Last updated: 17 September 2026
Chord Express is operated by Saving Circles Ltd, a company incorporated in England and Wales with company number 16194867, whose registered office is at 82a James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Bury St. Edmunds, England, IP28 7DE (“we”, “us”). We are the controller of the personal data described in this Policy, which means we decide why and how it is used.
For anything about your personal data, including exercising the rights in section 12, email privacy@chordexpress.com or write to us at 82a James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Bury St. Edmunds, England, IP28 7DE.
This Policy covers the Chord Express websites and mobile applications (the “Service”). Words defined in the Terms of Service mean the same here. The third parties described in section 8 that deal with you directly, such as payment and identity-verification providers, are controllers of the data they collect, under their own privacy policies.
Account and identity. Your Wallet address, which is your account identifier throughout the Service. The email address, or X (Twitter) account, you sign in with. These are held by our authentication provider, and we read them from that provider when we need to send you a notification. Your account role and mode.
Profile. First and last name, handle, bio, avatar photo, home city and country, and X handle, where you provide them. Your invite code and who invited you.
Identity-verification status. If you choose to verify your identity with our third-party provider, we send them your Wallet address and store the yes-or-no result and when we checked it. We never receive or store your identity documents, photo or date of birth.
Listings. Requests: item name, description, link, photos, price, quantity, and the origin and destination you enter, including city, country, address and map place identifiers. Trips: route, dates, city coordinates and your note. Offers you make.
Order records. Purchase and possession evidence, including receipt and item photos. Handover proposals: venue, time window and who proposed and accepted. Settlement and cancellation proposals. Reviews and ratings you give and receive.
Messages. The content of in-app messages between the Users on an Order, including image attachments, and messages and attachments you send to the Reviewer in an Order Dispute, which may include documents you choose to share.
Precise location at handover. When you check in at a handover, and when a Venue attests or witnesses one, the app records your device’s GPS latitude and longitude, the accuracy of the reading and the time, linked to your Wallet and the Order. This is used to show that the people involved were in the same place. The mobile app asks for location permission only while you are using it, and never tracks you in the background. If you use “use my location” to search, those coordinates are used for that one lookup and are not stored on our servers.
Payments and funding. On-chain transactions are described in section 4. When you add funds through a third-party provider, we store the provider’s session and transaction references, amounts, currency, destination Wallet and status updates they send us. We never see or store your card number or bank login. Addresses you have sent funds to, so that we can offer them again. If you use bank cash-out where it is offered, the account holder name and IBAN or payment tag you give us, which we encrypt at rest.
Venues. If you apply to register a Venue: business name, address, map location, type and hours, and the contact person’s name, role, email address and phone number.
Reports and enforcement. Reports you make, including your Wallet, the reason and any details you give. Reports made about you. Moderation actions taken on your content or account, with reasons, and changes to account roles.
Technical data. Your IP address, which we use to limit request rates and which appears in our hosting provider’s request logs. Browser and device information (user agent). If a page crashes in your browser, the error message, the page address and technical details of the failure, so that we can fix it.
Support. The content of emails and other communications you send us.
What we do not collect. We do not use advertising or analytics trackers, and we do not buy data about you from data brokers. The Service is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from children; if you believe a child has used the Service, tell us and we will delete what we can.
A marketplace needs listings to be seen. The following are visible to anyone, without signing in:
Do not put a home address, phone number or anything else you want kept private into a Request, Trip note or review. Enter a city or a public meeting place as your destination.
Open Requests and current Trips are included in our sitemap, may be indexed by search engines, and generate a preview image, showing the item, route and price, when their link is shared. Anyone can share a link to a public listing. Search engines and other sites may keep copies after a listing has closed or been removed; we do not control them.
Your profile (name shown as first name and last initial, handle, bio, avatar and home city) is visible to any signed-in User, not to the general public. A Venue you use for a handover sees your first name.
Creating a Request, making and accepting Offers, funding and releasing Escrow, submitting evidence, handover check-ins, Venue Attestations, Order Disputes and their outcomes are all recorded on the Solana blockchain under your Wallet address. For evidence, messages and location we record only a cryptographic fingerprint (hash) on-chain, never the content itself.
Blockchain data is public, copied across computers worldwide that we do not control, and cannot be edited or deleted by us or anyone else. Anyone who links your Wallet address to you, for example from a public listing, can see your full on-chain history, including amounts and counterparties.
Closing your Chord Express account, or asking us to erase your data, cannot remove anything recorded on the blockchain. Where data-protection law gives you a right to erasure, we honour it for the data we control, as section 11 explains.
| Purpose | Data used | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Providing the Service: accounts, listings, matching, messaging, Escrow, handovers, notifications, funding and cash-out | Account, profile, listings, Order records, messages, handover location, payments | Performance of our contract with you |
| Deciding Order Disputes | Order records, messages, evidence, handover location, Attestations | Performance of our contract with you; our and other Users’ legitimate interests in fair outcomes |
| Trust and safety: preventing fraud, prohibited items and abuse; moderation; acting on reports; enforcing our Terms | Any of the data in section 2, as needed | Our legitimate interests in a safe and lawful marketplace, and those of other Users and the public |
| Security: rate limiting, abuse prevention, fixing errors | Technical data | Our legitimate interests in keeping the Service secure and working |
| Complying with the law: sanctions, tax, customs and financial-crime rules; lawful requests from authorities | Any of the data in section 2, as the law requires | Legal obligation; otherwise our legitimate interests in co-operating with authorities |
| Establishing, exercising or defending legal claims | Any of the data in section 2, as needed | Our legitimate interests |
| Understanding and improving the Service, using aggregated or de-identified information | Usage of features, Order volumes and outcomes | Our legitimate interests in improving the Service |
| Service emails about your Orders and account | Email address, name, Order details | Performance of our contract with you |
| Marketing emails, if we send them | Email address, name | Your consent, which you can withdraw at any time |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and expectations. You can ask us about that assessment, and you have the right to object (section 12). We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.
We use automated rules to keep the Service secure, for example to limit request rates and to validate what is submitted.
We also use, or are introducing, automated systems, including machine-learning models, to analyse listing content, Order information and, where necessary for trust and safety, messages between Users. These systems may classify items against our Prohibited and Restricted Items Policy, identify potentially prohibited or fraudulent activity, assign risk indicators, flag content, accounts or Orders for review, and in some cases hold, restrict or remove content. Where a model is operated by a third-party provider, that provider acts on our instructions and may not use your data for its own purposes; we will list it in section 8.
Human review. Automated systems make mistakes in both directions. If an automated decision restricts or removes your content, or restricts your account, you can ask for it to be reviewed by a person, tell us your side, and contest the outcome, by emailing support@chordexpress.com. We do not permanently close an account, or make any other decision with legal or similarly significant effects on you, by automated means alone. A person makes those decisions. A funded Order is never cancelled, and its funds are never moved, by an automated moderation decision.
Reviewers deciding Order Disputes are people. Any automated classification or warning we show you is information, not legal, customs or tax advice (Terms, section 21).
Other Users and Venues, as sections 3 and 7 describe.
Service providers that process data for us, under contracts that limit them to our instructions:
| Provider | What for | Data involved |
|---|---|---|
| Privy | Sign-in and your self-custodial Wallet | Email or X account, Wallet, session data |
| Supabase | Our application database | All data we store off-chain |
| Vercel | Hosting and server logs | IP address, user agent, request and error logs |
| Helius | Reading and submitting Solana transactions | Wallet addresses, transactions |
| Knock | In-app and email notifications | Wallet address, email address, display name, and notification content, which can include a preview of a message sent to you |
| Upstash | Rate limiting | IP address or Wallet address, held briefly as a counter |
| Google (Places and Maps) | Place search and maps | Search text you type, place identifiers, and coordinates when you use “use my location” |
Providers you choose to use, who deal with you directly and are controllers of what they collect. We pass them your Wallet address so that funds arrive in the right place, and they send us status updates. They may carry out their own identity and fraud checks.
Websites you link to. When you paste a product link into a Request, our server fetches that page to read its title, image and price. The website sees a request from our server, not from you.
Authorities and others, where the law allows or requires. We may disclose personal data to law-enforcement, customs, tax, sanctions and regulatory authorities, courts and other parties: to comply with a legal obligation or a lawful request; to report suspected unlawful activity; to investigate or prevent fraud, prohibited items or a threat to anyone’s safety; to enforce our Terms; and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. We assess each request and disclose only what is necessary.
Professional advisers and insurers, under duties of confidentiality, and a buyer or successor if our business, or part of it, is sold, merged or reorganised, in which case this Policy continues to apply to your data.
Chord Express is an international marketplace. Your counterparty on an Order may be in any country, and several of our service providers are based in, or process data in, the United States and other countries outside the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area.
When we transfer personal data out of the UK or the EEA to a country that has not been recognised as providing adequate protection, we rely on a recognised safeguard: the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, or the UK–US and EU–US data-bridge frameworks where the provider is certified. You can ask us for a copy of the relevant safeguard. Data recorded on the blockchain is replicated worldwide by its nature (section 4).
We keep personal data only for as long as we need it for the purposes above. In practice:
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Profile and account data | While your account is open. Erased or anonymised when you ask us to close it, subject to the rows below. |
| Order records, messages, evidence photos, handover location and dispute records | Six years after the Order ends, which is the period in which legal claims can ordinarily be brought, then deleted or anonymised. You can ask for earlier erasure of message content (section 11). |
| Public listings and reviews | While your account is open, or until you or we remove them. |
| Funding and cash-out records | Six years after the transaction, for tax, accounting and financial-crime purposes. Bank details are erased on request once a payout has completed. |
| Identity-verification status | While your account is open. |
| Reports, moderation and enforcement records | Six years after the matter is closed. A record that an account was banned is kept for as long as needed to stop the person returning. |
| Venue applications | While the Venue is registered and six years after. Unsuccessful applications: one year. |
| Rate-limiting counters | Minutes. |
| Server and error logs | For our hosting provider’s standard log-retention period. |
| Support correspondence | Three years after the conversation ends. |
| Blockchain records | Permanently. They cannot be deleted (section 4). |
We may keep data for longer where the law requires it, or where we need it for an ongoing investigation, Order Dispute or legal claim.
To close your account or ask for your data to be erased, email privacy@chordexpress.com from the email address you sign in with. There is not yet a self-service option in the app. We will confirm it is you, and act within one month. When we erase your data:
What we cannot erase, or may need to keep:
You cannot close your account while you have an Order in progress. Your Wallet is self-custodial and remains yours after your Chord Express account is closed; withdraw any funds first, or access it afterwards through our wallet provider.
Depending on where you live, and in particular under UK and EU data-protection law, you have the right to:
To exercise a right, email privacy@chordexpress.com. We do not charge, and we respond within one month, which the law lets us extend for complex requests. We may need to verify your identity first. You can control notification emails in Settings.
We would like the chance to put things right first, but you can complain at any time to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint) or, if you live in the EEA, to the data-protection authority of the country where you live or work.
We protect your data with measures appropriate to the risk. All writes to our database go through server routes that verify your signed-in session; the database denies direct access to private tables; access to private Order data is checked against the parties recorded on-chain; bank details are encrypted at rest; your Wallet’s keys are held by our wallet provider’s infrastructure and never by us; and moderation actions are logged. No system is perfectly secure. If you suspect a problem with your account, or find a vulnerability, tell us straight away at support@chordexpress.com. If a breach is likely to put your rights at high risk, we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires.
We will update this Policy when what we do changes, including before we introduce a new provider or a new use of your data. The date at the top shows when it last changed. We will give you notice in the Service or by email of changes that materially affect you.
