No provider swaps Monero for Monero

Every pair has exactly one path that reaches its destination with no public record anywhere along the way, and it is always the two-hop Monero crossing. Nothing longer reaches zero on any pair.

The reason is a sentence nobody had said out loud: no provider swaps Monero for Monero. There is no trade to make — the deposit and the payout would be the same asset — so no instant exchange offers the pair. Which means a third hop cannot begin where the second ended. It has to come back out into something readable first, and the moment it does, that chain holds a record the two-hop route never created.

A longer route is not a longer tunnel. It is a tunnel, a field, and another tunnel.

The natural objection is that Monero is not the only opaque chain. Zcash has shielded addresses; chain four of five could be a shielded pool.

It is counted as readable here, and the reason is practical rather than theoretical. Instant exchanges pay out to transparent Zcash addresses. Shielding is something the recipient does afterwards, with their own wallet, as a separate act — which means this site can neither perform it nor verify that anybody did. A route that is private only if the person at the far end takes an additional step they were never told about is not a private route; it is a private route with a footnote, and the footnote does the work.

They were kept, priced, and shown — losing on both counts. A four-hop path costs four provider margins and four network fees instead of two, takes longer, and ends up with exactly the same linkability as the two-hop crossing at best.

They are still worth offering, for a reason that has nothing to do with privacy: the two-hop route needs a provider willing to take your coin into Monero, and for thin pairs there sometimes is not one. A longer path can exist where the short one does not. So the honest framing, which is what the planner now says, is that the reason to plan a longer route is availability, not privacy.

This is the part worth keeping. The planner was built on the hope that it would find something — that somewhere in the graph there was a cleverer path worth recommending. It searched, and what it found was that the simple answer was already the best one available, for a structural reason that cannot be engineered around.

The temptation at that point is to ship it quietly as a feature with more options, and let longer paths look like more privacy to anybody who assumes they are. It would have been easy and it would have sold better. Instead the planner names the shortest route as the private one and says what the others are for.

A search that rules out its own hypothesis has still earned its keep. The two-hop route is no longer an assumption that nobody tested — it is the answer, and this site can now say why rather than merely that.