Fees

Getting in is free, and staying in is free. Leaving costs 0.3% plus a small fixed fee: 0.005 SOL when what’s leaving is SOL, and 0.45 USDC or USDT when it’s a stablecoin.

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The who-pays table

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What the numbers mean

Recipients receive exactly what you enter. Type 1 SOL, and the recipient gets 1 SOL. The fee is added on top and comes out of your private balance — nothing is deducted on the receiving end. Only the program charges you. Fees are set per pool in the program’s on-chain configuration and collected on-chain by the Cloak program into a treasury account. Nothing else in the system charges you — no service margin, no spread, no hidden markup. Bridged funds arrive free of protocol fees, and leave on the standard terms. A bridge deposit is a deposit, so nothing is charged to arrive. Two costs sit outside Cloak’s fee table and are quoted to you before you send: the route’s own cut on the origin side, and the Solana network cost of getting the tokens into the pool, which comes out of the bridged amount because you arrive on Solana holding no SOL. Details in Bridging in. Your wallet pays gas once — when shielding. Shielding is an ordinary wallet transaction, so your wallet signs it and pays normal network gas. Everything you do from your private balance afterward — send, swap, unshield — is submitted for you: your wallet pays no gas and never appears as sender.

Why does a private send carry the withdraw fee?

Because sending to a public address is, mechanically, a private withdrawal. Funds leave the pool and land at an address anyone can see — the fee applies to money leaving the pool, not to the act of sending. Transfers that stay shielded→shielded never leave the pool and are free at the protocol level; that path is available today through the SDK.

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Two worked examples

Send 1 SOL. The recipient receives exactly 1 SOL. The fee is 0.005 SOL fixed + 0.003 SOL (0.3% of 1 SOL), so your private balance decreases by 1.008 SOL. Send 100 USDC. The recipient receives exactly 100 USDC. The fee is 0.45 USDC fixed + 0.30 USDC (0.3% of 100 USDC), so your private balance decreases by 100.75 USDC.

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