There come times when there are lots of things to do onchain. For instance, DeFi Summer in 2020, the NFT boom in 2021, the dawn of the memecoin trenches a couple of years ago.
Privacy apps are enjoying a moment like this now, too.
We’re seeing plenty of network-level advances on privacy lately, yet it’s the app layer that’s particularly teeming at the moment, and the flurry of new releases here is converting possibilities into practicalities.
They’re making privacy easier and more nonchalant onchain, in short. That’s good news for our industry and people everywhere. But it also means we’re back in the environment where the pace of new projects can be hard to keep up with!
For example, this list is by no means comprehensive, but some fresh drops that have caught my eye just from the past couple weeks are as follows…
anon.wei
anon.wei is a new experimental platform from Ross (a.k.a. z0r0z), the solo dev behind the Z ecosystem I featured in my recent Indie Trinity video.
The gist is that it lets you shield ETH on Ethereum, Base, or Robinhood Chain, send it privately, pull out any portion later, and optionally pay people by their .wei names, which I've walked through before.
The platform might look simple, and it doesn’t have many deposits yet, but it’s built to last, as the entire app, frontend included, lives onchain via ERC-8244 (a proposed standard for serving web pages directly from smart contracts). Deposits / withdrawals still show up onchain; however, the details of private transfers remain concealed.
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zk.money
Aztec Labs revived zk.money on Sept. 29th, a few years after shelving the original rendition to build Aztec Network, its privacy-first Ethereum L2.
This one’s a self-custodial wallet where you claim a tag like yourname.zk.money, deposit DAI, USDC, or USDT (the latter two convert to DAI), and onlookers can’t see your balance, how much you send, or to whom.
That said, the reboot is early and ramping up. For now, every deposit, payment, and withdrawal is capped below $2,500, so expect to start small if you dive in.
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Zcash Names
Zcash’s shielded addresses are long, which is where Zcash Names comes in. The service just kicked off (still in Early Access) and maps a readable name like abc.zcash or xyz.zec to yours.
This way, people can pay you without copying and pasting a wall of characters while your balance and history stay private. If nothing else, it’s a great avenue for increasing shielded address use.
Names are recorded within regular shielded Zcash transactions instead of on some company’s servers, and anyone can run an indexer to verify the namespace. Just double-check you’re on zcashnames.com, as an unrelated registry uses an almost identical name!
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Umbra v2
Solana is getting in on the action, too. Umbra, the Arcium-powered privacy layer that opened to the public in March, rolled out its v2 on Oct. 13th.
Connect your existing Solana wallet, move supported tokens into an encrypted private balance, and send or swap from there, with transfers settling in under 5 seconds and swaps in about 15, per the team.
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Just remember here that onramps and offramps stay public, with deposits showing what went in and from where, and withdrawals showing where funds landed.
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Shadow Accounts
Starknet unveiled Shadow Accounts on Oct. 13th, and the chain’s app layer wasted no time putting them to work.
Simply put, this primitive presents apps with a separate pseudonymous address funded from your shielded STRK20 balance.
On Oct. 14th, Ekubo, Starknet’s popular concentrated liquidity DEX, added a Public/Private switch for trading and LPing in private mode via these special accounts. A day later, Opus followed suit, letting you post collateral and borrow its CASH stablecoin from a Trove (i.e. your loan position) that isn’t tied to your main wallet.
Just know that a Shadow Account’s trades and positions stay public, so this system offers unlinkability rather than invisibility. You’ll also need a wallet that supports the new STRK20 methods.
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OffMarket
Polymarket wallets are an open book, which makes sharp traders easy marks for copycats. StarkWare’s OffMarket, open since Oct. 14th, is built to ax that connection.
Here, you deposit USDC into Starknet’s shared privacy pool, the same one behind Shadow Accounts, and each new position gets a fresh Polygon wallet (derived from your signature) that trades on Polymarket’s real order books. It’s the exact same markets at the exact same odds.
That said, those per-bet wallets still trade publicly, so an unusual size or timing could give you away. For now, deposits are also capped at $1,000, and a compliance firm holds a master viewing key for vetted legal requests.
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zkAPI
How about some privacy for your AI tab? As some of you may recall, the Ethereum Foundation and the Open Anonymity Project launched zkAPI on Oct. 1st.
The goal of this experimental system is to let people separate what they pay for AI from what they ask of AI.
In other words, with zkAPI you deposit ETH or USDC into a vault on Ethereum once, then use zero-knowledge proofs to mint temporary, dollar-capped API keys for AI models without revealing which deposit is paying. You can try it in your browser via OA Chat.
Keep in mind though that the model provider can still see your prompts, and your IP and question times aren’t masked. Still, it’s awesome to see the EF pushing forward here, and surely there’s more to come.
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Of course, all of these releases are brand new. Some have caps and small anonymity sets for now, and undiscovered bugs can’t be ruled out.
Yet even if you don’t jump into any of these apps immediately, the wave they’re riding is major, and it’s good to have them on your radar to better understand the pulse of our industry or in case you ever need their services for your onchain toolbox.