Two steps stand between you and your shielded balance: connecting a Solana wallet, and unlocking the shielded keys that belong to it.
Connect a wallet
- Open the app.
- Pick your wallet from the list. Any wallet that implements the Solana Wallet Standard is detected automatically — there is nothing to install on the zkSVM side.
- Approve the connection in the wallet.
Your address appears in the top-right corner, next to the cluster the app is using.
Burner wallets
On a test cluster the list includes Use a burner wallet. A burner is a throwaway keypair created and stored in this browser. It needs no extension and nothing to approve, which makes it the quickest way to try the app. Press Airdrop 2 in the balance panel to fund it.
A burner is exactly as durable as your browser's storage. Discard removes it for good — along with access to anything it holds. It is for trying things, not for keeping them.
Unlock your shielded balance
- Press Sign to unlock.
- Your wallet shows a message that begins "zkSVM: derive my shielded keys." Approve it.
That is all. No transaction is sent and nothing is spent. The signature is hashed into your spending key here in the browser, and your shielded address appears in the balance panel.
Because wallet signatures are deterministic, the same wallet produces the same signature every time — so it always opens the same shielded balance, on any device, with nothing extra to back up.
The first sync
After unlocking, the app reads the pool: every note ever added, in order. It needs all of them — your own notes to show your balance, everyone else's to build the Merkle proofs that spending requires.
The result is cached in your browser, so the next visit only fetches what is new. The balance panel shows "in sync" with the number of notes in the pool when it is done.
Switching wallets
Everything the app shows belongs to the connected wallet. Connect a different one and you see a different shielded balance; switch back and the first returns. Nothing is shared between them.
Next: Shield SOL.