The problem
Everything on Solana is public by default. Anyone with your address can read your balance, your income, your counterparties, and your habits — no subpoena, no hack, no permission needed. Your wallet is a public diary, and most people write in it every day. Privacy isn’t hiding — it’s choosing who gets the receipt.What you can do today
- Shield — move SOL, USDC, or USDT from your wallet into your private balance. Free — no protocol fee; your wallet pays normal network gas.
- Private send — pay any Solana address or .sol domain from your private balance. On-chain, the funds arrive from the Cloak pool; your wallet never appears as sender.
- Private swap — swap shielded SOL into any Jupiter-verified token, delivered to the address you choose without linking back to your funding wallet.
- Unshield — withdraw to your own wallet whenever you want. Same mechanics as a private send, with you as the recipient.
What makes Cloak different
Self-custodial, literally. Your private balance lives encrypted in your UTXOs — private notes only you hold — and your backup file is the money. Cloak can’t see your balance, can’t spend it, and can’t recover it. That’s the design. No gas, no sender trail. When you act from your private balance, your wallet pays no gas and never appears as sender. Deposits into the pool and payments out of it are both visible on-chain — the link between them isn’t. Auditable when required. A viewing key lets you disclose your own history — amounts, fees, recipients — to an auditor or counterparty, and can never move funds. Disclosing reveals your transactions only, nothing about anyone else in the pool. Private by default. Auditable when required. Cheaper to leave. Shielding is free. Leaving the pool costs 0.3% (plus a 0.005 SOL fixed fee for SOL) — other Solana privacy protocols charge a flat 1% on every withdrawal. The full who-pays-what table is in Fees. Screened before broadcast. Every transaction is screened against sanctions and high-risk lists before it goes out — invisible on the happy path.Who it’s for
- Individuals — get paid, save, and spend without publishing your finances to anyone who has your address.
- Teams — run payroll and treasury payouts without broadcasting salaries or vendor relationships.
- Developers — build private payments into your own product with the TypeScript SDK.
Where Cloak stands today
Cloak is live on Solana mainnet, in beta, with $500K+ in shielded volume and 1,500+ transactions processed on mainnet to date. Cloak’s shield-pool program has undergone an external security assessment. The full report is being prepared for publication and will be linked here. For the threat model and the full list of what Cloak cannot do, see Security.Where next
How Cloak works
The four flows, step by step — shield, send, swap, unshield.
Your private balance
UTXOs, the backup file, and exactly what happens if you lose them.