12 New Projects: A Look at Solana's Officially Highlighted Privacy Initiatives
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12 New Projects: A Look at Solana's Officially Highlighted Privacy Initiatives
covering categories such as encrypted computing, privacy infrastructure, payments and wallets, trading, prediction markets, and smart protection.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Cookie,律动
Yesterday, Solana's official Twitter account published a thread introducing 12 privacy-related projects within its ecosystem, covering categories such as encrypted computing, privacy infrastructure, payments and wallets, trading, prediction markets, and intelligent protection.
Encrypted Computing
Arcium
On March 27, encrypted computing network Arcium announced the completion of its angel round funding, with investors spanning multiple domains, including community fundraising via echo. The total amount raised has reached $11 million. Participants include Jupiter co-founders Meow and Siong, and namik from the MegaETH founding team.
Arcium initially started as Elusiv, a privacy protocol on Solana, later evolving into a broader privacy computing platform. Using MPC and ZKP technologies, it enables computation on encrypted data without exposing the underlying data content.
Within the Arcium network, MXE (Multi-party Execution Environment) securely executes computational tasks, allowing users to set specific encryption protocols per MXE on demand. arxOS is the distributed execution engine inside the Arcium network, responsible for coordinating computations and supporting Arx nodes and clusters. Each node (similar to a core in a computer) provides computing resources to execute tasks defined by MXE.
A key highlight is that Arcium offers two different MPC protocol backends. One is named "Cerberus," which operates under a "non-honest majority" trust model, featuring cheat detection and identifiable abort mechanisms. This means privacy is guaranteed as long as at least one node remains honest. The system can also detect dishonest nodes, remove them, and impose penalties—contrasting sharply with most protocols requiring an "honest majority" (i.e., more than 51% honest nodes).
The other is called "Manticore," designed specifically for AI scenarios. While its security assumptions are not as strong as Cerberus, it suits permissioned environments, such as conducting AI training within trusted settings.
Another privacy project on Solana, Umbra, uses the Arcium network to enable private transfers on the Solana blockchain; Umbra will be introduced later in this article.
Although Arcium released its tokenomics and conducted a token sale targeting 2% of supply on CoinList back in March, the project has yet to launch its TGE.
Privacy Infrastructure
MagicBlock
On April 25, on-chain gaming engine MagicBlock completed a $7.5 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $10.5 million. This round was led by Faction, with participation from Maven11, Mechanism Capital, Robot Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Equilibrium, and Pivot Global, along with angel investors including Solana co-founder Toly, Helius Labs CEO Mert, and former Backpack co-founder Tristan Yver.
Originally focused on being an on-chain gaming engine, in September MagicBlock launched Ephemeral Rollup, a scaling solution protected by TEE. According to the team, this is the first privacy infrastructure built on Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), natively supporting Solana.
Traditional privacy solutions often require significant cryptographic overhead, suffer from slow execution speeds, and involve complex integration processes. MagicBlock takes a pragmatic approach: Just-In-Time Ephemeral Rollups run standard Solana transactions within Intel TDX secure enclaves, creating a hardware-verified "black box" where sensitive computations are protected. It’s not only auditable but also production-ready with just a few lines of code, enabling applications such as confidential order books and dark pools, regulatory-compliant DeFi protocols with built-in privacy controls, secure and auditable payment channels, and consumer-grade apps and games requiring privacy protection.
Overall, this is infrastructure designed to build on-chain privacy features and even full applications, with advantages including high speed, developer-friendly integration for Solana, and high access control. However, since it's infrastructure largely unrelated to retail users, it remains uncertain whether they will issue a token in the future.
Payments and Wallets
Umbra
From October 6–8, Umbra conducted an ICO on MetaDAO, with a minimum fundraising goal of $750,000. Ultimately, around $155 million participated, exceeding the target by 20,659%.
As previously mentioned, the project leverages the Arcium network to enable private transfers on the Solana blockchain. Umbra conceals fund flows on-chain while offering users a voluntary audit function, allowing them to disclose their transaction history to third parties for compliance or auditing purposes.
The foundation of Umbra's anonymity layer is the "shielding pool"—a smart contract holding a large number of mixed tokens from various users. A shielding pool functions like a public treasury where everyone deposits tokens. Once tokens enter the treasury and mix with others, it becomes computationally impossible to determine ownership. As more users and assets flow into the pool, each user’s privacy assurance increases.
The depositor sends their tokens into the shielding pool, and the protocol encrypts details such as amount and recipient's Umbra address. On-chain, only the fact that a deposit came from a certain Solana address is visible, but the final destination remains hidden.
The recipient generates a zero-knowledge proof, which, once verified by the Umbra contract, triggers the transfer of funds to the recipient's Umbra address. The gas fees required during withdrawal are directly deducted from the received amount, so the recipient does not need to top up SOL to claim assets, ensuring complete privacy throughout the process.
encrypt.trade
A privacy-focused DeFi platform on Solana, supporting private transfers and swaps. Winner of the Colosseum hackathon, supported by Alliance.
When users perform a swap on this platform, they are first required to wrap their tokens, which are then encrypted using the ElGamal algorithm. On-chain, only the type of wrapped asset is visible, while actual encrypted data is stored off-chain.
In essence, wrapped tokens serve merely as "pointers" on-chain, letting on-chain applications (like Jupiter) recognize the token type. Specific transaction amounts and movements—transaction intents—are computed within a secure environment based on TEE architecture. After computation, data is re-encrypted and updated on-chain, executing corresponding operations through the algorithms of respective on-chain applications.
The result is that swaps via encrypt.trade do not explicitly broadcast transaction data on-chain like traditional DEXs. Instead, only state changes of wrapped assets are visible, with no visibility into transaction amounts, parties involved, or even whether a transaction actually occurred.
Hush
The product has not officially launched yet. According to its official Twitter, this is a privacy-first Solana wallet offering features including SOL anonymization, one-time addresses, and private transactions. Additionally, it supports dApp wallet creation and includes a built-in ZEC bridge.
Privacy Cash
The current version has limited functionality, supporting only private SOL transfers. Future updates will add support for private SPL token transfers and swaps.
The sender deposits SOL into a privacy pool, generating a corresponding "credential" added to a Merkle tree. The recipient then withdraws funds to any accepted address via zero-knowledge proof verification.
Trading
Vanish
Another winner of the Colosseum hackathon, Vanish secured a pre-seed funding round of $1 million led by Colosseum, with participation from Solana Ventures and Pivot Global.
Vanish uses intelligent trade routing technology to maintain transaction privacy through protected liquidity sources. Documentation lacks technical depth; the project emphasizes compliance and anti-money laundering aspects, focusing heavily on reassuring users concerned about regulatory risks.
UniFi Labs
The product has not been released yet. The team is working on privacy-enabled perpetual contracts.
Intelligent Protection
Darklake
This project aims to achieve many goals, describing itself as a "zero-knowledge proof privacy layer." However, rather than building a full privacy system or chain, they plan to use zero-knowledge proofs to develop practical privacy applications directly on Solana.
Currently live is the "blind slippage pool," also known as zk-AMM. The blind slippage pool adds an encrypted commitment layer to automated market makers (AMMs), hiding slippage data from searchers while still allowing post-trade verification. Specifically, after a user submits a swap transaction, the system generates a hash value and a unique encrypted value, submitting both along with the transaction information. Darklake’s proof generator creates a Groth16 proof showing that the calculated result meets or exceeds the slippage threshold. If the proof is valid, the transaction settles; otherwise, it is canceled and funds refunded.
They also plan to develop privacy versions of perpetual contracts and token launches. As for why Solana categorized this project under intelligent protection, likely reasons include the breadth of their ambitions and their integration of Arcium’s tech stack to manage multi-party private state coordination after trades.
Loyal
Another project that completed an ICO on MetaDAO, with a minimum fundraising goal of $500,000 and final participation of approximately $75.9 million—exceeding the target by 15,180%.
Loyal is an open-source, decentralized, censorship-resistant, and auditable intelligent protocol powered by MagicBlock and Arcium. In simple terms, the project aims to build an on-chain AI with user data privacy protection, starting with handling crypto-related tasks and gradually expanding to assist with daily life and work activities like mainstream AIs today.
Prediction Markets
Melee and Pythia
Both utilize Arcium's technology. At the technical level, there isn't much to elaborate—they essentially encrypt the order books of prediction markets, achieving a dark pool effect for prediction markets. Whether this will become a necessary feature as prediction markets mature remains to be seen over time.
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