Introducing Solana Privacy Rings
Today, we’re releasing Solana Privacy Rings on mainnet. Rings bring programmable privacy to Solana with native performance and execution, enabling confidential payments, private DeFi, and institutional adoption.
Developers can start integrating today via simple APIs, and build Solana apps with private escrows for confidential swaps, staking, and yield.
This lays the groundwork for Custom Rings, which will allow financial institutions and enterprise companies to create privacy applications with custom compliance rules and auditor visibility.
Why We Built Solana Privacy Rings
Solana is the most scalable and battle-tested public blockchain today.
With 150 ms settlement times, sub-cent fees, and a rapidly growing DeFi ecosystem, Solana is transforming the world’s financial infrastructure.
Still, like any public blockchain, Solana is pseudonymous.
Every transaction, balance, and wallet is permanently recorded on a public ledger. Anyone can view a wallet’s balances, counterparties, and transaction history since genesis.
This transparency makes public blockchains impractical for everyday financial and commercial use cases like payments and payroll.
Blockchains require privacy and scalability to bring finance onchain.
With this in mind, we set three main goals for Solana Privacy Rings:
- Make Solana private
- Make programmable privacy scalable
- Do both without impacting the user experience
When people talk about adoption and scaling in crypto, they mistakenly only think about throughput and latency — but the final scaling frontier in crypto is actually privacy. Without privacy, no serious institution or individual will feel comfortable having their entire financial identity exposed to the public in perpetuity. Even ignoring the surveillance, MEV, and safety considerations — privacy is crucial for security. You can not hack what you cannot see. So for crypto to scale 1,000x from here, privacy must be treated as a first-class citizen. And it must especially be treated that way for the most performant and usable chain in crypto, which is Solana.
What are Solana Privacy Rings?
Solana Privacy Rings are programmable shielded pools with encrypted onchain balances and native Solana execution.
Today, we launched a permissionless privacy Ring that provides confidentiality: assets and amounts are encrypted, while wallets remain visible. Only the user can decrypt their balances with a viewing key.
We built Rings around five core properties:
- Self-custody: transactions always require the owner’s signature
- Encrypt any asset: Rings support SOL, SPL and Token-2022 tokens
- Onchain execution: private transactions execute directly on Solana
- Onchain data: encrypted data is stored on Solana’s ledger
- Speed: succinct ZK proofs verify private txs on Solana in ms
Together, these properties make private transfers feel as familiar as public transfers on Solana.
Privacy Ring Demo
Experience confidential transfers on Solana with our Privacy Ring demo, and then view private transaction details on Orb.
User Flows
Users can deposit assets into a private balance, send private transfers to a Solana wallet address, and withdraw to a public balance.
Selected providers will also support private fiat on- and off-ramps.
Privacy Guarantees
Each action has different privacy guarantees.
The table below shows what remains public and what is encrypted using the default confidential Ring.
Programmable Privacy Use Cases
Developers have used Solana's programmability to build a whole new financial system. As more real money moves through it, privacy needs to become part of this infrastructure. Solana Privacy Rings lets individuals choose what stays private without giving up the programmability that made all of this possible in the first place.
Solana Privacy Rings extend privacy beyond simple transfers.
For example, private escrows can hold encrypted balances and release funds when defined conditions are met.
This provides the foundation for:
- Private swaps: exchange assets at agreed amounts and prices
- Borrow/Lending: hold collateral in private escrows to secure loans
- Staking and yield: use private balances in stake pools, tokenized treasuries, and curated/managed vaults
- Conditional payments: release funds on a schedule or after required approvals, for multisigs, payroll, vesting, or DvP
These apps can combine private transactions with other Solana programs in a single transaction, and can also share liquidity.
Custom Rings for Institutional Privacy
Solana is attracting institutional interest, and companies need privacy that meets their compliance, reporting, and audit requirements.
To meet these requirements, companies will be able to create Custom Rings that enforce compliance rules directly on Solana.
For institutions to meaningfully participate in onchain finance, privacy needs to be built into the infrastructure from the start. Businesses need to protect sensitive transaction data, counterparties, and balances without sacrificing the transparency and accountability required by their compliance frameworks. Solana Privacy Rings gives institutions the flexibility to create custom environments with configurable privacy, auditor visibility, and compliance controls, all while benefiting from Solana’s speed and performance.
Benefits of Custom Rings
Each Custom Ring is a Solana program that coexists with the permissionless default Ring. The benefits of Custom Rings are:
Configurable Privacy
Custom Rings can be confidential, where counterparties are visible and balances are encrypted, or anonymous, where both counterparties and balances are encrypted.
Auditor Visibility
A separate auditor key grants read access to wallet balances within the Custom Ring, according to its configured policy.
Selective Disclosure
Users can share read access through their viewing key or disclose a single transaction through its transaction viewing key.
Custom Compliance
Institutions can enforce controls such as allowlists, blocklists, freezes, and additional signature requirements directly on Solana.
In other words, Custom Rings are the financial tools SEC Chairman, Paul S. Atkins highlighted in his December 15th remarks:
...zero-knowledge proofs, selective disclosure, and wallet designs (…) allow users to prove compliance without handing over their entire financial history...
Custom Rings are currently being audited, and a target Solana mainnet release date is anticipated for Q4 2026.
Ecosystem
The permissionless Solana Privacy Ring is on Solana mainnet and multiple products are already live including:
- Decrypt: confidential transfers for their money account
- Ore: confidential transfers in the mining and staking app
- Aurora Intents: cross-chain interoperability to deliver assets into confidential balances
Range, Chainalysis, and Elliptic Labs all support compliance flows for wallet screening, and more teams are building confidential onramps, including Crossmint, Moonpay, and Paybis.
Additionally, teams including Backpack, DFlow, Jupiter, Squads, Titan, and more companies in stealth are actively working on integrations.
If you're building private DeFi on Solana, contact us.
Build with Solana Privacy Rings
We built the SDKs, APIs, and an embedded private wallet to make adding privacy to new and existing Solana applications easy.
Most of the technical details are abstracted away, so developers can integrate privacy without requiring deep technical expertise on ZK:
- Single RPC URL: Access the Solana RPC, indexer, and remote prover endpoints through a single Helius RPC URL
- TypeScript and Rust SDKs: use our client SDKs to deposit assets, read private balances, send transfers, and withdraw funds
- Dedicated RPC Methods: use simple privacy RPC methods to look up shielded transactions, find encrypted outputs, and more
- ZK Toolchain: we partnered with Blueshift so you can use the XARK toolchain to write custom ZK circuits in Rust
Additionally, we’re building an embedded private wallet to easily add an in-app wallet with public and private balances.
Audits and Security
The core Solana Privacy Ring programs are deployed on Solana mainnet. The programs and ZK circuits have been audited by three independent security audit firms: Certora, ZK Security, and OtterSec.
Engineers from Solana Foundation, Blueshift, Zcash, Certora, OtterSec, and ZK Security performed the trusted setup for the ZK circuits.
Formal verification of the permissionless Privacy Ring programs and ZK circuits is underway. We expect it to be complete by the end of 2026.
What's Next
We built Solana Privacy Rings to bring privacy to Solana without sacrificing user experience and native performance. The foundation is now in place for private payments, DeFi, and onchain institutional finance at scale. Our focus is helping more developers and institutions turn onchain privacy primitives into scalable, private applications.
If you’re interested in building privacy products on Solana, get in touch.
For updates please follow @HeliusPrivacy on X, join our Privacy Telegram group, and join the Helius Discord.
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