In the last few weeks, Starknet made its leap into building a privacy solution that works for the practical crypto world with STRK20. STRK20 is Starknet’s privacy capability: it lets any ERC-20 token exist privately on Starknet through shielding, giving those assets shielded balances and private transfers. That capability has been live on mainnet for … Read more
Privacy on public blockchains has arrived. The harder problem has been making it work with the rest of the financial world. The choice has always been binary. Complete privacy meant complete isolation (secrecy), off-limits to regulated businesses and cut off from the financial system. But with full transparency it meant every balance and payment exposed, … Read more
Stablecoins have become the unit of account for onchain finance. They settle trades, move treasury, pay contributors, and back most of the liquidity that DeFi runs on. But every one of those transfers carries a cost that rarely gets named: it is permanently, irreversibly public. On Starknet, this has changed with privacy features for USDC, … Read more
Onchain privacy has felt harder to use than it should The need is obvious: people, companies, and institutions need ways to use crypto without exposing every balance, transfer, position, and interaction by default. But in practice, privacy has usually meant accepting trade-offs across assets, wallets, applications, liquidity, and user experience. That is not how privacy … Read more
For years, private DeFi has forced users into a trade-off. You could have privacy, but it usually meant leaving your normal wallet, using a separate privacy application, or accepting a user experience that felt disconnected from the rest of DeFi. As a result, private DeFi never became normal DeFi. STRK20 changes that. STRK20 is Starknet’s … Read more
Shielded balances are only the beginning. STRK20 opens a wider design space for payments, payroll, trading, governance, games, treasury tools, and future app flows on Starknet. It does this by making shielding a normal crypto action, and shielding is what closes the leak. Public chains do not only expose balances. They expose relationships, timing, strategy, … Read more
Crypto has already proven that privacy can work. The harder problem is making people use it. There are a growing number of privacy protocols in crypto. Some, like Zcash and Monero, build privacy into a single asset. Others, like Railgun, add a shielding layer on top of a chain. Others provide dedicated execution environments, fully … Read more
Privacy That Works for Crypto Earlier this year, the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy and Scaling Explorations team published findings from a long stretch of user research on private transfers. The report was not a ranking of privacy systems, but it surfaced recurring blockers: fragmented anonymity sets, weak DeFi composability, poor wallet support, disclosure complexity, and cost. … Read more
strkBTC goes live on Starknet tomorrow. Ahead of launch, this guide explains how you will be able to access strkBTC, which wallets support the experience, how shielding works, and where incentives will be directed after launch. strkBTC is a Bitcoin-backed asset on Starknet, designed to let Bitcoin holders bring BTC into Starknet, access privacy through … Read more
Overview This guide explains how to get strkBTC on Starknet, how to shield it for private use and how to stake strkBTC to earn staking rewards. To use this guide, users will need a Starknet wallet before starting. To bridge from Bitcoin, users will also need a Bitcoin wallet with BTC. To shield an asset … Read more