What Are Solana Privacy Rings? Inside Helius’ Privacy Protocol for Solana

By Decrypt Agent

Every transaction on Solana is public by default. Anyone can look up a wallet address and see its balance, what it has sent and received, and when. That transparency is useful for verifying the network, but a problem for anyone who doesn't want their finances on display: a business paying salaries, a trader building a position, or an individual who simply doesn't want strangers seeing their savings.

Solana Privacy Rings are designed to fix that, without asking users to leave Solana for a separate privacy network. Developed by Solana infrastructure firm Helius, Rings launched on Solana's mainnet on November 10, 2026.

What are Solana Privacy Rings?

Solana Privacy Rings are programmable shielded pools: shared pools on Solana that hold encrypted balances. Users deposit tokens into a Ring, send them privately to other Solana wallets, and withdraw them back to an ordinary public balance whenever they choose, according to the Solana Foundation.

Rings support SOL and other tokens on Solana, including SPL and Token-2022 tokens. Users keep custody of their funds throughout, since every transaction needs the owner's signature.

Crucially, the private balances live on the same network as everything else. Private transactions execute directly on Solana and encrypted data is stored on Solana's ledger, with no separate layer-2 network or sequencer in between. That means private balances sit alongside the same stablecoins, tokenized assets and DeFi liquidity as public ones.

The Solana Foundation describes its approach to privacy as "public by default, private by choice," letting each user or app pick how much privacy it needs.

How do Privacy Rings work?

Helius' developer documentation defines two levels of privacy. Confidentiality encrypts the asset and the amount of a transfer, while anonymity also hides who sent it and who received it. The default Ring is confidential: think of a bank statement where the names on each payment are visible but the amounts are blacked out.

Each private transfer comes with a zero-knowledge proof, a piece of cryptography that lets the network confirm the transfer is valid, for example that the sender actually had the funds, without revealing the numbers involved. Rings use a type of zero-knowledge proof called a Groth16 zk-SNARK, which Helius says can be generated in tens of milliseconds, either by a service provider or on the user's own device. Each private transfer settles in a single Solana transaction.

Users read their own encrypted balances with a viewing key. They can decrypt their balance locally, or let a service provider decrypt it and serve it to them, and they can share a key for a single transaction with an auditor or counterparty without exposing the rest of their history.

Default Rings vs. Custom Rings

There are two kinds of Ring:

• Default Ring: live on mainnet and open to anyone. It provides confidentiality: the asset and amount of each transfer are encrypted, but sender and recipient addresses remain public.
• Custom Rings: built for businesses and institutions, each run as its own Solana program with settings chosen by the operator. A Custom Ring can be confidential, or fully anonymous, also hiding who sent and received funds. Operators can add compliance controls such as KYC allowlists, sanctions screening, auditor access and the ability to freeze and recover funds. Custom Rings are in audit and expected to reach mainnet in the coming weeks, according to the Solana Foundation.

Because Custom Rings interoperate with the default Ring, regulated firms can keep their activity confidential from the market while still sharing the same liquidity as everyone else.

What can you do with Privacy Rings?

Private transfers are just the start. Solana programs can hold encrypted balances in private escrows and release them when set conditions are met, opening the way for:

• Private swaps that trade against public liquidity without revealing size or price.
• Private lending, posting collateral without publishing positions.
• Private staking and yield on encrypted balances.
• Conditional payments, such as payroll, vesting or multisig treasury releases.

At launch, Decrypt, mining and staking app ORE and cross-chain service Aurora Intents were using the default Ring, while Backpack, DFlow, Jupiter, Squads and Titan were among the teams working on integrations.

How safe are Privacy Rings?

Helius says the core programs and zero-knowledge circuits have been audited by security firms Certora, OtterSec and ZK Security. Engineers from the Solana Foundation, Blueshift, Zcash and other teams took part in the "trusted setup," the one-off ceremony that generates the parameters the proofs rely on.

The code is open source, published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, so anyone can inspect how it works.

Formal verification, a mathematical check that the circuits behave exactly as intended, is still underway and expected to finish by the end of 2026. Solana's own documentation currently describes Rings as being in beta.

Privacy tools also come with compliance questions. The launch came days after another Solana privacy protocol, Privacy Cash, temporarily paused deposits in light of the October 2026 Binance hack, saying it wanted to "make sure bad actors can't use our product" while it strengthened its wallet screening. Stolen funds from the hack had been deposited into its pools, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. The default Ring leaves addresses, deposits and withdrawals visible, and Helius works with blockchain analytics firms Range, Chainalysis and Elliptic on wallet screening.

How do Privacy Rings compare with other privacy tech?

Rings are one of three privacy tools Solana itself offers. Its documentation also lists Confidential Balances, a Token-2022 extension that encrypts token balances and transfer amounts while keeping accounts public, and Private Channels, private execution environments run by an institution.

Across the wider industry, blockchain privacy tends to rely on four broad families of technology:

• 📝 Zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs): These let one party prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. Privacy coin Zcash uses zk-SNARKs to power its shielded transactions, as Decrypt's guide explains. Privacy Rings belong to this family, using compact Groth16 proofs, but bring shielded pools to Solana instead of a dedicated privacy chain.
• ⭕ Ring signatures: Used by privacy coin Monero, a ring signature can be produced by any member of a group of keyholders, without revealing which one actually signed. Monero mixes a user's real transaction output with others pulled from the blockchain to form a "ring" of possible signers, so outside observers can't tell which one is real, according to the Monero Project's Moneropedia. Despite the similar name, Solana Privacy Rings don't use ring signatures.
• 📱 Trusted execution environments (TEEs): Rather than cryptography alone, TEEs use secure areas of a computer's hardware, sometimes called enclaves, to process private data out of view of the rest of the system—the same sort of hardware used to store biometric data on smartphones. They're efficient and can run existing code, but require trusting the chip's manufacturer, and they have been vulnerable to side-channel attacks, according to a primer from venture firm a16z.
• 🧮 Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE): FHE lets computers perform calculations directly on encrypted data without ever decrypting it, which makes it possible to run smart contracts on private inputs. The technique is powerful but computationally heavy, making it slower and more costly than other approaches for now.

In short, Privacy Rings take the zero-knowledge route: they rely on mathematics rather than trusted hardware, and they hide amounts rather than performing private computation in the way FHE aims to. Their main distinguishing feature is where they run, on Solana's mainnet itself, rather than on a separate privacy network.

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