Confidential Solana transfers leak at the network layer: your IP, your RPC provider, your timing, your habits. Zolana is the metadata-privacy layer that closes those leaks — riding proven on-chain privacy and a real mixnet, never inventing its own cryptography.
Devnet beta. Use test funds only. Wait-tolerable transfers — real privacy costs seconds, and we say so.
Use any on-chain privacy protocol over a normal connection and three observers still learn plenty: your RPC provider sees every account you query and every transaction you submit; your ISP sees when and how often you interact; the protocol's own indexer and relayer see your IP next to your privacy operations. The chain hides the payload — nobody hides the envelope. That envelope is Zolana's entire job.
All app egress is routed through the Nym mixnet — a 3-hop, packet-mixing network with its own anonymity set. Your RPC provider and the protocol's infrastructure see a mixnet exit, not you.
✓ verified live: exit IP ≠ origin IP (T18)If the mixnet is unavailable in strict mode, the action is blocked — never silently downgraded to a clearnet request. A less-private fallback requires your explicit choice, every time.
✓ CLAUDE §5/§6 enforced in CIEvery privacy statement ships with its observer model and anonymity-set context. We tell you what is protected against whom — and what isn't, including at cold-start when the set is small (minimal on devnet, Umbra's active pool on mainnet).
✓ per-observer, never absoluteZolana deliberately writes no cryptography of its own. On-chain confidentiality and the mixnet are proven systems we integrate behind swappable adapters — our layer is the seam that makes them leak-free together, plus the behavioral noise and honest scoring on top.
Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs + Arcium MPC hide amount and recipient on-chain. Claims go through a relayer, so the recipient needs no gas and leaves no funding trail.
Sphinx-packet mixing over three independent hops with cover traffic. The transport layer for every RPC call, indexer read, and relayer submission Zolana makes.
One injected transport for every egress path (RPC, indexer, prover assets, relayer, MPC monitor) — fail-closed; ZK proving assets bundled locally so proving doesn't phone home; local claim/withdraw scheduling with timing jitter; per-observer privacy health with anonymity-set context.
Both are good systems — this is a scope comparison, not a security ranking. Umbra is our L1; Zolana adds the network/metadata layer around it. EVM pools like Railgun solve L1 confidentiality on Ethereum-family chains and leave network metadata to the user. Zolana is Solana-native and treats the metadata layer as the product.
| Capability | Zolana | Umbra SDK directly | EVM shielded pools (e.g. Railgun) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chain | Solana | Solana | Ethereum-family (EVM) |
| On-chain confidentiality (amount/recipient hidden) | Yes — via Umbra (Groth16 + Arcium MPC) | Yes (same L1) | Yes (own ZK pool) |
| Origin-IP protection for RPC reads & submits | Yes — all egress over Nym mixnet | No — your fetch/RPC, your IP | Not built-in — user must add Tor/VPN/private RPC |
| Indexer/relayer see your IP? | No — relayer & indexer calls are mixnet-routed | Yes by default (clearnet fetch) | Depends on user setup |
| ZK proving assets | Bundled locally — proving never phones home | Fetched from CDN at prove-time by default | Varies by wallet/integration |
| Silent clearnet fallback | Never — fail-closed, explicit consent required | n/a (no transport policy) | n/a (no transport policy) |
| Recipient gas / funding trail | None — relayer-submitted claim, mixnet-routed | None — relayer claim (clearnet IP visible) | Relayer network available |
| Privacy reporting | Per-observer health score with anonymity-set context | — | — |
| Latency posture | Honest: seconds per round-trip, stated upfront | Fast (clearnet) | Fast (clearnet) |
Scope comparison as of June 2026, based on public docs and our live measurements; "directly" means the SDK with default transports. No claim here is a security ranking — each system's cryptography is its own and unbroken as far as we know. Corrections welcome.
Privacy products fail people when they oversell. Our claims are per-observer and bounded; here is the boundary.