Your sovereignty is the product.

Blackwing is a non-custodial platform. We help you run your own Ravencoin node, create assets, and trade on a peer-to-peer marketplace — but we never hold your funds, your keys, or your passphrase. This page documents how.

The seven sovereignty guarantees

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G1. Your droplet is yours. It is provisioned into your own DigitalOcean account and billed directly to you. Revoke our access — or shut us down entirely — and it keeps running.
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G2. Your wallet passphrase is yours alone. You enter it client-side; it travels only over encrypted channels to your own droplet, is never written to platform storage or logs, and is discarded the moment each request that uses it completes.
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G3. Your seed phrase is yours. Whether you generate a new wallet or import an existing seed, the words are derived and shredded on your own droplet — the platform only relays them in-memory over the encrypted channel and never writes them to storage or logs.
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G4. Your assets are yours. Every asset is issued on-chain to your wallet, and its IPFS files are pinned locally on your droplet — not on our servers.
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G5. Your listings survive us. Marketplace listings are portable, exportable signed-transaction blobs, and the reference CLI can complete a swap against your own node with no dependency on this platform.
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G6. The marketplace protocol is open. It is a versioned, MIT-licensed specification — our web UI is just one client, and anyone is free to build a compatible one.
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G7. If Blackwing ever winds down, you get at least 30 days' notice — cryptographically signed so you can verify it is genuine even with our website gone — plus offline tools (CLI + a self-contained decryptor) to keep operating your node, wallet, and listings without us.

Direct SSH access

Your droplet public IPv4 is shown on the Node page. You can SSH in at any time using the key you provided during provisioning — regardless of whether Blackwing is running.

ssh root@<your-droplet-ipv4>

Once on the server, you can interact with your Ravencoin node directly:

raven-cli getblockchaininfo
raven-cli getwalletinfo
raven-cli listmyassets

What’s running on your droplet

Blackwing provisions your node, then steps out of the way. Everything that holds value or does real work runs on your droplet — the web UI is just a window onto it:

A freshly provisioned node moves through creating → cloud_init → syncing → ready; wallet and asset actions unlock once it reaches ready. You can watch the exact same state directly over SSH:

systemctl status ravend ipfs ravenforge-sidecar raven-cli getblockchaininfo | grep -e blocks -e headers -e verificationprogress ipfs --api /ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/5001 pin ls --type recursive

Backing up and restoring your wallet

Your wallet is stored at /root/.raven/wallet.dat on your droplet. Download it directly or use the backup button in the Wallet page.

scp root@<your-droplet-ipv4>:/root/.raven/wallet.dat ./wallet.dat

To restore on a fresh node, copy the file back and restart ravend:

scp ./wallet.dat root@<new-droplet>:/root/.raven/wallet.dat systemctl restart ravend

You can also restore from your 12- or 24-word BIP39 seed phrase — Blackwing regenerates the wallet directly on your droplet; your words are only relayed in-memory over the encrypted channel and are never written to storage or logs. The simplest path is to provision a fresh node and choose Import existing wallet during onboarding. To do it by hand over SSH instead (Ravencoin Core has no importmnemonic command — it only consumes a seed when it first generates a wallet file):

1Stop the daemon: systemctl stop ravend
2Set the auto-generated wallet aside: mv /root/.raven/wallet.dat /root/.raven/wallet.dat.bak
3Add three lines to /root/.raven/raven.conf: mnemonic=word1 word2 … (your 12 or 24 words), mnemonicpassphrase=… (only if you set one), and rescan=1.
4Start the daemon: systemctl start ravend — it derives wallet.dat from the seed, then rescans the chain.
5As soon as raven-cli getwalletinfo responds, delete the mnemonic= / mnemonicpassphrase= / rescan= lines from raven.conf so your seed is not left on disk.
6Optionally re-encrypt the restored wallet: raven-cli encryptwallet "<new-passphrase>".
7All your RVN, assets, and transaction history are restored once the rescan finishes.

Using raven-cli without the platform

Your Ravencoin node runs 24/7 and is accessible via SSH. All RPC commands work regardless of whether Blackwing is online.

# Check balance raven-cli getbalance # List your assets raven-cli listmyassets # Send RVN raven-cli sendtoaddress <address> <amount>

Using the marketplace without this platform

Every listing is a signed partial transaction in a public open format (see the Marketplace Specification). You can complete any listing with only a Ravencoin node and the partial tx hex — no UI required. Always decode and verify the real terms before you pay: a swap is atomic, so you cannot send payment without receiving the asset in the same transaction.

# 1. Inspect the REAL terms before you pay raven-cli decoderawtransaction <partial_tx_hex> # 2. Add your inputs + change, sign YOUR side, broadcast: raven-cli fundrawtransaction <partial_tx_hex> raven-cli signrawtransaction <funded_hex> raven-cli sendrawtransaction <fully_signed_hex>

Ravencoin Core has no signrawtransactionwithwallet — the legacy signrawtransaction signs your own inputs. Prefer a single command? The open-source reference CLI decodes, re-validates the blob against your own node, builds, and broadcasts in one step:

ravenforge-cli market accept --blob ./their-listing.json

What happens if Blackwing shuts down?

Your assets are safe.
Your Ravencoin node keeps running on DigitalOcean — it is your droplet, not ours. Your wallet.dat, your RVN, and your assets are all stored on-chain and on your droplet. The Blackwing UI is a convenience layer; removing it changes nothing about what you own.

Active marketplace listings: any buyer who has the partial tx hex can still complete the swap directly using raven-cli, as described above. We recommend exporting active listings before any planned downtime.

We commit to at least 30 days’ notice before any planned shutdown (guarantee G7). Every notice is cryptographically signed by a key whose fingerprint is pinned into your droplet at provisioning, so you can confirm a notice is genuine — and reject a forged one — even if our website is gone. Verify it with nothing but the CLI already on your node:

ravenforge notice verify --file ./notice.json # or against a mirror: ravenforge notice verify --url https://<mirror>/notice.json

The full recovery manual ships on the droplet itself at /root/OFFLINE_RUNBOOK.md. You can also export your address book and your active listings, and decrypt an encrypted contacts backup completely offline with a self-contained contacts-decryptor.html file — no platform required.

If our database is lost, your node is not

Your DigitalOcean account — not our database — is the root of trust. At provisioning we stamp identity tags onto the droplet itself (a stable node id, its chain, and the fingerprint of its TLS certificate), so the platform’s records are a rebuildable cache. If they were ever wiped, signing in re-scans your DigitalOcean account, lists every Blackwing droplet it finds there, and offers a one-click Restore Connection — your node keeps running and your funds never move in the meantime.

Restoring proves account ownership to your node with a one-time DigitalOcean tag that the node verifies against DigitalOcean’s own metadata service, then hands back fresh read-only credentials over a channel pinned to the certificate fingerprint recorded on the droplet’s own tags — trust-on-first-use is never allowed. No seed phrase and no wallet passphrase are involved: the signing key never leaves the droplet, before or after recovery.

What state we keep — and what we don’t

We never hold your wallet passphrase, seed phrase, private keys, or funds. In the interest of full honesty, there are exactly two pieces of non-secret platform-side state worth disclosing — both are convenience/observability only, both die with the platform, and neither weakens guarantees G1–G6: