Safety and privacy
What leaves the device
What stays on your iPhone or Mac, what goes out, and who sees it.
Short version: your chats, your files and your keys stay on your iPhone or Mac. Hermit goes online to look things up and to send what you approve. We don’t run a server that sees any of it.
Your chats
Section titled “Your chats”Hermit has two modes, picked from the menu next to Send. On-device is the default.
| On-device | Private Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Your messages and the replies | Stay on the device | Go to the NEAR AI Cloud enclave, after Hermit checks the enclave on your device |
| Files you attach | Read on the device | Their text goes with your message |
| Saved chats | On the device | On the device |
Your keys never leave in either mode. They’re locked to the device’s security chip (keys and recovery). The on-device model works with no connection at all: turn on Airplane mode and it still answers.
The public services Hermit talks to
Section titled “The public services Hermit talks to”To show balances, prices and quotes, Hermit asks public services directly from your device, in both modes. They see your IP address and what you look up. None of them sees your chats.
| What for | Who | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Balances, sending | Public blockchain nodes for each network | Your addresses, and the transactions you approve |
| Prices | Hyperliquid, Binance, CoinGecko, FinancialModelingPrep | Which prices you look at |
| Prediction markets | Polymarket | Which markets you look at |
| Swap quotes | 1Click (NEAR Intents), Relay, Jupiter | The tokens, the amount, and your receiving and refund addresses |
| Yields | DefiLlama | Which pools you look at |
| History | Etherscan, Blockscout, NearBlocks | Your addresses |
| Token logos | wsrv.nl, CoinCap, DefiLlama’s icon server, the Filebase and Pinata IPFS gateways | Which logos load |
| Web search in Explore | DuckDuckGo | What you search for |
| The model download | models.hermit.my or Hugging Face | That you downloaded it |
Private Cloud adds two more. NEAR AI Cloud gets your messages inside its enclave. NVIDIA’s attestation service gets the GPU’s evidence, never your prompt.
A web app you open in Hermit’s browser is its own website and sees what any site sees. It only learns your address if you connect it. A connector you set up, like a Binance API key, talks to that service.
What we don’t have
Section titled “What we don’t have”- No server of ours that sees your chats or your wallet. models.hermit.my only serves the model files.
- No account. Hermit asks for a name to call you, and it stays on the device.
- No analytics or tracking in the app.
If you test through TestFlight and choose to send feedback or a crash report, Apple passes that to us under its own terms.
Check it yourself
Section titled “Check it yourself”Every address the app can reach is written in its source. From the root of the repo, this lists them all:
grep -rhoE 'https://[a-z0-9.-]+' Packages/HermitKit/Sources | sort -uAt the commit these docs were checked against, that’s 68 hosts. Some are block explorers that only open when you tap “View on explorer”, and some are test networks. What it can’t list is a web app you visit in the browser, or a server address you type in yourself.