Solana Privacy Rings Launch With Encrypted Amounts

Helius has put Solana Privacy Rings on mainnet as a permissionless way to hide amounts and assets, not the people sending them. In a 10 November 2026 Solana Foundation news post, the network said: “Helius today launched Solana Privacy Rings on mainnet, a permissionless privacy protocol.” The Helius blog describes the same launch: “assets and amounts are encrypted, while wallets remain visible. Only the user can decrypt their balances with a viewing key.”

That is confidentiality, not anonymity. Addresses stay on the public ledger. Users can deposit into a private balance, send a private transfer to any Solana wallet address, and withdraw again. The rings support SOL, SPL tokens and Token-2022 tokens, and the companies say zero-knowledge proofs verify private transactions “in a few hundred milliseconds.”

Encrypted amounts are live; Custom Rings with freeze and recovery tools are not

The permissionless Ring is the product that is actually out. Helius and Solana say the core programs and circuits have been audited by Certora, OtterSec and ZK Security, with engineers from the Solana Foundation, Blueshift and Zcash taking part in the trusted setup. Formal verification is a separate workstream. Both official pages say it “is underway and expected to complete by the end of 2026.” An audit is not that verification, and the end-2026 date is an expectation, not a completed result.

Custom Rings, the institutional follow-on, have not shipped. The Solana news post says they will let an institution run a permissioned environment on the same mainnet, with “KYC-gated allowlists, sanctions screening, and the ability to freeze and recover funds,” and that they “are currently in audit, and expected to be on mainnet in the coming weeks.” The Helius blog agrees they are being audited and also gives “a target Solana mainnet release date… anticipated for Q4 2026.” Those are two ways of describing a plan. Neither page says the compliance features are live.

Named products already using the permissionless Ring are Decrypt, for confidential transfers in its money account; Ore, in its mining and staking app; and Aurora Intents, which the posts say can deliver assets cross-chain into a confidential balance. Range, Chainalysis and Elliptic are described as supporting wallet-screening flows. Other firms, including Crossmint, MoonPay, Paybis, Backpack, DFlow, Jupiter, Squads and Titan, are described as building or integrating. They should not be treated as live Privacy Rings apps on the strength of that list.

Helius chief executive Mert Mumtaz called privacy “the final scaling frontier in crypto.” Cat McGee, technical privacy lead at the Solana Foundation, said Privacy Rings “lets individuals choose what stays private without giving up the programmability that made all of this possible in the first place.” Those are advocates’ lines, not a measure of how much activity has moved into the new pools.

A visible address is the feature, and the limit, of this launch

The protocol’s own guarantee is the right place to stop. Wallet addresses remain visible, so this is not a stealth network and it is not a substitute for tools that hide counterparties. Anyone reading a explorer will still see that a given address interacted with a ring. What is hidden, if the system works as described, is the amount and the asset inside the private balance. That is a meaningful change for payroll, treasury and inventory, and it is also a narrower change than the word “privacy” sometimes implies.

It also sits in a Solana stack TSN has already covered on other grounds. The foundation’s open DvP atomic settlement program is named in the new posts as one of the programmable uses — conditional payments and private deal terms — not as a feature that shipped today. Mumtaz’s appointment to the NEAR Foundation council is useful context for who is shipping this, not evidence that Privacy Rings extend to NEAR. And the speed claim has to be read against Solana’s Alpenglow finality work, which is the network’s own account of how fast settlement now is. Rings, the companies say, are designed not to undo that. They have not published a live mainnet latency study alongside the launch note.

The next date on the companies’ own calendar is the Custom Rings audit. Until those programs are on mainnet, the product in production is the permissionless Ring: encrypted amounts, visible addresses, a viewing key, and a formal-verification job that is still open.