A shielded balance usually just sits there. In zkSVM it earns: when you shield, your SOL is staked with Jito on the way in, and what you hold inside the pool is jitoSOL — a token that is worth a little more SOL every epoch.
Nobody can see your balance. It grows anyway.
How to earn
- Open the Shield tab.
- Leave Earn as jitoSOL selected. The figure beside it is the current yearly rate, measured from the stake pool itself.
- Enter an amount of SOL and press Shield.
That is the whole procedure. One transaction stakes the SOL and shields the result; there is no second step and nothing to claim later.
Your note now reads in jitoSOL — for example 1.151752 jitoSOL · worth 1.4999 SOL. The jitoSOL figure never changes. The worth figure does.
Reading your balance
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Shielded balance | Everything you hold in the pool, valued in SOL at today's rate. |
| Earning | How much of it is jitoSOL, and the current yearly rate. |
| Each note | Its amount in its own asset, and for jitoSOL what it is worth in SOL. |
Where the yield comes from
Jito's stake pool delegates SOL to validators and collects staking rewards and MEV tips. Rewards are added to the pool each epoch — about every two days — while the number of jitoSOL tokens stays the same, so each token is backed by more SOL than before. There is nothing to compound or harvest: holding the token is the yield.
The rate shown in the app is last epoch's growth, annualized. It moves from epoch to epoch.
Using earning notes
Everything works exactly as it does for SOL.
- Send moves jitoSOL privately. When you hold both assets, a switch above the amount chooses which. Nobody watching the chain can tell which asset a transfer moved.
- Claim, Take back and Prove work unchanged. A proof of balance is stated in jitoSOL.
- Unshield pays out SOL. The pool hands the jitoSOL back to Jito's stake pool, which pays the recipient from its reserve, less its 0.1% withdrawal fee; the form shows what will arrive before you confirm. Choose Receive jitoSOL instead to take the token itself.
Why this makes you more private, too
A pool hides you among everyone else in it, and it hides you better the longer you stay: time is what separates your deposit from your withdrawal. Until now waiting had a cost — idle money. Here waiting pays, for you and for everyone you are hiding among.
Amounts help as well. What goes in is converted at one rate and what comes out at another, later one, so the round number that went in is not the number that comes out.
Good to know
- The note is worth exactly the jitoSOL the stake pool minted for your deposit. If the pool's rate changes in the seconds between pressing Shield and the transaction landing — it does once an epoch — the transaction is refused and nothing is spent. Press Shield again.
- Unshielding to SOL redeems a whole note. When you withdraw part of one, the app first splits it with a private transfer to yourself, then unshields the piece: two steps, both automatic, and the split is invisible from outside.
- Earning adds one thing to what you rely on: Jito's stake pool, the largest on Solana. zkSVM never holds your SOL outside it and the pool's token.
- On a cluster where the stake pool does not exist, the Shield tab offers SOL only.
Underneath: The model.