November 10, 2026 - Helius today launched Solana Privacy Rings on mainnet, a permissionless privacy protocol with execution and settlement on Solana. It gives developers a way to add privacy to new and existing Solana applications through simple APIs, and lays the foundation for private payments, private DeFi, and compliant privacy for businesses.
Solana's performance, deep DeFi liquidity, and growing institutional adoption are moving more of the world's financial activity onchain. Yet balances, counterparties, and transaction history remain public by default, and the privacy options on offer elsewhere ask participants to leave the open market for a private network, trading liquidity for confidentiality.
Consumers do not want every payment on a public ledger; businesses need confidentiality for payroll, treasury, and trading positions; institutions need that confidentiality with compliance controls and audit access. None of them should have to give up the market to get it.
Privacy on Solana is a spectrum. The network's approach is to let each participant choose the level of privacy a use case needs while keeping public liquidity, composability, and sub-second settlement intact: public by default, private by choice. Helius built Solana Privacy Rings as the first permissionless expression of that approach, with three goals: make Solana private, make privacy programmable and scalable, and do both without compromising the user experience.
What Solana Privacy Rings are
Solana Privacy Rings are programmable shielded pools with encrypted onchain balances and native Solana execution. The permissionless Ring launched today provides confidentiality: assets and amounts are encrypted while wallet addresses remain visible, and only the user can decrypt their balances with a viewing key. Users deposit assets into a private balance, send private transfers to any Solana wallet address, and withdraw back to a public balance, with selected providers supporting private fiat on- and off-ramps. Nothing leaves the network: private balances live on the same mainnet, alongside the same stablecoin, tokenized asset, and DeFi liquidity, as public ones.
“The final scaling frontier in crypto is privacy. Without privacy, no serious institution or individual will feel comfortable having their entire financial identity exposed to the public in perpetuity.” Mert Mumtaz, CEO, Helius
Helius built Rings so that private transfers feel as familiar as public ones on Solana, and so that privacy never costs performance:
- Self-custody: every transaction requires the owner's signature.
- Any asset: Rings support SOL, SPL tokens, and Token-2022 tokens.
- Onchain execution and data: private transactions execute directly on Solana, and encrypted state is stored on Solana's ledger.
- Speed: succinct ZK proofs verify private transactions in a few hundred milliseconds, so Solana's sub-second finality is unchanged by encryption.
- Audited and in production: the core programs and ZK circuits have been audited by Certora, OtterSec, and ZK Security, with engineers from the Solana Foundation, Blueshift, and Zcash participating in the trusted setup. Formal verification is underway and expected to complete by the end of 2026.
Programmable privacy use cases
Privacy Rings extend well beyond private transfers. Solana programs can hold encrypted balances in private escrows and release funds when defined conditions are met, and private transactions compose with other Solana programs in a single transaction while sharing liquidity across applications. That is what makes privacy on Solana a setting on the asset rather than a separate network: traders, lenders, and treasuries keep their positions private while settling against the same public liquidity as everyone else.
- Private swaps: trade against public liquidity without showing your hand on size, price, or inventory.
- Private lending: post collateral into private escrows to secure loans without publishing positions.
- Private staking and yield: earn on private balances through staking, liquid staking, tokenized treasuries, and managed vaults.
- Conditional payments: release funds on a schedule or after required approvals, for payroll, vesting, multisig treasuries, or private deal terms settled through Solana DvP.
“Developers have used Solana’s programmability to build a whole new financial system. As more real money moves through it, privacy needs to become part of this infrastructure. Solana Privacy Rings lets individuals choose what stays private without giving up the programmability that made all of this possible in the first place.” Cat McGee, Technical Privacy Lead, Solana Foundation
Custom Rings for businesses
Institutions moving onchain have been told that confidentiality means leaving the public market for a permissioned network, recreating the silos tokenization was meant to remove.
Custom Rings, the next release from Helius, take the other side of that trade-off. An institution will be able to run a permissioned, private environment directly on Solana mainnet and decide what is hidden and from whom: confidential or fully anonymous counterparties, auditor visibility into every transaction and balance, selective disclosure so each party sees only what it needs to, and compliance built in through KYC-gated allowlists, sanctions screening, and the ability to freeze and recover funds.
Each Custom Ring is a Solana program that interoperates with the permissionless Ring, so regulated participants keep full confidentiality from the market, full visibility for their regulator, and access to the same liquidity as everyone else.
Custom Rings are currently in audit, and expected to be on mainnet in the coming weeks.
Start building
The Permissionless Ring is live on mainnet today with products already shipping on it.
Decrypt offers confidential transfers in its money account, Ore has added confidential transfers to its mining and staking app, and Aurora Intents delivers assets cross-chain directly into a confidential balance.
Range, Chainalysis, and Elliptic support compliance flows for wallet screening. Crossmint, MoonPay, and Paybis are building confidential onramps, and Backpack, DFlow, Jupiter, Squads, Titan, and other teams are integrating Privacy Rings to bring privacy to Solana DeFi.
Helius built the SDKs and APIs so that adding privacy to a Solana application does not require deep ZK expertise. Developers get a single Helius RPC URL covering RPC, indexer, and remote prover endpoints (proofs can also be generated locally), TypeScript and Rust SDKs for deposits, private balances, transfers, and withdrawals, dedicated privacy RPC methods, and the XARK toolchain from Blueshift for writing custom ZK circuits in Rust.
To get started, explore the Solana Privacy Rings docs and examples. Teams interested in building privacy products on Solana can get in touch with Helius today.