What is private DeFi?

Private DeFi is decentralized finance, such as trading, swapping, lending and borrowing, used from accounts with no visible link to your wallet. The rules stay on-chain for anyone to check, while your positions stop adding up to one public profile.

Also called privacy DeFi or confidential DeFi.

Why DeFi is public by default

On a public chain every balance, trade and loan sits next to the address that made it. Anyone can look an address up on an explorer and read its whole history, and once one address is tied to a name, so is everything linked to it.

How it works

  • Shielded pools hold funds as private notes and prove every action with zero-knowledge proofs, so the chain checks the rules without seeing who acts.
  • Some chains and rollups keep parts of their state encrypted, using zero-knowledge proofs, trusted hardware or fully homomorphic encryption.
  • Privacy layers on existing chains let you act from a fresh account funded from a shared, shielded space, so your orders and loans meet the same markets as everyone else’s.

What stays public

Private DeFi still settles on a public chain. Trades, prices and market balances stay visible, and a deposit into a privacy system is a public transaction. What goes away is the link between those actions and the person behind them.

In Redacted

Redacted is a private DeFi layer built on Rujira, THORChain’s app layer. You deposit into a shared Reserve once, then trade, swap, stake, lend and borrow from a Spending account that has no visible tie to your public wallet.

Reserve and Spending →

Related terms

Shielded poolA shielded pool holds funds as private notes inside a smart contract. Deposits and withdrawals are public, but what happens inside is proved with zero-knowledge proofs and does not reveal who owns what.Zero-knowledge proofA zero-knowledge proof lets someone prove that a statement is true without revealing anything else, for example that they own funds and may spend them, without showing which funds or who they are.Anonymity setAn anonymity set is the group of people a given action could have come from. The larger it is, the harder it is to tell who did it.Spending accountA Spending account is your personal private account in Redacted. It is a smart-contract account with no visible tie to your public wallet, and from it you trade, swap, stake, lend and borrow on Rujira.RujiraRujira is THORChain’s app layer, with orderbook trading, swaps, lending, borrowing, staking and more, all using native coins held as THORChain secured assets.

Updated October 7, 2026. All terms