At LumenShade, we're bringing financial discretion to Stellar.
We were inspired by projects like Tornado Cash, 0xbow’s Privacy Pools and Railgun.
Our mission is simple: empower users with financial privacy, while building the foundation for fully compliant, private DeFi on Stellar.
Motivation
Stellar is an incredible platform for fast, low-cost global payments, especially across emerging markets.
But today’s users don’t have strong privacy options.
We believe that privacy is a necessity, not a luxury, and it’s time for Stellar to start offering real options.
Right now, payments on Stellar are fully public.
We strongly believe that mainstream blockchain adoption will come when privacy is integrated by default.
Think about NGOs working in sensitive regions, businesses wanting to protect their payment flows, or just regular individuals who simply don’t want their entire transaction history displayed to the world…
LumenShade can help make this possible.
Our modular components will be reusable for other projects in the ecosystem, fueling further innovation in privacy across the Stellar developer community.
Description
In simple terms, LumenShade lets users deposit Stellar assets (like XLM and USDC) into a shared pool, and withdraw them later without anyone being able to trace the link between the deposit and the withdrawal.
Here's how it works:
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When a user deposits funds into the pool, he receives a unique note (a secret) that proves ownership of that deposit
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Later, when the user wants to withdraw, he generates a zero-knowledge proof showing they own one of the previous deposits, by proving knowledge of the previous “note”
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The smart contract verifies the proof and, if correct, releases the funds to a specified address. There’s now no way to link that withdrawal with any deposit
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The more deposits, the bigger the anonymity set, the more private each user is
Here are some of the key features we're excited to deliver:
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Privacy-preserving deposits and withdrawals, thanks to zero-knowledge proofs
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Intuitive frontend and CLI tools, for a seamless user experience
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An innovative compliance layer featuring:
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Modular, reusable smart contracts and circuits, enabling future ZK projects on Stellar
We also take inspiration from Railgun, which has set a high bar for compliant privacy pools with features like “private proof of innocence”. LumenShade is built to move Stellar in that same direction.
