Using Dapps

The CLI shines at receive → shield → wait → unshield. What you do after that — pay someone, hit a router, use a DeFi protocol — is where choices matter.

Prefer paths that never connect a wallet to a dapp frontend. Frontends see your address, can fingerprint you, and often push you into messy multi-step approvals. When you can build the calldata yourself, keep everything in the CLI.

# Preference order

1. Just paying someone exact Y — use private-transfer. It unshields through a fresh account and forwards the exact amount in one step (Tornado, Privacy Pools, and Railgun).
2. Build custom calldata yourself (no wallet connected to any frontend) — then, if you can, run it in the same flow as the unshield with tail calls. Fresh address appears mid-flow; funds never sit idle waiting for a second tx.
3. Same calldata, later — if you already unshielded (or cannot attach the call to the unshield), submit with transact-raw.
4. Already on a public address — plain transfer from that address when you decide the destination only afterward.
5. Last resort: browser — only when the dapp is hard or impossible to use without connecting a wallet to its frontend. Then export one key into a clean browser wallet, use it briefly, and remove it.

paying someone exact Y from private balance?
        │
       yes ──► private-transfer
        │
        no ──► can you build calldata without a frontend?
                      │
                     yes ──► can you attach it to the unshield?
                      │              │
                      │             yes ──► tail calls
                      │              │
                      │              no ──► transact-raw after unshield
                      │
                      no ──► clean browser wallet (last resort)

# Why this order

• Private transfer is the zero-calldata path for “pay this address exactly Y.”
• Tail calls keep “appear as a fresh address” and “do the useful thing” atomic when you already have router / contract calldata.
• Transact-raw is still CLI-only and frontend-free — just not synchronized with the unshield.
• Browser export works for anything a UI can do, but you hand key material to an extension and trust a website that may be adversarial to privacy. Use it only when the alternatives fail.

The next pages walk each option in that order.