12 new projects, a list of privacy projects officially named by Solana

Written by: Cookie, Rhythm

Yesterday, Solana's official Twitter posted a thread introducing 12 privacy-related projects within its ecosystem, covering categories such as cryptographic computing, privacy infrastructure, payments and wallets, trading, prediction markets, and smart protection.

Cryptographic computation

Arcium

On March 27, the crypto computing network Arcium announced the completion of its angel round financing, with investors from various fields, including some community fundraising through echo. The total financing amount has reached 11 million dollars. Investors include Meow, co-founder of Jupiter, namik, a member of the founding team of MegaETH, and Siong, co-founder of Jupiter.

Arcium was originally a privacy protocol on Solana called Elusiv, which later transformed into a broader privacy computing platform. It utilizes MPC and ZKP technologies to allow computations on encrypted data without exposing the data content.

In the Arcium network, MXE (Multi-Party Execution Environment) is responsible for securely executing computational tasks, and users can configure the encryption protocols used for each MXE individually as needed. arxOS is the distributed execution engine within the Arcium network, responsible for coordinating computations and supporting Arx nodes and clusters. Each node (similar to a core in a computer) provides computational resources to execute tasks defined by MXE.

Notably, Arcium offers two different implementations of the MPC protocol backend, one called “Cerberus.” Cerberus operates under a “non-honest majority” trust model, featuring cheating detection and identifiable abort mechanisms. This means that as long as one node is honest, privacy can be guaranteed. The system can also identify dishonest nodes, eject them, and impose penalties. This sharply contrasts with most protocols that require an “honest majority” (i.e., more than 51% of nodes being honest).

Another type called “Manticore” is designed specifically for AI scenarios. Although its security assumptions are not as strong as Cerberus, it is suitable for environments with access control, such as conducting AI training in a trusted environment.

Another privacy-related project on Solana, Umbra, achieves private transactions on the Solana chain through the Arcium network, and Umbra will also be introduced later.

Although Arcium released its tokenomics and conducted a token sale targeting 2% on CoinList as early as March this year, the project has not yet had its TGE.

Privacy Infrastructure

MagicBlock

On April 25, the on-chain game engine MagicBlock completed a $7.5 million seed round financing, bringing the total funding amount to $10.5 million. This round of financing was led by Faction, with participation from institutions such as Maven11, Mechanism Capital, Robot Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Equilibrium, and Pivot Global, as well as angel investors including Solana co-founder Toly, Helius Labs CEO Mert, and former Backpack co-founder Tristan Yver.

Although it initially focused on an on-chain game engine, in September of this year, MagicBlock introduced the TEE-protected scaling solution Ephemeral Rollup. According to them, this is the first privacy infrastructure built on a trusted execution environment (TEE) specifically designed for native Solana support.

Traditional privacy solutions require significant encryption overhead, slow execution speeds, and cumbersome integration processes. MagicBlock adopts a pragmatic approach: Instant ( Just-In-Time ) Ephemeral Rollup runs standard Solana transactions within Intel TDX secure enclaves, creating a hardware-verified “black box” where sensitive computations are protected. It is not only auditable but can also be put into production with just a few lines of code, usable for building confidential order books and dark pools, regulatory-compliant DeFi protocols with built-in privacy controls, secure and auditable payment channels, and consumer-grade applications and games that require privacy protection.

Overall, this is an infrastructure designed to create on-chain privacy features and applications. Its advantages include fast speed, developer integration friendliness for Solana, and high access control. However, from this perspective, since it is an infrastructure that has almost nothing to do with retail investors, it is difficult to say whether they will issue tokens in the future.

Payment and Wallet

Umbra

From October 6 to 8, Umbra conducted an ICO on MetaDAO, with a minimum fundraising target of 750,000 USD. In the end, approximately 155 million USD participated in the fundraising, exceeding the target by 20659%.

As mentioned earlier, the project enables private transactions on the Solana chain through the Arcium network. Umbra can obscure the flow of funds on the chain and provides a user-initiated auditing feature that allows users to disclose their transaction history to third parties for compliance or auditing purposes.

The foundation of the Umbra anonymous layer is the “shielded pool,” which is a smart contract that holds a large amount of mixed tokens from numerous different users. A shielded pool is like a public vault where everyone deposits their tokens. Once the tokens enter the vault and mix with everyone else's tokens, it becomes impossible to determine the specific ownership of the tokens through computation. As more and more users and assets flow into the pool, the privacy protection of each user increases.

The depositor will deposit their tokens into the shielded pool, and the protocol will obtain the details of the deposit (such as the amount and the recipient's Umbra address) and encrypt it. On-chain, it can only be seen that the deposit comes from a certain Solana address, but the ultimate destination of the deposit cannot be seen.

The payee will generate a zero-knowledge proof, and after verification by the Umbra contract, the contract will transfer the funds to the payee's Umbra address. During the process of the payee receiving the assets, the required gas fees will be directly obtained from the payment, so the payee's Umbra address does not need to recharge SOL to complete the receiving action, thereby ensuring the complete privacy of the entire process.

encrypt.trade

Privacy DeFi on Solana, supporting private transfers and swaps. A winning project of the Colosseum hackathon, supported by Alliance.

When users perform a Swap on the platform, they will first be required to wrap their tokens. The tokens will be encrypted and wrapped using the ElGamal algorithm. Only the wrapped asset type can be seen on-chain, while the actual encrypted data is stored off-chain.

In other words, the packaged token only serves as a “pointer” on the chain, allowing applications on the chain (like Jupiter) to know what kind of token it is. As for the specific transaction amounts and movements, these transaction intents will be calculated in a secure environment based on a TEE architecture. After the calculation is complete, the data will be re-encrypted and updated on the chain, using the algorithms of the corresponding on-chain applications to execute the respective operations.

The result of this set is that the Swap through encrypt.trade does not explicitly broadcast transaction data on the chain like traditional DEXs; one can only see the status changes of packaged assets, but cannot see the transaction amount, trading parties, or even whether the transaction actually occurred.

Hush

The product has not been officially released yet. According to its official Twitter description, this is a privacy-first Solana wallet that will provide SOL obfuscation, disposable addresses, and privacy transaction features. Additionally, it supports wallet creation for dApps and has a built-in ZEC bridge.

Privacy Cash

The current version has relatively simple functions, only supporting private SOL transfers. In the future, it will be updated to support private transfers of SPL tokens and swaps.

The depositor will deposit SOL into the privacy pool, which will generate a “credential” added to the Merkle tree, and the recipient will verify it through zero-knowledge proof to withdraw the corresponding funds to any receiving address.

Transaction

Vanish

Another winning project from the Colosseum hackathon has secured a $1 million seed round pre-financing led by Colosseum, with participation from Solana Ventures and Pivot Global.

Vanish utilizes smart trading routing technology to maintain trading privacy through protected liquidity sources. The documentation does not provide many technical details; this project places a greater emphasis on compliance privacy, stating that users who are anti-money laundering do not need to worry about it.

UniFi Labs

The product is not out yet, and the direction being taken is privacy perpetual contracts.

Smart Protection

Darklake

This project has a lot of things it wants to do and describes itself as a “zero-knowledge proof privacy layer.” However, they do not intend to create a complete privacy system or chain, but rather to use zero-knowledge proofs to directly build practical privacy applications on Solana.

The “Blind Slippage Pool” has currently been launched, also known as zk-AMM. The Blind Slippage Pool adds a layer of cryptographic commitment to automated market makers (AMM), making slippage data invisible to seekers but verifiable after the transaction. The specific principle is that after the user submits a Swap transaction, the system generates a hash value and a unique cryptographic value based on the transaction and submits both along with the transaction information. Darklake's proof generator will create a Groth16 proof to indicate that the computed result is equal to or exceeds the slippage range. If the proof is valid, the transaction is settled; otherwise, the transaction is revoked, and the funds are refunded.

At the same time, they also plan to create a privacy version of perpetual contracts and token launches. As for why Solana categorizes this project as smart protection, I think one reason is that they cover all aspects of what they are doing, and another is that they have integrated Arcium's tech stack to handle multi-party privacy state coordination after transactions are completed.

Loyal

It is also a project that completed its ICO on MetaDAO, with a minimum fundraising target of 500,000 USD, ultimately raising approximately 75.9 million USD, exceeding the target by 15,180%.

Loyal is an open-source, decentralized, censorship-resistant, and auditable smart protocol supported by MagicBlock and Arcium. The simplest summary of this project might be that they want to create an on-chain AI that guarantees user data privacy, starting with processing transactions related to cryptocurrency and gradually improving to assist in daily life and work matters like the AI available on the market today.

Prediction Market

Melee and Pythia

Both use Arcium's technology. Overall, there isn't much worth discussing on the technical level; it simply adds encryption to the order books of the prediction markets, achieving the effect of a dark pool for the prediction markets. As for whether this will be what players need after the prediction market develops to a certain extent, time will tell.