Quickstart

Five minutes, start to finish: connect, shield some SOL so that it starts earning, and send a private payment. You need a Solana wallet in your browser — or, on a test cluster, no wallet at all.

Before you start

• Open the app. The chip in the top-left corner shows which cluster it is talking to.
• Have a little SOL in your wallet for network fees. On a test cluster the app has an Airdrop button, so you can start from zero.

Send your first private payment

1. Connect. Choose your wallet from the list. On a test cluster you can pick Use a burner wallet instead: a throwaway keypair that lives in this browser tab.

2. Unlock. Press Sign to unlock and approve the message in your wallet. Nothing is sent and nothing is spent — the signature is turned into your shielded keys, locally. The same wallet always opens the same shielded balance.

3. Shield. On the Shield tab, leave Earn as jitoSOL selected, enter an amount and press Shield. One transaction stakes your SOL with Jito and shields the result. Your Shielded balance goes up, and a note appears under Your notes showing what it holds and what that is worth in SOL — a figure that rises every epoch.

4. Send. Switch to Send. Enter an amount, and paste the recipient — either a shielded address (it starts with zks) or any ordinary Solana address. Press Send.

   The app now builds a zero-knowledge proof. This takes a few seconds and happens entirely in your browser; the first time, it also downloads the proving key.

5. Done. Open View transaction. You will see a transaction from your wallet to the zkSVM program — and no recipient, and no amount.

Try the rest

• Unshield some of it to a fresh address. It arrives as plain SOL.
• Copy your own Shielded address from the balance panel and have someone pay you.
• Send to a Solana address and watch it appear under Sent, not yet claimed — it comes back if nobody collects it.
• Open the Prove tab and show that you hold at least 1 SOL without showing your balance.

If something is off

More in Troubleshooting.