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The Problem with Public Blockchains

Every transaction on Solana is publicly readable. Anyone can look up your wallet address and see exactly how much of any token you hold and every transfer you’ve ever made. For many use cases — payroll, business payments, personal finance — this is unacceptable. Umbra fixes this without requiring you to move your tokens off Solana or trust a centralized custodian.

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The Two Privacy Modes

Umbra provides two distinct privacy tools that can be used independently or together:

EncryptedTokenAccount (ETA)

Your token balance is stored on-chain, but the amount is encrypted. Transfers still happen on-chain — what’s hidden is how much.

Stealth Pool

Tokens are written as Stealth Pool Notes into a shared mixer tree, then burned from any wallet with no on-chain link between sender and recipient. Who paid whom is hidden.
You can use the EncryptedTokenAccount alone (hide amounts), the Stealth Pool alone (hide the transfer path), or both together for the strongest privacy guarantees.

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How EncryptedTokenAccounts Work

When you deposit tokens into your ETA:
  1. Your tokens move from your AssociatedTokenAccount (ATA) to the on-chain pool custody account.
  2. The program initialises an EncryptedTokenAccount PDA for your (wallet, mint) pair if one does not already exist.
  3. The balance is encrypted and stored in that ETA using Arcium MPC.
The encryption means no one — not Umbra, not Arcium, not Solana validators — can read your balance without the decryption key.

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What is Arcium MPC?

Arcium is a network of nodes that perform computation on encrypted data using Multi-Party Computation (MPC). You don’t need to understand the details, but the key property is:
No single node can decrypt your data. The computation is split across multiple independent parties so that learning your balance requires compromising a majority of them simultaneously.
From a developer’s perspective: Arcium is the computation backend. The SDK handles all communication with it automatically.

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Encryption Modes

When your balance is encrypted, it can be in one of two modes:
  • MXE-only — Only the Arcium MPC network can decrypt it. Withdrawals require MPC to perform the decryption. You cannot decrypt it locally.
  • Shared — Encrypted under both the Arcium MPC key and your personal X25519 key. You can decrypt your own balance client-side without MPC. Available after you register your X25519 key.
After registering with confidential: true, your deposits automatically use Shared mode so you can query your balance locally.

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How the Stealth Pool Works

The Stealth Pool uses a cryptographic structure called an Indexed Merkle Tree combined with zero-knowledge proofs. Here’s the simplified version:
1

Write a Stealth Pool Note

You create a commitment — a cryptographic hash of (amount, recipient, secret) — and insert it as a leaf into the Merkle tree. The commitment is public; the contents are not.
2

Wait

More users write notes into the same tree. Your commitment is now one of many thousands of leaves. The larger the set, the stronger the anonymity.
3

Burn to any address

You present a zero-knowledge proof that you know the secret behind one of the leaves in the tree without revealing which leaf. The proof is verified on-chain, the nullifier is burned to prevent double-spending, and the tokens are released to the destination balance.
The deposit address and the burn destination need not be related. An observer sees a note being written and a burn happening, but cannot link them.

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Self-burnable vs receiver-burnable

There are two ways to write a Stealth Pool Note:
  • Self-burnable — the writer keeps the unlocker. Useful for “stage funds in the pool, burn them out later from a fresh wallet” patterns. Requires zero on-chain state from the destination.
  • Receiver-burnable — the writer encrypts the unlocker against the recipient’s userCommitment. The recipient scans, decrypts, and burns. Requires the recipient to have completed all three registration sub-steps on-chain (account init, X25519 key, user commitment).

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The Dual-Instruction Pattern

Every confidential MPC operation in Umbra involves two on-chain transactions:
  1. Handler — your wallet signs a transaction that validates inputs and queues a computation request with Arcium.
  2. Callback — Arcium completes the off-chain computation and posts the result back on-chain, triggering the program’s callback instruction to update state.
The SDK waits for both transactions to confirm before returning. You don’t need to manage this yourself.
This is why Umbra MPC operations take a few seconds longer than a standard token transfer — there is an off-chain MPC round-trip between the two on-chain instructions. Pure ZK operations (e.g. an ATA-source note write) are single-tx and finish in normal Solana confirmation time.

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Privacy Guarantees Summary

  • Token balance amount — hidden by EncryptedTokenAccounts. Encrypted with MPC; auditors can be granted selective access via compliance grants.
  • Transfer counterparty — hidden by the Stealth Pool. Requires a sufficient anonymity set (other notes in the same tree at the same denomination).
  • Transaction history — strongest guarantees when the Stealth Pool and EncryptedTokenAccounts are used together.

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What is NOT Hidden

  • That you are using Umbra — on-chain interactions with the Umbra program are visible.
  • Note amounts — the amount is committed at note creation and revealed at burn.
  • Timing — if you write a note and immediately burn it from a fresh wallet, temporal analysis can correlate them.

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Compliance

Umbra includes a built-in compliance system. Users can create viewing grants that allow specific parties (auditors, regulators) to decrypt their balances. See the Compliance guide for details.