The cryptography hides what happens inside the pool. What it cannot hide is what you do at the edges — when you go in, when you come out, and from which wallet. A few habits make the difference.
The short version
- Let time pass between shielding and unshielding.
- Never withdraw the amount you deposited.
- Withdraw to a fresh address, not the one you deposited from.
- Stay inside. Pay people at their shielded address and the chain sees nothing at all.
Why these work
A pool hides you in a crowd: everyone who has shielded is a possible source of every withdrawal. Anything that singles out your deposit shrinks the crowd.
Timing. A deposit at 14:02 and a withdrawal at 14:05 are an obvious pair. The same two a week apart are lost among everything that happened in between.
Amounts. Deposit 7.3519 SOL, withdraw 7.3519 SOL, and no amount of cryptography helps. Shield round amounts; withdraw different amounts, in pieces, at different times.
Addresses. Unshielding to the wallet you shielded from draws a line between them in public. The app warns you when you are about to.
The fee payer
Every Solana transaction shows who paid its network fee. When you use the app, that is your connected wallet — so the chain records that your address used the pool at this moment, even though it does not record what for.
For most purposes that is fine: many people use the pool, and using it says little. When it matters, use a wallet that is not publicly tied to you for pool activity. The protocol is built so that a relayer can submit transactions on your behalf and be paid from inside the pool; see Fees and costs.
Which operations show what
| Operation | The chain sees |
|---|---|
| Shield | depositor, amount |
| Send | that a transfer happened, and the fee payer |
| Claim | the claiming address |
| Unshield | recipient, amount |
| Take back | the return date, rounded to a day |
| Prove a balance | the floor, the purpose, a holder ID, the fee payer |
| Receipt | nothing — it never touches the chain |
The full account is the Privacy model.
Being paid privately
Give people your shielded address. A payment to it is invisible from end to end: no claim, no address on the record, nothing to collect.
Use your plain Solana address when the payer cannot be expected to know about shielded addresses. Collecting then shows that your address claimed something — never what, or from whom.
Your network
Your RPC provider sees which transactions your browser fetches. The app reads the whole pool rather than asking for specific notes, precisely so that this reveals nothing about which are yours.