Shade Wallet

Inspiration

We see privacy as being a major narrative in the upcoming years. Despite the recent surge in popularity, privacy on the blockchain has been a constant point of issue. It isn't abnormal for a user to want to keep their account balances and activity private. As we build the next financial system, mainstream adoption is only possible if users can hide their crypto activity in a safe and compliant way, and it starts at the wallets that users use. Making a privacy-based wallet means giving users the comfort, protection, and control they need to continue using crypto in this explosive industry.

What it does

Shade Wallet lets users hold, swap, and transfer all in private. It also has features to easily and anonymously view prediction market data, token price data, and settings for customizability to make the wallet as end-to-end as possible, as well as private bridging between chains like Solana and Base. All of these privacy features are secured using on-chain shielded pools and shielded balances, so the privacy of the system grows as user adoption increases.

How we built it

Shade wallet uses privacy protocols such as Encifher to make private swapping and transfers of SOL and SPL tokens possible. We also use Helius to get a user's wallet balance and activity for a seamless and familiar wallet experience. Mnemonics are generated with BIP39, which is converted to a seed for keypair/wallet generation with BIP44. This wallet is stored locally for max non-custodial security. We also fetch and upsert prediction market data to our proxy layer so wallets can easily view the most popular prediction markets right in the wallet with anonymity protections. Furthermore, our bridging features build on top of private transfers to ensure greater privacy when bridging funds across chains.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was finding a privacy protocol that was working at this current moment. Most privacy protocols are deprecated or in maintenance, but we managed to find a proprietary SDK that allows private swapping and transferring. We had to message the founders for an SDK key before we could continue building. Another challenge was making a familiar and intuitive UI/UX for users to easily view their private and public balances at the same time. Since there aren't many other wallets doing such features, there wasn't much inspiration to pull from. Furthermore, it was a long struggle to implement bridging in our wallet as the protocols we tried to use were newer or not as permissionless, but we were eventually able to integrate a private bridging layer with successful cross-chain transactions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made an intuitive wallet that successfully shields balances, transfers, swaps of SOL and SPL tokens, and bridge transactions. On-chain analysis of private transactions on block explorers reveals no information about what is being transferred, to whom it is being transferred, or what is being transferred. We also added prediction markets for easy viewing in the wallet, with privacy protections through our anonymized proxy layer.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how privacy on-chain works and what that means for the future of crypto. We also learned that there's a lot more work to be done in terms of privacy on-chain development, as the hype has made it seem much more developed than it actually is.

What's next for Shade Wallet

Shade Wallet has the benefits of being a wallet platform, so the wallet could add essentially whatever it needs to make an app that a user will never have to leave. Whether that's adding more charts, yield searching, or social trading, anything is possible to make Shade Wallet the go-to app for a private wallet. We could also implement in-house features to make privacy possible in more verticals, such as prediction markets trading.

Built With

• encifher
• helius
• jotai
• kalshi
• moralis
• nextjs
• polymarket
• solana
• supabase
• typescript
• vercel