Notes, confirmations, and fees

Notes

Shielded funds are held as notes: discrete, encrypted outputs in the Orchard or Sapling pools, analogous to transparent UTXOs but visible only to holders of the right viewing key. A wallet’s shielded balance is the sum of its unspent notes; spending selects specific notes, and any excess value returns to the account as a new change note. Change handling is entirely internal — Zallet derives change addresses itself and never exposes them (there is no getrawchangeaddress).

Confirmations and spendability

Zallet follows the ZIP 315 wallet best-practices draft in distinguishing two kinds of received outputs:

• Trusted outputs — those the wallet trusts to stay mined, such as change created by the wallet itself — become spendable after 3 confirmations by default.
• Untrusted outputs — everything received from other parties — become spendable after 10 confirmations by default, because a malicious sender could attempt a double-spend.

Both thresholds are configurable (builder.trusted_confirmations and builder.untrusted_confirmations); lowering them trades reliability under reorgs for latency. Methods such as z_sendmany apply this policy when minconf is not given explicitly.

Fees

Transaction fees follow ZIP 317 (proportional to transaction size), always. There is no fee parameter to tune: z_sendmany requires its fee argument to be null if present, and zcashd’s settxfee has no equivalent.