Internet Computer (ICP)

🚨 🔐 Privacy transactions are coming to $ICP — and the design is fundamentally different from privacy chains and ZK-based protocols. Most privacy systems today rely on persistent hiding. Privacy chains and mixers depend on global, long-lived pools where users hide inside a permanent anonymity set. ZK-based protocols improve this by hiding transaction details cryptographically, but they still rely on reusable on-chain state, historical membership proofs, and ever-growing privacy pools. Even if values and addresses are hidden, the pool itself remains forever and becomes a long-term analysis target. The privacy model described in recent ICP research takes a different approach. It does not rely on permanent anonymity sets or global mixers. Instead, it achieves privacy through unlinkability, ephemerality, and execution isolation. Each private transfer is split into two independent phases: a deposit phase and a retrieval phase. These phases are intentionally decoupled. Between them, the system uses short-lived, single-use canisters that hold only sealed payloads, never observe both sender and receiver, and are destroyed immediately after use. There is no reusable privacy pool, no long-term ledger of private interactions, and no historical anonymity set to analyze later. Privacy exists per transfer, not per ecosystem. This architecture is possible because of ICP’s execution model. Canisters are isolated execution units, not shared contracts. State is not globally readable by default, execution is replicated across nodes without publicly replayed traces, and certified state enables verifiable teardown without exposing contents. Sensitive parts of the protocol can additionally run inside trusted execution environments (TEEs) at the node level. This ensures that sealed payloads are never visible to node operators, intermediate secrets never leave protected memory, and even replicas cannot reconstruct sender–receiver links. This is fundamentally different from chains where every validator replays the full transaction logic in the clear. As a result, privacy on ICP is enforced by architecture, not just by cryptography. Example: Alice wants to send assets privately to Bob. Alice deposits assets into an ephemeral routing canister. The payload is sealed and processed inside isolated execution. Bob later retrieves the assets via a different ephemeral route. No canister ever sees both Alice and Bob, and all intermediaries are destroyed after completion. After teardown, no reusable state exists, no transaction graph remains, and no future correlation is possible. Even with full historical access to the chain, there is nothing left to analyze. Compared to ZK-based privacy systems, the difference is clear. ZK systems hide data, but keep permanent pools and long-term state. ICP’s model removes the link before it can ever exist. Privacy does not depend on pool size, future activity, or long-term secrecy assumptions. It depends on unlinkability plus destruction. The most important advantage is that this privacy model is asset-agnostic. Because it operates at the routing and execution layer rather than the asset layer, it automatically applies to all assets integrated into ICP. Through the ck-architecture, assets from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and beyond — such as ckBTC, ckETH, ckUSDC, and ckSOL — can all be transferred privately using the same unlinkable, ephemeral routing model. No new privacy coins. No fragmented liquidity. One privacy architecture — many assets. And again. Just possible on ICP Find the white paper in the comments below runter ⬇️

Developer forum with explanations: https://t.co/dKHRe7BOzj White paper: https://t.co/3jE6Vje5au