Written by William M. Peaster
Compiled by Saoirse, Foresight News
On-chain sectors always experience wave after wave of hype: for example, the DeFi summer of 2020, the NFT wave of 2021, and the era when meme coins took the world by storm a few years ago.
Right now, privacy applications are also having their own moment.
Recently, privacy technology has made many breakthroughs at the network infrastructure level, but the strongest innovative energy is still at the application layer. A large batch of new products has emerged one after another, turning privacy technology that once remained at the conceptual stage into tools that can actually be used in practice.
In short, these products have greatly lowered the barrier to using on-chain privacy. This is good for the entire industry and for users worldwide, but it also means new projects keep emerging, making it hard to keep up.
The products listed below are not exhaustive, but over the past few weeks, seven new releases have been especially noteworthy:
anon.wei is an experimental platform launched by independent developer Ross (@z0r0zzz). I previously introduced this developer and the Z ecosystem he built in the "Three Giants of Independent Developers" video.
Core features of the platform: users can seal ETH on Ethereum, Base, and Robinhood Chain, initiate private transfers, and later withdraw any amount; it also supports sending payments to others via .wei domains, a feature I have explained before.
The platform has a simple interface, and the amount of funds currently deposited is not large, but its underlying design has long-term value. The entire application (including the frontend page) is deployed on-chain based on the ERC-8244 standard, which supports providing web services directly through smart contracts. Deposit and withdrawal records will still be publicly recorded on-chain, but the transaction details of private transfers will be hidden.
Aztec Labs previously shelved the zk.money project and focused on developing Aztec Network, a privacy-focused Ethereum Layer 2 network. After several years, the team relaunched zk.money on September 29.
This is a self-custodial wallet. Users can claim an account identifier in the form of yourname.zk.money and deposit DAI, USDC, or USDT (the latter two are automatically converted to DAI after deposit). External third parties cannot see your account balance, transfer amount, or recipient.
However, the relaunched project is still in an early iterative stage. Currently, each deposit, payment, and withdrawal has a $2,500 cap, so those who want to try it can only start with small amounts.
Zcash's native shielded privacy addresses are long and cumbersome, and Zcash Names was created precisely to solve this pain point. The service has just launched and is still in an early experience stage. It can map easy-to-understand domains (such as abc.zcash, xyz.zec) to your privacy address.
In this way, others can send you funds without copying and pasting a long string of complex characters, while your balance and transaction records remain private. At the very least, this service can effectively improve the practical usage rate of shielded addresses.
Domain information is recorded directly in Zcash shielded transactions and is not hosted on corporate servers. Anyone can run an indexer to verify this namespace. Be sure to confirm that you are visiting zcashnames.com. There is an unrelated domain registration service on the market with a highly similar domain name, so beware of visiting counterfeit websites.
The Solana ecosystem has also entered the privacy track. Umbra, a privacy layer supported by Arcium, officially opened to the public in March this year and released V2 on October 13.
Connect your existing Solana wallet, transfer supported tokens into the encrypted private balance pool, and then you can initiate transfers or token swaps there. According to the development team, transfer confirmation takes less than 5 seconds, and token swaps take about 15 seconds.
Note: the entry and exit points for depositing and withdrawing funds are still public. Deposit records will show the deposited assets and the source of funds, and withdrawal records will also expose where the funds go.
Starknet launched the shadow account infrastructure component on October 13, and various on-chain applications quickly completed integration and implementation.
Simply put, this underlying primitive can generate independent anonymous addresses based on privacy-shielded STRK20 balances for applications to use.
On October 14, Ekubo, a popular concentrated liquidity DEX on Starknet, added a toggle switch. Using shadow accounts, users can switch between public and privacy modes for trading and providing liquidity. One day later, Opus also followed suit, allowing users to stake collateral and borrow the platform stablecoin CASH from a lending position completely unlinked from their main wallet.
But to be clear: transactions and position records of shadow accounts are still publicly visible. What this system achieves is identity unlinkability, not complete anonymity. In addition, you need to use a wallet that supports the new STRK20 interface.
Polymarket wallet data is completely public, and the actions of skilled traders are easily copied and followed by others. StarkWare launched OffMarket on October 14, aiming to sever this identity link.
Users deposit USDC into Starknet's shared privacy pool (shadow accounts also reuse this underlying pool); each time a new trading position is created, the system generates a brand-new Polygon wallet (derived from the user's signature), directly connecting to Polymarket's real order book to complete trades, with the same trading targets and odds as the original version.
However, the trading behavior of each derived wallet is still externally visible. Unusual trade sizes or specific trading times may still reveal your identity. At this stage, the deposit cap is set at $1,000; a compliant institution holds the master viewing key, used only to respond to reviewed lawful forensic requests.
AI use cases can also achieve privacy protection in the payment process. The Ethereum Foundation and the Open Anonymous Project launched zkAPI on October 1.
The core goal of this experimental system is to separate the identity information of users paying for AI services from the act of submitting questions to AI.
How it works: users make a one-time deposit of ETH or USDC into an Ethereum contract vault, and then use zero-knowledge proofs to generate temporary AI API keys with amount limits. The outside world cannot trace the deposit source corresponding to the key. Everyone can experience the tool in the browser through OA-Chat.
However, the tool has limitations: AI service providers can still read your prompts, and your IP address and question time will not be hidden. Even so, the Ethereum Foundation's exploration in this direction is still commendable, and more features are likely to be launched later.
Of course, all of the above products are recent releases. Some have transaction limits and limited anonymity sets, and undiscovered vulnerabilities cannot be ruled out.
Even if you do not plan to start using them immediately, this industry wave is worth watching. You can use it to keep a pulse on industry developments, and in the future you can also include it in your backup library of on-chain tools.