Relayer fees

A relayer submits your transaction on-chain and pays the gas, so your own address doesn't have to. Relayer fees are separate from protocol fees — the protocol takes no cut of them.

How relayers are paid

Each relayer sets its own fee (its gas cost plus a markup) and competes for users. The fee is paid as a shielded note to the relayer, funded from the proceeds of the very transaction it submits — so you never have to hold or spend public gas tokens.

Two properties keep this honest:

• No protocol cut on in-pool operations. For transfers, unshields, and shielded yield, the relayer's fee is an output note inside the proven transaction (or re-shielded by the yield adapter), so Armada takes nothing from it. On a gasless shield the relayer's fee note is itself a deposit and pays the normal shield fee; relayers price their gasless-shield quotes to cover it.
• The relayer can't inflate it. The fee amount and its destination are committed inside the transaction you authorize — bound into the proof for in-pool operations, and fixed in the signed request for gasless shields. A relayer can decline to submit, but it cannot rewrite the fee after the fact.

Because it's a competitive market, you can choose among relayers on price and reliability.

Relaying is a privacy mechanism, not just a convenience

It's tempting to think of a relayer purely as a way to avoid holding gas — but its more important role is privacy. Submitting a transaction yourself puts your funded, public address on it as the sender and gas payer, which re-links that public identity to the shielded operation. For operations that spend shielded notes — transfers, unshields, and shielded yield — relaying keeps your address off the transaction entirely. A shield is different: every deposit reveals the funding address, so a relayed (gasless) shield only removes the need to hold gas.

Self-submitting is therefore best understood as a liveness fallback — a way to get a transaction in if no relayer will serve you — not a way to save money. Doing it trades away much of the privacy the relayer exists to provide, so it is not a recommended default. See the privacy model for how self-submission weakens unlinkability.