By placing salaries, inventory, or trading positions on a public blockchain, the settlement speed is improved, and business relationships may also become visible to everyone. On November 10th, the Solana Foundation announced that Helius would go live on the mainnet. Users can deposit assets into their encrypted balances, initiate private transfers to any Solana address, and then withdraw them back to their public balances; the amount and asset information are encrypted, but the wallet addresses are still visible for now.
This boundary is more accurate than “anonymous transactions.” Privacy Rings does not make all information disappear, nor does it move funds to a separate private chain. It uses programmable shielded and pool to store encrypted balances; transactions are still executed and settled on Solana, and users use their viewing keys to decrypt their own balances. What the product attempts to solve is to add an optional layer of confidentiality to public liquidity, rather than shutting down the public market entirely.
Privacy becomes an asset setting, rather than just another aspect of the internet.
After users deposit assets, they can transfer funds between their private balances and switch to their public balances when necessary. The protocol supports SOL, SPL tokens, and Token-2022 assets. Each transaction still requires the signature of the owner. According to Helius, concise zero-knowledge proofs can be verified within a few hundred milliseconds, so encryption does not affect the sub-second finalization experience of Solana.
The same mainnet settlement brings composability. Private custody allows for the release of funds based on time or approval conditions, and transactions can also be combined with other Solana programs in a single transaction. For traders, there is no need to expose positions and order sizes in advance; for businesses, salary payments, fund management, and transaction conditions can be executed without disclosing all details. Public liquidity remains in the original market, and there is no need to bridge assets to an isolated network first.
But the visibility of addresses means that the relationship graph is not completely hidden. Observers may not know how many exchanges have taken place, yet they can still see which wallets are interacting with the protocol, and infer identities by combining this information with time, fund inflows and outflows, and public behaviors. The true level of privacy depends on the way it is used, the size of the anonymous group, and the off-chain data. The product page refers to this as a “privacy spectrum,” which is more accurate than describing a single encryption feature as providing complete anonymity.
Audited does not mean that all risks have been eliminated.
Helius claims that the core program and zero-knowledge circuits have been audited by Certora, OtterSec, and ZK Security. Engineers from Solana Foundation, Blueshift, and Zcash participated in the credible setup; formal verification is still ongoing and is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. Credible setup, auditing, and formal verification each address different issues, and none of them can guarantee that there will never be any vulnerabilities.
Viewing keys and self-hosting also come with new responsibilities. If a user loses their keys, they may not be able to view their private balances; if the keys are leaked, transaction information could be exposed. Wallets need to clearly distinguish between signing keys, viewing keys, and recovery materials, and should not mix them into a single, difficult-to-manage backup in order to simplify the experience. Cross-chain access and fiat currency deposits and withdrawals also involve third-party services, which may have access to off-chain identities and transaction associations.
Currently live are permissionless and Ring. The Custom Rings version, which is aimed at institutions, is still under audit and is expected to be launched on the mainnet within a few weeks. The latter is planned to support licensed environments, auditor visibility, selective disclosure, a KYC whitelist, sanction screening, as well as the ability to freeze and retrieve funds. The timing and capabilities mentioned here are still in the planning stage and should not be considered as features that have already been delivered. If institutions are evaluating the product now, they should separate the current mainnet capabilities from the future customizations.
Confidentiality and compliance are no longer forced to be a choice between the two, but power needs to be redefined.
Custom Rings envisions a situation where the market cannot see transaction details, while regulators or authorized parties can view the complete balances and history. This can meet auditing and compliance requirements, but it also raises new issues of power: who can have access to view this information, who can freeze or restore funds, and how should changes in permissions be recorded. Technology can enable selective disclosure, but governance still needs to decide who has that right.
For the application of DeFi, Privacy Rings has lowered the barrier to accessing zero-knowledge tools. Helius provides a unified RPC, indexers, remote proof endpoints, as well as TypeScript and Rust SDK; developers no longer need to build circuits from scratch. This convenience also means that more applications may rely on the same infrastructure, making failures in remote proofs, indexing, and RPC a common risk. However, locally generating proofs and designing with multiple service providers still holds value.
Solana Privacy Rings pushes public chain privacy from a standalone product to programmable components, allowing users to choose to hide amounts for the first time within the existing mainnet liquidity. It does not erase addresses, nor does it automatically resolve compliance and security issues. The real change is that the public ledger no longer has "full display" as the only default option; at the same time, the rights to view, freeze, and restore must be made clearer than before.
