Why do crypto users need shielding?

Aleph Zero is building the leading interchain privacy framework, ensuring secure, compliant blockchain applications with a seamless experience—on any chain, for any dApp. Shielding is vital to realizing this vision.

Shielding–which is making your assets private–is made possible by Aleph Zero’s zkOS, a single developer-friendly framework that integrates confidentiality features without requiring deep knowledge of the underlying cryptography. 

Try it for yourself in the demo, to experience how the system protects your on-chain privacy without interrupting your actions thanks to the speed it achieves for client-side ZK proof verification.

ZK Proofs prevent your financial history and identity from being exposed on-chain through proving something is true without revealing the data. They can also verify identity, assets, or transactions without exposing the individual behind them. This is a very powerful tool for your privacy!

It’s not just the demo–with the launch of Common Extension V1, you can already shield assets on Aleph Zero EVM Mainnet. There are currently limits that will be lifted once the audits are completed.

In utilizing zkOS’ shielding capabilities, Common is poised to play a big role in achieving Aleph Zero’s vision for a private web3—cementing it as the only personal finance app users need within the broader web3 ecosystem. 

But this is just the beginning of what we’re rolling out. Let’s take a look at what the future holds for Common, the Aleph Zero ecosystem, and web3 at large.

Why shield?

Most blockchains are public, so every transaction, wallet balance, and activity is recorded and visible to everyone. This is great for general traceability but not so for your own privacy.

Shielding fixes this by encrypting the transaction details, allowing you to create private action on a public blockchain. When you’re sending a transaction, the recipient won’t be able to snoop into your holdings–and neither will any other network user.

This protects your assets against undesired monitoring, prevents front-running in DeFi, and makes your financial transactions private—just like traditional banking. Whether you’re a consumer safeguarding personal funds or a company safeguarding transactions, shielding places control of your privacy in your own hands without ever sacrificing the ease of use.

Common is how you use shielding

What really sets Common apart is that with shielding, users can move on-chain with complete privacy. This isn’t just relegated to trading—shielding can enhance every personal finance activity. These activities could include privately staking, earning yield, or asset management. 

Additionally, while trading on Common, users can enjoy a real competitive advantage and rest assured that no one else can see the moves that they’re making. Common will function as your all-in-one app for managing on-chain finance—privately. On Common, privacy is not just a feature—it’s a standard. By empowering users to shield, hold, and trade their assets securely, Common is setting a new benchmark for DeFi.

A powerful & simple feature of Common is being able to use dApps while maintaining privacy, straight out of the box. How? With temp accounts!

Shielding breaks the trace from the main account, so you can unshield part of your funds to a new public account, use any dApp with it and when you’re done–you shield your assets back to the main account. While some of these actions are public–your identity and main account are still protected. The main benefit? No integrations needed–any app that works with an EVM wallet can be supported.

Aleph Zero makes shielding possible

Once launched, Common Wallet will be the main interface for privacy leveraging Aleph Zero’s features, which will unlock a whole new way to trade and manage your assets within web3. Thanks to shielding, other applications won’t even have to integrate anything in order to provide privacy to users. A user will only need to interact with their favorite applications directly from their Common Wallet and their transactions will already be private.

This is not to say that other projects can’t build upon these privacy features within their own projects. As an off-chain zk-based tool, shielding is composable with many web3 applications.

As shielder SDK continues to develop, the introduction of new privacy features to applications like these will become easier. At the same time, their implementation will make sure that they have a competitive advantage when compared to similar applications that don’t make use of solutions like shielding.

The concept of shielding for the broader web3 ecosystem

The benefits of shielding are not limited to the users of Aleph Zero. In fact, Aleph Zero aims to become the shielder network–offering privacy to multiple users, across multiple ecosystems and chains.

Why? To offer the best user experience while ensuring a broad distribution of the solutions we’re building. Ecosystems such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base could easily get privacy-enhancing capabilities. We’re also testing shielder on Berachain, Monad, and Sonic with the plans to implement it on other EVM networks.

Such a shielder network will be run by the relayer system of Aleph Zero, accruing shielding fees using AZERO, with the convenience of using it natively on various chains.

The possibilities are endless and the mobile-first experience of Common will make using the network as easy as it can get. And it’s debut with lifted shielding limits is not far away!

Learn how you can shield your assets on Common in this tutorial.