How Private Sending Works
A high-level overview of what happens when you send tokens privately, and why it matters.
What is private sending?
On a public blockchain, every transaction is visible to everyone. When you send tokens from your wallet to another address, the entire world can see who sent what, to whom, and how much. Block explorers, analytics firms, and anyone with curiosity can trace your financial activity.
Private sending breaks that link. Instead of sending tokens directly from your address to the recipient, your tokens are first deposited into a shared shielded pool — a smart contract that holds tokens for many users. Once inside the pool, your tokens are indistinguishable from everyone else's. When the tokens are withdrawn to the recipient, there is no on-chain connection back to your original deposit.
The result: the recipient gets their tokens, but no observer can determine who sent them.
Why does the sender-recipient link matter?
Every time you transact on a public chain, you create a permanent record that links your address to the recipient. Over time, this builds a detailed financial profile — your spending habits, business relationships, portfolio size, and trading activity are all visible.
This isn't just a theoretical concern. On-chain analytics tools are widely used to profile wallets, and any counterparty you transact with can see your full history. Private sending restores the kind of financial privacy that people expect in traditional banking.
The flow
The on-chain link between sender and recipient is completely broken.
Gold-standard privacy
This is not a mixer or a tumbler.
Mixers shuffle funds between a small set of participants, which limits anonymity and can often be traced with enough analysis. RAILGUN uses collectivized anonymity sets — every deposit into the shielded pool strengthens the privacy of every other user. The more people use the pool, the harder it becomes to correlate any individual deposit with any withdrawal.
Zero-knowledge proofs ensure that tokens can be withdrawn without revealing who deposited them, what token was deposited, or how much. When you follow best practices, this is the most private way to send tokens on EVM chains.
What to expect
When you use the simplified send form, here's the general flow:
- Sign in — you sign a message (no gas cost) to create your private key
- Wallet sync — the app scans the blockchain to find any existing shielded balances
- Shield tokens — your tokens are deposited into the shielded pool (you may see 1-3 wallet prompts)
- Wait for clearance — a short compliance check runs before your tokens become spendable
- Delivery — a zero-knowledge proof is generated and tokens are sent to the recipient
Want to understand each step in detail?
Read about the Privacy Pipeline