The cat is inside
the transaction.

On 26 September 2026 a small picture of a cat was sent through the Zcash network as a normal shielded payment. Zcash hides what a payment contains, so a block explorer only shows scrambled bytes. This page unscrambles them, right here in your browser, and shows you the cat. Press Decrypt to watch it happen.

What happens when you press Decrypt

Your browser downloads the transaction from Blockchair, a public Zcash explorer. It then tries to open each of the 20 encrypted parts with the viewing key below. The parts that open contain the picture, cut into 19 small pieces. The pieces are glued back together and shown as an image. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

What is the transaction id

Every Zcash payment has a 64-character id. It is public. You can paste this one into any explorer, for example Blockchair, and see that the payment exists, when it was mined, and that it contains nothing readable.

What is the viewing key

The owner of a Zcash wallet holds two keys. The spending key moves money and stays secret. The viewing key only lets you read what the wallet received. We published our viewing key on purpose so anyone can check the cat. It cannot spend a single zatoshi.

How to be sure this is real

Press Use someone else's key. It loads a real viewing key from a different wallet. The same transaction is downloaded again, but nothing opens. Only the right key shows the cat. You can also copy the raw bytes shown in step 1 and compare them with what Blockchair shows.

01
Download the transaction
From api.blockchair.com, a public explorer. What comes back is the same scrambled data anyone can see.
02
Try the viewing key on every part
The transaction has 20 encrypted parts. Each one is tested with the key, in your browser, using the same code Zcash wallets use.
03
Put the picture back together
Each opened part is one piece of the picture, numbered 1 to 19. They are sorted, joined, checked against a fingerprint, and shown.
decoded image

The picture is not a link to a file somewhere else. The picture bytes themselves are stored on the Zcash blockchain, in the memo field of a shielded payment, split over 19 parts of 512 bytes. Decryption code: the librustzcash orchard crate, compiled with wasm-bindgen. Explorer: Blockchair.