Legal

Terms of use and licences

Shear is experimental, open-source software. You must be 18 or over to use it. You alone hold your keys, and nobody can recover them for you. Testnet coin has no value and may disappear.

Last updated: 2026-10-29 · Applies to shear.digital and its subdomains, the Continuum wallet, the ShearK miner and the Shear node. See also the privacy policy.

Terms of use

Who we are

Shear is run by Russell Gray Sneddon. Contact: russell.gray.sneddon@gmail.com.

Age

You must be at least 18 years old, and old enough to enter a binding agreement where you live, to use the Shear wallet, miner or node, or to mine on the public pool. If you are under 18, please do not use Shear.

Experimental software and testnet

Shear is currently a testnet. Testnet balances have no value and may be reset or disappear at any time. Mainnet is not live. Nothing on this site is financial, investment, legal or tax advice, or an offer to sell anything. Shear has no sale of coin, no accounts and no subscriptions.

Your keys and your wallet

Your wallet is restored from the shewall.bin file together with its password. There is no seed phrase, and no one, including us, can recover a lost file or password or reverse a transaction. Back up your file, and keep it and your password safe and separate.

Using Shear lawfully

  • Use Shear only in ways that are lawful where you are. You are responsible for any taxes and reporting that apply to you.
  • Do not attack, overload or try to disrupt the network, the pool or our servers, and do not try to get into systems you are not allowed to use.
  • Mine only on hardware and power you are entitled to use. ShearK does not run on phones, because sustained mining can overheat a phone and damage its battery.

Open-source licence and no warranty

The software is provided under the MIT License, "as is", without warranty of any kind. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss arising from your use of Shear, including lost coin, lost keys, network faults or downtime. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

Third parties

Downloads and release details come from GitHub, which has its own terms. Other services you connect to, such as third-party pools or nodes, are not run by us.

Copyright

If you believe material on a Shear site infringes your copyright, email russell.gray.sneddon@gmail.com. Name the work, say where the material appears (for example, its URL), and give your contact details. We will review it and remove material that infringes. Where appropriate, we will remove access for anyone who repeatedly infringes.

Changes

We will post changes on this page and update the date above. If you keep using Shear after a change, you accept the updated terms.

Open-source licences

Shear is released under the MIT License. The Continuum wallet bundles the third-party components listed below. Each one is shown with its licence text and copyright lines exactly as it ships them. This is the same notice file the wallet shows under its licences screen.

Shear third-party notices

Generated by scripts/licenses/notices.py. Do not edit by hand.
Shear is MIT licensed (see the Shear section). Each section below names the
components it covers and carries the licence text and copyright lines exactly
as each component ships them.