Overview · Zolar

BUY pays for digital goods straight out of the shielded pool. The ZEC leaves your pool for the third party's, and nothing unshields on the way.

This is the layer the other three make possible. Nothing here needs an attestation, a quorum or a Solana program, because a payment is a payment.

What the third party learns

What was bought, and that somebody paid for it. Not your name, not an email, not an account, and not your balance.

An order carries the name of the address it paid, and that address exists for the order alone. Nobody watching from outside can tie two orders from the same person together.

What the chain shows

No sender, no recipient, no amount. Only that a shielded payment happened somewhere.

Three filters

The shelf is not a list of things somebody liked. Three rules decide what can sit on it, and each one has already removed a product that looked obvious.

Filter	What it rules out
Not a bearer instrument	What sets the height of a third party's gate is not the product. It is whether the product resembles cash. Anything you can cash out and hand on becomes a route for fraud, so it draws anti-money-laundering rules and a business gate with no exceptions. That is why gift cards are not among the eight and never will be. All eight attach to a number, a device, an account or a machine.
Retail, full stop	Buy at the price anybody pays, as an ordinary buyer rather than a reseller. No business account, no verification form, no minimum deposit, no manual review. Every wholesale route fails here, however good its pricing looks.
The ticket clears ten times the network fee	The floor on cheap is not what a third party charges. It is Zcash's own fee, and the buyer pays it.

ZIP 317 puts the minimum at 10,000 zatoshi, which is 0.0001 ZEC. At the ZEC price on 25 August 2026 that is about eight cents a payment, and about twelve if the buyer needs three inputs.

Ticket	The fee as a share of it	Workable
$0.10	83%	No.
$0.50	17%	The edge.
$0.83	10%	The threshold.
$1.50	5.5%	Yes.
$3.00	2.8%	Yes.

The shelf

Eight cards, in the order the three filters leave them. One has a third party that takes shielded ZEC today. The other seven each fail a different rule, and the page for each says which.

Card	Status	Where it sits
eSIM	live	Clears every filter, and nobody had to force it. The smallest plan is $1.50, the gate is nothing at all, and the third party settles in ZEC.
Hosting	roadmap	No deposit and no identity check, at an hourly price somebody verified. Sold by the day rather than the hour, because an hour is under the threshold.
VPN	roadmap	Retail with no gate, and the most crowded card on the shelf. Four third parties already reach ZEC holders here.
Proxy	roadmap	The only card with no competition at all, and it has to be a bundle. Nobody checked whether the third parties take crypto.
Domain	roadmap	Ordinary to buy at retail, and the one card whose limit is not the payment. Renewal also costs twelve times the first year.
AI credit	roadmap	A single request is far under the threshold, so this is a package or nothing. Delivery without an account is still unanswered.
Phone number	roadmap	Far under the threshold, the one route that worked closed, and the card that sits closest to abuse.
Airtime	roadmap	The card with nobody behind it. Every route that takes crypto is wholesale, and the ticket is one of the largest here rather than the smallest.

The pool question

Ironwood activated on 28 July 2026 at block 3,428,143, and Orchard has taken no new output since. A payment can only land in a pool that still accepts one.

That makes one unanswered question decide the whole shelf: which shielded pool a third party settles into. Somebody wrote the merchant tooling this ecosystem runs on before Ironwood existed, and its payment processors carry documentation naming Sapling and Orchard. Nothing there names Ironwood.

The third party's address	Pool	What happens
t1 or t3	transparent	The headline fails. Money that lands there is public.
zs	Sapling	It works, it stays shielded, and Ironwood's seal does not touch it.
u1	unified	Depends on which pools it carries.
Orchard only	Orchard	The payment cannot land. Ironwood sealed that pool on 28 July 2026.

What it costs

What	Figure	Detail
The spend proof	~28 s	The same Orchard Action circuit shielding uses, carrying a real spend rather than a dummy one. Built in a Web Worker, with the proving key ahead of it.
The transaction	~9.2 KB	One shielded payment to the address the order opened. Measured natively, alongside the proof.
The network fee	0.0001 ZEC	ZIP 317's minimum, and the buyer pays it. It rises with the number of inputs a wallet has to spend.
The price window	a clock	The price fixes in ZEC when the order opens and holds for a set window. ZEC moves against the goods while a payment confirms, and a quote without an expiry is a promise made with somebody else's money.

BUY