You wouldn't hand your bank statement to a stranger on the street. Yet every payment on a public blockchain is permanently, irrevocably visible to anyone who cares to look. Shade fixes that — without hiding who you paid, only how much.
The problem
Public blockchains expose every transaction to everyone, forever. Your salary, your vendor payments, your investment positions — all permanently readable by competitors, data harvesters, and anyone with a block explorer. This level of financial transparency has no equivalent in traditional finance, and most organisations would never accept it if they fully understood what they were publishing.
Existing privacy solutions — mixers, shielded pools, ZK-based privacy coins — solve transparency by hiding everything. You lose the auditability that makes blockchains useful in the first place. Counterparties can't verify who they paid. Compliance becomes impossible. Smart contract composability breaks. You swap one problem for another.
The approach
Shade takes a surgical approach: addresses stay fully visible on-chain, but amounts are encrypted using Fully Homomorphic Encryption. This means you can verify that a payment was made from wallet A to wallet B — but you cannot read how much was sent. Counterparties remain auditable. Amounts stay confidential.
The result: a system where payroll can be distributed without exposing individual salaries, escrow can be settled without revealing the locked sum to third parties, and payments can be made without your transaction history becoming a public business intelligence dataset.
Trust model
No off-chain operators
FHE computation runs natively inside the EVM via Zama's coprocessor. There is no separate privacy infrastructure for you to trust.
No operator keys
There is no private key that could be stolen to decrypt your balances. The encryption is enforced by mathematics, not by a trusted party.
No bridge custody
Your USDC stays in smart contracts on Ethereum. There is no bridge, no wrapped token, and no custodian holding your funds.
Shade inherits its security guarantees entirely from Zama's fhEVM — a production implementation of Fully Homomorphic Encryption running inside the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Encryption is enforced at the protocol level. No configuration, no trust assumptions, no operator.
Who it's for
Web3 teams
Pay contributors and vendors without publishing your treasury's payment history to competitors.
DAOs
Run payroll with per-person encrypted salaries. No member can see another's compensation on-chain.
Freelancers
Invoice and get paid in USDC without your entire client list and rate card becoming public record.
Protocols
Need encrypted escrow in your settlement layer? Integrate PrivateEscrow directly into your contracts.
Built on
Zama is the company that built the Fully Homomorphic Encryption toolchain that makes Shade possible. Their fhEVM library extends Solidity with native encrypted types —euint64,ebool, and more — and their coprocessor handles FHE computations off the EVM hot path. Without Zama, none of this is possible.