Helius acquires Light to build the canonical privacy layer for Solana

We are acquiring Light Protocol, the Solana privacy company that authored Solana’s original Zero Knowledge (ZK) syscalls and built ZK Compression to reduce state costs by up to 1000x.

For public, permissionless blockchains like Solana to improve upon legacy financial networks across trading, payments, and tokenization, privacy is non-negotiable.

Bitcoin proved cryptographic money was possible. Ethereum proved it could be programmable, and Solana proved it could scale to all.

With Light, we will prove that crypto, at scale, can also be private. We view privacy as the final scaling frontier for blockchains.

Why Light

The Light Protocol team has been building Solana-native privacy and scaling infrastructure for the last four years, and with this acquisition, we will make privacy a first-class citizen on Solana.

When Light Protocol's founders began, programmable privacy on Solana was technically impossible. The primitives weren't in the runtime.

So, they wrote them. 

The sol_poseidon hash function syscall, as well as the sol_alt_bn128_group_op and sol_alt_bn128_compression syscalls (i.e., altbn G1 pairings, additions, multiplications, and G1/G2 compression) were Light's original contributions to the SVM. 

Every zero-knowledge app on Solana, including projects that today compete in the privacy category, runs on or is influenced by the work Light spearheaded and delivered.

After shipping Solana’s ZK syscalls, Light applied similar principles to solve Solana’s account state problem, and built ZK Compression to reduce the cost of onchain state by 1000x.

Now, with privacy primitives and state compression shipped, Light is returning to their original goal: to solve privacy on Solana at scale.

Their engineers will join Helius, and with the full support of our team, infrastructure, institutional relationships, and distribution, we will deliver a fully onchain, programmable privacy layer for Solana. 

Encrypted balances. Encrypted payments. Encrypted markets.

All with the auditability, configurability, and selective disclosure that institutions and startups require.

Privacy is the precondition for Solana to become the chain that traditional finance operates on. 

Without it, we’re building faster surveillance technology. 

With it, we’re creating a new financial system.

Follow @HeliusPrivacy on X for updates.

For builders

If you’re already building with ZK Compression, nothing changes, except that the team maintaining these products now has more engineers and a much louder mandate. If you’re building with the Light Token SDK, features will be sunset.

If you’re a privacy-first startup or institution evaluating Solana for handling onchain operations and have been told that privacy is “coming,” reach out to our team. We want to work with you to build a truly scalable, onchain privacy layer for Solana.

If you’re an engineer interested in building privacy infrastructure at global scale, we’re hiring across the stack. The work is hard, but the upside is the future of finance. 

To learn more about Light, explore these resources:

• GitHub
• Website
• Light on X
• ZK Compression

For questions or comments, please email sales@helius.xyz.