How so? They do only know the next hop, no? And they don’t know whether the next hop is the final one. Unless you open up a channel with them directly the trace should be lost after the first hop… at least from my understanding. 🤔
Discussion
"It all begins with the invoice, which has the receiver’s public key embedded in it. Everyone with access to an invoice can easily discover the associated node." So the exchange knows where the payment is going. If your node has an IP (not run on Tor), they have even more info about you. I believe most lightning nodes are not running on Tor because it negatively affects performance and reliability.
The more you know… ok but the two hop thing would mitigate this right? Could have the exchange send to a wos address and then on to your own node? Or do the double node thing. That should work right?
I'm not an expert at Lightning privacy by any means, but I think that should be right. Just note if you use WoS as the first hop, they see the second hop. There's also a service called LN Proxy you might look into. I don't fully understand it but I think it is meant to mask the final destination.