Are you an LLM? Read llms.txt for a summary of the docs, or llms-full.txt for the full context.
Skip to content

Privacy Pools

Cloaked integrates Privacy Pools to give you an incognito balance — funds that have no direct on-chain link to your original deposit. Privacy Pools were introduced in the original research paper by Buterin, Jacob, et al. and implemented by 0xbow.

How It Works

  1. Deposit — Move visible funds into a compliant privacy pool. Your deposit is grouped with other users' deposits.
  2. Approval — An Association Set Provider (ASP) reviews the deposit for compliance with network policies. Once approved, your funds are ready to use.
  3. Send or swap — Spend from your incognito balance. A zero-knowledge proof authorizes the withdrawal without revealing which deposit is yours.

Balance Tiers

Your incognito balance is made up of funds sitting in the privacy pool after ASP approval. They can be used for private sends or swaps at any time. Privacy grows as more people deposit into the pool.

Trust Model

Privacy pools break the on-chain link between your deposit and withdrawal. No external observer can connect the two by analyzing the blockchain.

However, Cloaked's relay service submits transactions on your behalf. This means the Cloaked server can observe the association between your deposit and withdrawal, because it coordinates both sides of the transaction.

This is a trade-off of using Cloaked versus interacting with privacy pool contracts directly. The benefit is a seamless UX — you don't need to manage proofs, gas, or contract calls yourself. The trade-off is that Cloaked, as the relay operator, has visibility into the link.

For users who need stronger privacy guarantees, the underlying Privacy Pools protocol is open and can be used independently with different relayers. You can use recovery.clkd.xyz to export your private key and withdraw through privacypools.com directly. See the FAQ for details.

Fees

  • Network fee — Gas for the deposit or withdrawal transaction, displayed before you confirm.
  • All applicable fees are disclosed before transaction execution.

Compliance

Privacy pools are designed to be compatible with regulatory expectations. The ASP approval step ensures that deposits meet network compliance policies before funds can be used privately. This distinguishes privacy pools from mixing services — privacy is achieved within a compliant framework.

Further Reading