Trying Private DeFi with RAILGUN

Over the past decade, blockchains have made major strides, particularly when it comes to providing secure blockspace and scaling. But to bring billions of people onchain, it's no secret what's required.

We'll have to make more privacy advances.

Regular folks, from dissidents to college students, have a right to privacy in their financial affairs. It's an inalienable pillar of individual freedom alongside things like due process.

And as for businesses and institutions, they need privacy to protect sensitive operations and meet regulatory obligations. Without it, meaningful adoption at scale simply won’t happen. Fortunately, our options are growing.

✨ The RAILGUN Connection

This year, I've been making it a point to explore and highlight compelling onchain privacy projects, as you've seen with my recent 0xbow, Fluidkey, and Veil posts.

And, on a larger scale, this need for privacy is why the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced it's leaning into a new Defipunk treasury policy that will actively support open-source, privacy-preserving tools.

Amid this milieu, the EF's decision to stake 50k $RAIL and become an active stakeholder in RAILGUN, a rising onchain privacy protocol, caught my eye.

Of course, not only is this one of the EF's first salvos in its Defipunk push, but it also validates that RAILGUN is a powerful privacy tool worth exploring by the Ethereum ecosystem's denizens. Let's dive deeper into this protocol and get you caught up on the basics. 👇

Vitalik Buterin Uses Privacy Tool Railgun Again, Signaling Ongoing Embrace of On-Chain Anonymity

Railgun’s RAIL token has spiked 15% higher after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin transferred over $2.6 million in crypto using the privacy protocol.

CoinDeskSam Kessler

🔀 How Does RAILGUN Work?

Powered by zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), RAILGUN is a set of onchain smart contracts now live on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and BNB Chain.

There's no bridging or separate standalone network. With RAILGUN, you can use the blockspace you already use privately by shielding assets into a private balance, i.e. an 0zk address.

From that 0zk vault you can transfer, swap, provide liquidity, farm, lend—basically any onchain operation possible—while a ZKP hides the sender, receiver, asset, and amount.

This means your public wallet never appears involved! At most, the only thing outsiders see is an unrelated broadcaster address submitting a transaction hash.

The privacy strength scales with more use, too. Every new shield, private send, etc. helps grow RAILGUN's ZKP smokescreen system, so even modest activity can quickly create robust anonymity.

🔰 How to Get Started

1) Create a wallet

RAILGUN doesn't have an official frontend. That said, Railway is the leading community gateway to the protocol, so I recommend starting here. Install, then create a new wallet (you’ll get both a normal 0x and a private 0zk address), and secure your seed phrase somewhere safe.

2) Shield assets

Once you've got funds ready to go in your normal address, click on your desired token in Railway like ETH, WETH, stablecoins, NFTs, etc. and then press the "Shield" button. Select your 0zk address to shield to, input your desired amount, and press "Confirm amount." After the one-hour "unshield-only" standby phase, you'll find the balance in your "Shielded tokens" tab.

3) Try private DeFi

With shielded funds in Railway, now you can start exploring DeFi activities privately from within the RAILGUN system. In the "Wallets" tab, you can make 0zk-to-0zk payments without exposing either side of your transactions. You can also check the "dApps" tab to try Railway's DeFi integrations, like Beefy for providing liquidity and farming, or Railway DEX, an onchain exchange powered by the same 0x API tech underlying Matcha.

4) Unshield when ready

Whenever you want to move funds out of RAILGUN's smokescreen, select your desired shielded token in Railway and press "Unshield." Input your target, normal 0x address into the recipient box, enter the number of tokens you want to unshield, and click "Confirm amount." Follow the ensuing prompts, like "Generate proof" and "Unshield" once more, and your tokens will become available in your destination 0x address.

That's all it takes to begin here!

If you'd like to dive deeper, I recommend checking out the RAILGUN docs + the Railway docs. All in all, this privacy protocol infra is slick and early proof that the EF's new Defipunk mandate already has teeth.

If swaps, farming, payroll, etc. increasingly happens behind a veil of ZKPs in DeFi, and adoption reaches escape velocity here, then "public-by-default" DeFi can finally become a relic of the past.

That's a future worth fighting for, and it's the task at hand for RAILGUN.