Free iPhone beta · verifying real rides on Zcash mainnet

Prove the ride. Never the route.

Pedalshield verifies real bike rides entirely on your phone. What leaves is a distance and a signature — never a map of where you live, work, or go.

No route database to breach Open source · MIT No token, no ponzi You choose what you share Beta riders earn real ZEC
Proof, not promises: verified rides paid autonomously on Zcash mainnet, no operator in the loop — tap a txid and check the chain yourself.
How it works

Ride. Your phone does the proving.

No account. No email. No name. Nothing to sign up for — you connect a wallet you already control and start riding.

1

Install & connect a wallet

Install free via TestFlight, then paste your Zcash wallet address — from Zodl or any Zcash wallet (free, takes 2 minutes). We never hold your keys.

2

Ride your bike

Tap start and ride. GPS, motion and barometer are read on-device to prove a human on a bicycle actually moved through the world. The route stays on the phone.

3

The proof is signed and sent

Your phone signs a verdict — distance, an integrity score, nothing else — and an autonomous treasury pays shielded ZEC straight to your address. No approval queue, no operator, no waiting.

Why Pedalshield exists

Your fitness app is a surveillance device with a leaderboard.

Heatmaps have exposed military bases, stalking victims, and home addresses. The deal was rewards for data. We think that deal is robbery — so we built the opposite.

Your route is never uploaded

Not stored on our servers, not "anonymized", not encrypted-and-uploaded. It never leaves the device. There is no route database to breach or subpoena.

Enforced by code, not a policy

The payload that leaves your phone is pinned by an open-source unit test that rejects location, motion, and sensor fields. You can read it and run it yourself.

🔑

Your keys, your money

Payouts go straight to a shielded Zcash address only you control. We can't freeze it, take it back, or see what you do with it.

Don't trust us — read the code on GitHub. The privacy contract is MIT-licensed and independently verifiable.

Your call, not ours

You choose what leaves your phone.

Most apps give you one switch and a paragraph of reassurance. Pedalshield gives you three separate, revocable choices — and the strictest one is the default you never have to find.

Default

Shielded

Level 0

A signed verdict and nothing else. How far you rode, and that it was real.

  • Verified distance
  • Integrity score
  • No route
  • No times or patterns

Aggregate

Level 1

Adds coarse, bucketed signals that can't be traced back to a person.

  • Distance band
  • Hour of day
  • CO₂ estimate & region
  • Still no route

Route

Level 2

Adds the shape of your ride, so planners can see where bike lanes are actually needed.

  • Route geometry
  • Both ends always removed
  • Rounded to ~11 m
  • Never your address

Endpoint protection has no off switch. The danger in route data was never the ride — it's that the start and end are someone's home, workplace, school or clinic. Strava's privacy zones are opt-in, which means the rider who never finds the setting is the one most exposed. Here the first and last ~250 m are removed from every shared route, for everyone, with no way to disable it.

Being visible to other riders is separate — and unpaid. Leaderboards and shared cards are a feature, never something we buy from you. Sharing with other cyclists and licensing data to a city are different decisions, so they're different switches.

Real rides only

Verified, not self-reported.

Anyone can claim they rode. A physics engine runs on your phone before anything is signed — speed envelopes, pedalling cadence, road vibration, and whether your motion sensors actually agree with your GPS. That's the difference between a log and a proof.

Catches cars

Speed envelope, missing road-buzz vibration, and no pedaling cadence in the motion data — a car ride fails on all three.

Catches fake GPS

Teleport jumps, impossibly constant speeds, and synthetic ruler-straight tracks are hard-failed before payout.

Catches walks

Real cyclists break ~15 km/h at least briefly. A walk dressed up as a ride never does — and never gets paid.

Catches replays

Replay a real GPS track while shaking the phone and the sensors stop agreeing: the gyroscope must turn when the route turns, and road buzz must rise with speed. Faking one sensor is easy; faking two that stay in step is not.

Pays the clean miles

One bad GPS stretch costs you that stretch, not the whole ride. Impossible sections are cut out and earn nothing; the rest still counts.

Explains itself

If a ride doesn't fully verify, the app tells you what the sensors saw and the most likely innocent reason — instead of silently paying you less.

Honest limits: the engine raises the cost of cheating well above the reward — it isn't unbeatable, and we publish the threat model including what it doesn't catch yet. Hardware attestation, ZK route proofs and a community-signed treasury are on the roadmap, not live today.

FAQ

Fair questions, straight answers.

What is Pedalshield actually for?
Proving a trip happened without surveilling the person who took it. Every system that wants to reward physical movement faces the same fork: trust a self-report, or harvest location data. Pedalshield collapses that fork — your phone does the judging, and only the verdict leaves. Riders get privacy and a small reward; programmes that need verified trips get proof without holding anyone's route.
How much do I earn, honestly?
About $0.09 per mile in shielded ZEC, capped per ride. Each mile ridden instead of driven avoids roughly 1 lb of CO₂, and that's its value at the EPA's social cost of carbon. Being straight with you: this is a beta funded from a finite treasury, not an income. Nobody should ride for the money — ride because you were going to anyway, and the proof is worth something. Privacy is the product; the ZEC is a bonus.
So how does Pedalshield make money?
Not by selling you out. Employers, universities and cities are legally required in many places to measure commuting — and today they do it with self-reported surveys. We sell them verified trip counts, which means they never need to touch an employee's location data. If a rider chooses to contribute route data on top of that, the co-op pays them a share of what it's licensed for. Nothing has been licensed yet, so that pool is $0 today, and we'd rather say so than imply otherwise.
Is this another crypto ponzi like StepN?
No. There is no Pedalshield token, nothing to buy, no NFT sneakers, and no yield promises. You install a free app, ride, and receive small amounts of ZEC — an established cryptocurrency — from a capped treasury. If the treasury runs dry, payouts pause; nobody is left holding a bag.
Do I need to know anything about crypto?
You need a Zcash wallet address, which takes about two minutes: install a free wallet like Zodl, copy your address, paste it into Pedalshield once. Done. We never touch your keys.
What data leaves my phone?
By default: distance, duration, and an integrity score. No coordinates, no route, no sensor data — an open-source unit test pins the exact payload and rejects those fields. No account, no email, no identity required to ride. You can choose to share more (see what leaves your phone), and you can revoke it at any time with nothing left behind.
What if I don't trust you?
Good — don't. The privacy contract is MIT-licensed and testable: clone the repo, run the test that asserts no location or sensor field can appear in a claim, and watch it pass. The anti-cheat engine itself is closed (publishing exact thresholds would just hand them to spoofers), but what it defends and why is public in the threat model, including its current gaps.
I'm on Android — can I ride?
iPhone first; Android is next. Drop your email in the box below and you'll be the first to know when it lands.
Will it drain my battery?
Tracking runs only during a ride you start and stop yourself — comparable to any cycling app for the duration of your ride, and nothing in the background the rest of the day.
Run a commute programme, campus or city? If you're measuring mode shift with self-reported surveys, we can give you verified trip counts without your people ever handing over their location data. Pilots are open in Bend, Oregon.
Talk to us