In a new interview with diva.exchange, developer and Monero researcher Vasilii Rogin breaks down the real-world architecture of privacy tech—from Zero-Trust in the Lightning Network to ring signatures in Monero. We discussed why off-chain transactions don’t guarantee absolute anonymity, what de-anonymization risks mobile wallet users face, the future of Atomic Swaps amidst tough crypto regulation, and the role of overlay networks like Tor and I2P. Today, we’re kicking off with Part 1 of the interview.

Diva.exchange

Let’s look back at the recent MoneroKon conference in Warsaw. You gave a talk connecting Monero’s infrastructure with the Lightning service. Could you share the key takeaways for those who couldn’t attend or follow MoneroKon? How can this be explained in simple terms—since users might have some misunderstandings when it comes to privacy in network protocols?

Vasilii Rogin

It all started at last year’s MoneroKon when I was talking to an expert running a workshop. The topic of Lightning came up, and he said he wouldn’t use it because he believed users don’t hold their own funds there. The way I see it, Lightning is actually built on zero trust—meaning everyone is always protected, and you can always settle a transaction back. Later I realized this topic is really interesting yet underrated: even people deep in the space still make these kinds of assumptions and have doubts.

So the main point of my talk was to show that Lightning really does work securely, and to compare how privacy actually holds up. In Bitcoin, privacy only exists in the sense that we might not know who owns a specific wallet; everything else is transparent.

Lightning is a bit more private, and Monero is even more private. The right way to compare them isn’t through vague claims, but by looking at how they actually work under the hood and drawing conclusions from that. The core idea was that preserving privacy is hard, while breaking it is easy. So it’s easier to explain how to break it so people know what to avoid.

Diva

Monero encrypts everything at Layer 1: signatures, stealth addresses, amounts. Lightning moves transactions to Layer 2, into off-chain channels outside the main network. People tend to assume off-chain transactions are automatically more private. But does that hold true in practice, or are there specific attack vectors?

Vasilii

If two people open a channel, all subsequent transactions happen purely as private communication between them. If Alice and Bob open a channel, the distribution of that channel’s balance (how much Alice has vs. Bob) is strictly an agreement between the two of them. It can be encrypted as privately as they want—even via letters or carrier pigeons.

From the outside, all you see is that a channel was opened with a certain capacity, and eventually closed. In our case, two participants are exchanging data between themselves. You can’t tell for sure if they’re even making transactions, how many, or of what value. We don’t know at all—maybe they connect once a month, or maybe they’re sending things back and forth every second.

That’s a huge step forward for privacy. It’s not a universal payment tool with just anyone, but something happening inside a channel between two people. Where things open up is Lightning routing—when you send payments through someone else. That’s where intermediate nodes start seeing certain details.

At the conference, things like rendezvous routing were mentioned—where you don’t even know who the final recipient is; you just send to a rendezvous point, and it gets handled there. The recipient also connects to that point and claims it.

I suppose you could also set up a routing loop, so an intermediate node can’t tell whether it’s part of a loop or separate overlapping transactions. That’s an extra layer of Lightning. So when it comes to Lightning’s privacy, it really depends on how you use it.

To give an example: if I’m a regular user and install a mobile wallet that opens a channel directly with the wallet provider’s company, they naturally see all my transactions because everything routes through them. So privacy here isn’t absolute—it relies entirely on trusting the wallet, its developers, and who you opened the channel with.

Diva

So would you say this is a scaling issue?

Vasilii

Not really scaling—more about how the network is structured. The core idea of Lightning is that you have a network you can connect to.

When I first started experimenting, I just connected to the biggest node—opened a channel with it because it had connections to everyone else. These big nodes end up seeing something similar to what a bank sees: I open an account with one bank and pay someone at another.

I have a bank account, and the bank handles the settlement with the other bank to get the money to the receiver. It’s a similar setup here: private individuals don’t run their own bank; they maintain a connection to nodes, and those nodes route payments between each other.

Diva

So when you connect to that node, you don’t have visibility or control over how it connects to others—you might get technical data, but zero control. Meaning you might have an anonymous connection, but what happens downstream is out of your hands.

Vasilii

For a channel to be private, both parties need to keep it private. If the party on the other side is broadcasting everything that happens, it won’t be private. Otherwise, this “bank”—the wallet server—decides who to connect to and what’s most efficient, especially considering routing fees. They’re tiny, but they exist.

It’s a small reward for hosting a channel and routing transactions. While the fee is very low, it can vary—one route might cost a bit more than another.

Diva

Speaking of multisig: how does the architecture of channels and multi-signatures affect user anonymity compared to dedicated privacy networks? Is that even a fair comparison?

Vasilii

No, it doesn’t really impact anonymity directly—a channel is just between two people, and multisig is used as escrow technology. Funds are held in an account, but spending them requires signatures from two users.

Lightning’s implementation actually uses multisig as well: we lock funds into a channel and mutually agree on how to spend them. Bitcoin uses a 2-of-2 multisig.

I also gave another talk—a workshop on Monero multisig at MoneroKon. That’s a slightly different story: how to create a wallet that requires 2-of-3 signatures.

That technology works. And in crypto, especially with Monero, these cryptographic techniques are battle-tested in practice. For instance, ring signatures used in Monero have been around for nearly eight years and have been proven through huge transaction volumes and real-world security. We know for sure it’s secure—if it weren’t, someone would have hacked it by now, dumped all the coins, and made a fortune.

Practical Applications of the Technology

The bug bounties on crypto code are massive, so this proves the tech not just in abstract math, but in real use with real money on the line. Monero’s ring signatures are genuinely anonymous and secure.

You can use this tech for simple real-world applications—like voting, feedback systems, and so on. If Monero used it and nobody broke it, it means it really works, beyond just theory. The same goes for 2-of-3 multisig—the same tech can be applied to PGP certificates.

You can build certificates and signatures using something like Ed25519. To an outside observer, a multisig signature looks just like a standard signature. No need to reinvent the wheel—the tech already exists; we’re just applying it in new ways. And it’s not limited to signatures—you can also do multisig decryption.

For example, if a 7-person team handles backups and receives backup data: to restore the data, you might require at least 3 people to come together. One or two people alone can’t access it, but any group of three can. You set up a 3-of-7 PGP multisig, tell everyone to encrypt data using that public key, and all incoming data is secured.

To decrypt, you need at least three members present. That’s a real-world use case that’s valuable beyond crypto—for any company handling critical data that needs protection while allowing distributed recovery rather than relying on a single person.

Real examples like these show how crypto pushes technology forward by proving it works in practice.

Read the rest in the second part of the interview with Vasily Rogin.

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