We continue our conversation with Monero developer and researcher Vasilii Rogin. In the second part of the interview, we’ll talk about Tor, I2P, and the limits of privacy.

Diva.exchange

Vasilii, I’d like to zoom out to the network level. If a user makes a Monero transaction or routes a payment through a Lightning channel from their home IP address without any protection—how easy is it to de-anonymize them using network-level metadata?

Vasilii Rogin

That’s really one of those timeless questions. Suppose I have a signed transaction ready, but haven’t sent it anywhere yet – only I know about it. I need to broadcast it to the network through the nearest connected node. It travels encrypted – if I recall correctly, the network protocol uses encryption, and I’d bet everything is encrypted there.

So to a network observer watching packets, they’ll see some traffic activity, but won’t know what actually happened. Maybe I sent a transaction, a query, a photo, or maybe it’s just background noise.

If an observer is monitoring all traffic nationwide – some countries require ISPs to report traffic in real time – then sure, they might analyze something. They might see a traffic spike distributed across nodes and notice a new transaction appeared somewhere on the network. But what can they actually do with that?

A transaction appeared – someone sent it, and you could guess it’s likely the person who had the traffic spike. You could even connect to them directly since Monero nodes accept incoming connections to keep the network running.

But that’s a whole different level of surveillance – where someone is actively monitoring all traffic. And even that is fairly easy to counter with noise traffic.

Besides, all of this works seamlessly over Tor. You can run the node itself and sync blocks over regular internet, but route your own signed transactions over Tor. A hybrid approach works great – you don’t have to push everything through Tor, especially since syncing the blockchain is around 160–200 GB.

To avoid downloading 200 GB over Tor, download it normally and send only your newly signed transactions over Tor.

From a privacy standpoint, I don’t see a huge risk here – it’s quite difficult to trace because there’s too much noise.

Diva

So someone would have to target you specifically.

Vasilii

Exactly. If someone already suspects you and is tracking all your timing, they might find something. But again, that’s easily bypassed – it’s much simpler to just route your transaction through Tor at the exit point than to worry about all that.

Diva

Glad you mentioned Tor – I wanted to touch on that. Diva.exchange works with I2P to encrypt traffic and hide network nodes. How critical do you think it is to combine cryptographic transaction privacy with overlay networks like Tor or I2P?

Vasilii

These networks solve different problems in different domains, and they complement each other perfectly: you run the Monero daemon and tell it, “here’s your connection via Tor” or I2P. They serve separate purposes. They share a common goal, but trying to bundle them into a single product would create something bloated that wouldn’t work well. The beauty is that each piece handles its own job independently, and its security is well-understood in isolation.

The main hurdle isn’t technical – it’s organizational. Sure, you could merge everything into one massive application, but nobody would use it. When each component evolves in its own niche, people can piece them together to create something new.

Diva

You brought up complexity. I2P can be objectively tricky for regular users to set up – installing Docker, configuring proxies. It might take just a few minutes, but every extra step drops users off in the funnel. Do you think this complexity holds adoption back?

Vasilii

Absolutely. I know I2P exists, for example, but I rarely hear people talk about it in everyday use. To me, it always felt more academic. Mainly because there isn’t a large user base – why run something if no one’s using it?

Diva

Is the main barrier the lack of popularity and users, or is it the setup friction?

Vasilii

Again – what problem is it solving? For me, if Tor solves the same problem as I2P and has a much larger user base, I don’t see a reason to switch. If Tor had a fundamental issue that I2P solved, then I2P would be popular.

The two go hand in hand: once users show up, people make it easier to use; once it gets easier, more users join. It’s like the multisig example I mentioned: it’s complex, requiring three rounds of message exchange, so almost nobody uses it.

Same with Bitcoin: Lightning is a great technology. It was essential when transaction fees were around a euro, but now fees are 20–30 cents. You start thinking, “Why bother if the whole transaction costs 20 cents?”

Especially regarding privacy. Lightning’s main value proposition is speed and continuous microtransactions. Privacy came as a bonus – it wasn’t the primary goal from the start.

Diva

How fast is Lightning – is there any noticeable delay?

Vasilii

It’s practically instant. It just depends on network latency – a matter of milliseconds based on the route. If you and I have a channel open and I send funds, it takes two or three messages to exchange keys, and that’s it. If we’re in different countries, ping might be around 40 milliseconds back and forth. So it’s very fast.

In fact, as a developer, I’d say if it’s too fast, it feels suspicious! You almost want a loading spinner for a couple of seconds so users know something is happening. Waiting 10 minutes in Bitcoin is long; waiting 2 minutes in Monero is long too – you have to wait at least one block.

Diva

Another topic I wanted to ask about: decentralized exchanges. Currently, many DEXs still rely on centralized gateways, servers, APIs, or Cloudflare frontends. There’s even a term for it: DINO (Decentralized In Name Only). How involved are you with this space?

Vasilii

Well, we’ve had fantastic technology for years – Atomic Swaps between Monero and Bitcoin. It’s a prime example: you trade with anyone on a zero-trust basis – either the swap goes through or funds return to their owners. Centralization is obviously more convenient when there’s a polished website, but with atomic swaps, it doesn’t matter whether it’s centralized or not: you show up, trade peer-to-peer, and receive your funds. That’s what counts.

Expanding this tech so atomic swaps work across all cryptocurrencies would be great. With traditional exchanges, you’re still trusting the platform: you send your funds and hope they send back what you bought.

With atomic swaps, you just watch the network to see if it settled. And there are straightforward solutions—you download an app, run it, see available rates, pick a peer, and everything happens automatically. For some reason, it’s just not widely popular yet, and I don’t use it often myself simply because there aren’t many orders.

Diva

I was actually about to ask about Atomic Swaps – you already touched on it. My question was whether non-KYC DEXs could fully cover user needs, but as you mentioned, they haven’t gained mass traction yet. Why do you think that is?

Vasilii

I think they will gain traction eventually. Regulators will push hard enough that using traditional exchanges will become a hassle, and people will naturally move toward Atomic Swaps. I actually hope regulators push further – so standard exchanges become cumbersome and slow.

Diva

They seem to be on that track – just a couple of weeks ago the EU passed new regulations, like MiCA.

Vasilii

Exactly. From an Atomic Swap perspective, that’s great news. Again, regulators are artificially creating these pain points.

And privacy didn’t just pop up out of nowhere either. Why would people suddenly care about privacy? Usually because of past incidents where people got burned.

I suspect most people entered this space because they got burned at some point, making privacy a priority for them. It’s rarely a case of someone sitting down and thinking, “I just want privacy for no particular reason.”

That applies beyond Bitcoin and Lightning – in a way, all of this is a tool to bypass regulatory friction somewhere down the line. Take stablecoins: they solve a problem artificially created by traditional banks.

Issuing stablecoins is essentially issuing digital dollars, enabling fast peer-to-peer transfers using cryptographic signatures. Yet banks could have solved this themselves: “Here’s your account, sign the request, and we’ll transfer it.”

Diva

Essentially bypassing unnecessary banking bureaucracy.

Vasilii

Exactly. Nothing fundamentally new was invented here – it’s still currency emission tied to a state. They just bypassed bureaucracy with better tech, even though banks could have streamlined it humanely.

Diva

One final question: what are your plans for the future? How do you plan to work with Lightning going forward?

Vasilii

What interests me about Bitcoin is that it’s a great sandbox for learning the entire domain. When I started studying Bitcoin, I had time to dive into cryptography—how signatures work, elliptic curves, all of it – and implemented it myself from scratch so I understood it hands-on rather than just reading about it.

For me, it was like a complete course: I built Bitcoin from the ground up and read every available spec. By the time I finished, I really understood what was going on – it gave me a strong foundation.

Lightning is the next step. When I started reading about it, I suspected it was built by academics who wanted to use every single concept they ever learned. Everything feels thrown together from different fields—usually developers try to keep things simple, even if inefficient. Here, it feels far more academic—where simplicity isn’t valued as much as complexity.

To make it sound impressive, they stacked a lot of extra layers on top. Even establishing a connection between three nodes with public keys – a problem solved decades ago via standard methods like TLS – feels overly complex here.

So yes, I’ll keep exploring Lightning as a self-study course in cryptography and systems engineering. Every time I dig into it, I stumble upon something new and think, “Oh wow, what’s this?”

Then I spend a week or a month figuring out that specific piece before coming back. It would be fun to write my own implementation once I find the time, just to absorb knowledge across different domains.

You know, what’s really exciting is how tech developed in crypto bleeds into real-world, non-crypto applications – like voting systems, multisig access control, or distributed decryption like the 3-of-7 backup example I mentioned.

Diva

Vasilii, thank you so much for the conversation. It was really insightful, and your passion for the subject shows. Best of luck with your work!

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