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Honest answers, worst cases first. If your question isn’t here, start with What is Cloak?.
Cloak’s shield-pool program has undergone an external security assessment. The full report is being prepared for publication and will be linked here. Our full threat model — including what Cloak cannot do — is at Security.
No — no custodial path exists in the program. Cloak can’t see your balance, can’t spend it, and can’t recover it. That’s the design.
If your browser data is still intact, nothing is lost yet — open Backup & Restore and export a new file now. If you clear your browser data with no backup file, your private balance is gone — not seized, gone. Cloak cannot recover it, and neither can anyone else; that’s the proof that we never had your funds.
Your funds are safe as long as you still have your browser data or your backup file — any connected wallet can spend a restored private balance. The wallet is not a recovery root; its signature is used for sign-in and encryption only. What you do lose is the viewing key tied to the old wallet, which means compliance-history access for that older activity.
No. Your private balance lives encrypted in your UTXOs, on your device; Cloak’s servers never hold UTXO secrets, so there is nothing on our side to restore from. Your backup file is the money — it is the only recovery artifact, and it restores your balance on any device via Backup & Restore.
Deposits into the pool and withdrawals out of it — never the link between them. Shielded pools are like sealed envelopes in a public mailbox: everyone sees mail, not what’s inside. Other pool users see nothing about you, and each withdrawal is validated by a zero-knowledge proof without revealing which deposit funded it.
Shielding is free; sending SOL to a public address costs 0.005 SOL fixed plus 0.3%, while USDC and USDT pay 0.3% only, with no fixed fee. A private swap costs 0.005 SOL plus 0.3% of the SOL swapped, and shielded-to-shielded transfers are free at the protocol level. Fees are collected on-chain by the program — nothing else charges you; the full table is at Fees.
The protocol charges only when value leaves the pool, so deposits carry no protocol fee — your wallet pays normal network gas to shield, nothing more. Recipients receive the exact amount entered because the fee is added on top and deducted from the sender’s private balance.
You can shield and send SOL, USDC, and USDT, each in its own shielded pool; swaps take shielded SOL in and deliver any Jupiter-verified token out. Phantom, Solflare, Ledger, and Solana Mobile are supported, and any Wallet Standard wallet (such as Backpack) is auto-detected. Details at Wallets & tokens.
Yes for SOL: 0.01 SOL to shield and 0.01 SOL to swap. There is no protocol minimum for USDC or USDT.
You do only when shielding — your wallet signs the deposit and pays normal network gas. For private sends, swaps, and withdrawals, the transaction is submitted for you: your wallet pays no gas and never appears as sender.
The Cloak program is upgradeable. The upgrade authority is held by the Cloak team and is planned to move under a Squads multisig. We say this plainly because an upgradeable program you know about is safer than an “immutable” one that quietly isn’t — upgradeability is how fixes ship.
Your wallet never appears as sender from the first transaction, but privacy strength grows with pool activity and time. Funds already shielded are more private than shield-and-send in one step, for example. The three habits that strengthen it are in How Cloak works.
Before you rely on any of the above: export your backup file. Your backup file is the money.

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Where next

Security

The threat model, on-chain protections, and the full “What Cloak cannot do” list.

Your private balance

How UTXOs, the backup file, and restore actually work — read before you shield.