Privacy

kwataverse has no account for you, no profile of you on our servers, and no way to sign in. This page says what that means in practice, including the parts that are not comfortable.

Effective 24 September 2026.

There is no account

You do not give us a name, a phone number, an email address or a password to use kwataverse. The app makes a key on your phone the first time it opens, and that key is who you are on the network.

We hold no profile of you. The name and picture people see are in a post you signed and sent to the network yourself, exactly like everything else you post.

Because there is no account, there is nothing for us to close, nothing for us to hand over, and nothing for us to lose in a breach.

Your keys and your money never leave your phone

Your money is yours alone. It lives in a purse on your phone, held by your backup words. Nobody at kwataverse can see it, move it, freeze it or recover it for you — not if you lose your phone, not if you lose your words, not if you ask us to.

The backup words are shown to you the first time money arrives, because that is the first moment they matter. Write them down. They are the only copy.

Payments go from your purse to the other person's purse over the Lightning network. They do not pass through us, and we never hold anyone's money.

What you post is public, and on machines that are not ours

Everything you post — a status, a listing, a price, a reply, your name and picture — is signed by your key and sent to relays: small public servers that pass messages on. That is what makes the market work without a company in the middle.

Your posts go to our relay (wss://relay.kwataverse.com) and to public relays run by other people (wss://relay.damus.io, wss://nos.lol, wss://relay.primal.net). Once a post has reached a relay, anyone can read it and anyone can copy it.

Do not post anything you would mind a stranger reading. There is no private post, no follower-only post, and no way to un-say something the whole network already has.

Photos, voice notes and clips

Media is uploaded to media servers (ours, and public ones), addressed by a hash of the file, and only the link travels with your post. Anyone who has the link has the file.

Before anything is uploaded, the app strips the file's hidden information — the GPS fix above all, the camera details, the colour profile. Where you were never travels with a photo because your phone knew it.

On our own media server, a picture or a voice note is kept for a year after the last time somebody fetched it, and a clip for 90 days. Then it is deleted. Public media servers keep their own rules, which are theirs and not ours.

Where you are

A place only travels with a post when you attach one. The app asks for location at the moment you use a feature that needs it, never at launch, and you can say no and keep using everything else.

When you do attach a place, what is published is a geohash cell — a square of the map, not a point — so it says which neighbourhood, not which house.

Payments leave a public trail, permanently

Every payment on kwataverse leaves a receipt on the relays. That is deliberate: receipts are how a seller proves they are real without anyone having to trust us.

A receipt is public and says: the amount, the key that paid, the key that was paid, the time, and what it was for. It does not say your name, your phone number or your bank. It is signed by the payment provider, not by us, which is why nobody can fake one.

A receipt cannot be deleted. It is on relays all over the world by the time you see it. If you would rather a payment were not public, do not make it here.

A fee paid to kwataverse itself is the same thing: a payment to pay@kwataverse.com with a tag saying what it bought, and a public receipt. They are all listed on our ledger page.

Buying a name

A name at kwataverse.com is published: the name and the key it belongs to, signed by us, on the relays. That is what makes it work as an address other apps can look up. It is public and permanent.

When somebody pays that address, our server looks up where to forward the payment and forwards it. We see the lookup. We do not see who paid, we never hold the money, and we do not keep a record of the lookup beyond the ordinary web log below.

What this website counts

This website counts how many times each kind of link was opened and how many times somebody asked for the app, as fourteen whole numbers held in memory. It counts by kind — a listing, a stall, an envelope — and by nothing else.

It does not record who, from where, on which phone, at what time, or which link. There is no cookie, no tracking pixel, no analytics company, no advertising. The numbers are thrown away when the server restarts, and you can read them yourself at /counts.

Our web server keeps an ordinary access log — the address the request came from, the path, the time — for at most seven days, to find faults and stop abuse. Then it is deleted.

What the website stores in your browser

One thing, and only on a page that shows you something somebody sent you: a note in your browser's session storage remembering that we already tried to hand this link to the app, so it is not tried twice. It goes when you close the tab.

When you tap "Get the app", the link is copied to your clipboard so the app can offer to take you back to it on the first run. That happens in your browser, on your tap. Nothing is sent to us.

What we cannot delete

We can delete a file from our own media server, and we can remove a post from our own relay. Ask us and we will. Today that is a person doing it by hand — our relay does not yet accept the automatic delete-this message other relays use — so it is not instant, and it only ever covers our copy.

We cannot delete anything from relays and media servers we do not own, and most of the network is other people's machines. We cannot delete a payment receipt anywhere, including ours, because deleting receipts is the same as deleting the proof that keeps sellers honest.

We will not pretend otherwise. If someone asks us to erase a post from the network, the true answer is that we can remove our copy and ask, and nothing more.

Other people

Apple and Google know you installed an app, on their own terms, not ours. A media server you upload to sees the upload. A relay sees what you publish. If you follow a link out of the app, that website sees you.

We do not sell anything about you to anyone, because we do not have anything about you to sell.

Children

kwataverse is a market where real money moves. It is not built for children, and we do not knowingly serve anyone under 13.

Questions, and changes

Write to support@kwataverse.com. A person reads it.

This page is effective 24 September 2026. When it changes we will change the date, and if the change matters we will say so in the app.

Obiverse, LLC is the company behind kwataverse.