RAILWAY WALLETUSE
The flagship frontend: free, open source, cross-platform (desktop, iOS, Android), non-custodial. Shielding, private transfers, private swaps via 0x aggregation, PPoI built in, zero activity logs.
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RAILGUN
RAILGUN · RAILGUN DAO MAINNET + 3 CHAINS ZK PPOI NON-CUSTODIAL NON-UPGRADABLE
LIVE SINCE — 07.2021 · ETHEREUM MAINNET
$80.3M
Shielded TVL
≈ 42,255 ETH
20,452
ETH shielded · mainnet
$38.9M
$5B+
Cumulative private volume
all-time, per 06.2026
$62.2M
RAIL staked
governance, not shielded TVL
147
Tokens shielded
mainnet
DEFILLAMA + ONCHAIN, CROSS-CHECKED
LIVE SINCE 07.2021 CHAINS 4 AUDITS 3 CONTRACTS NON-UPGRADABLE GOVERNANCE RAILGUN DAO PPOI YES BROADCASTERS SELF-FEDERATED (WAKU) *shielded TVL excludes ~$62M of staked RAIL; that's the governance token, tracked separately by DefiLlama
ONE SHIELDED BALANCE FOR ALL OF DEFI
Your balance becomes encrypted notes in a shielded Merkle tree, and every spend is a zk-SNARK proof, verified onchain without revealing sender, recipient, token or amount.
01 Shield.
Move tokens from your public address into the Railgun contract. You get a 0zk address with separate spending and viewing keys, and your balance becomes encrypted notes the chain can verify but not read.
02 Transact.
Send 0zk → 0zk in arbitrary amounts: no fixed denominations, no fragmented liquidity. Balances can stay shielded indefinitely; this is an account model closer to Zcash than to Ethereum's public ledger.
03 Use DeFi.
RelayAdapt unshields, runs any sequence of contract calls (a swap, a deposit, a claim) and re-shields the result in a single transaction. Your strategy never touches the public graph.
04 Unshield.
Exit to a public address whenever. A Broadcaster submits the transaction and pays gas, reimbursed in any token it accepts, so your gas wallet never links to your private balance.
THE FLOW
WHERE THE $80.3M SITS
Top shielded assets, Ethereum mainnet. Token amounts where the asset isn't already dollars.
| SHIELDED ASSET | VALUE LOCKED | SHARE OF TVL |
|---|---|---|
| ETH | $38.88M (20,452.5 ETH) | 48.4% |
| USDC | $14.73M (14,729,845 USDC) | 18.3% |
| USDT | $11.54M (11,557,379 USDT) | 14.4% |
| DAI | $6.28M | 7.8% |
| wBTC | $1.77M (27.7 wBTC) | 2.2% |
| everything else — 140+ tokens + 3 more chains | ≈ $7.1M combined | 8.9% |
live when fetched
The shielded pool is one big anonymity set: every asset shares the same Merkle tree, and privacy strengthens as more value shields. One caveat: rare tokens have small crowds. ETH and the major stables are where the set is deepest.
Per chain: Ethereum $75.2M · Arbitrum $3.3M · BNB Chain $1.1M · Polygon $0.7M. Identical non-upgradable contracts on each; privacy added to existing chain liquidity, no migration.
TRADE OFFS
Strong privacy inside the pool; the observable surface is at the edges:
THE CROWD IS THE PRODUCT
Privacy scales with the anonymity set. For ETH and major stables the crowd is deep; shielding a thinly-held token puts you in a thin crowd. Check here to see the depth of each token.
THE EDGES ARE PUBLIC
Shield and unshield events are visible onchain; what's hidden is everything in between. Timing and amount correlation at the edges is the analysis surface, so value that stays shielded stays quietest, and round-trip amounts in quick succession weaken the effect. Read more here.
NO OFFICIAL WALLET
The contracts are non-upgradable, but frontends aren't the protocol: you're trusting the wallet you pick. Railway, Anon and Terminal are the known open-source options, and Broadcasters, while self-federated over Waku and runnable by anyone, are a fee-charging middle layer your wallet selects for you.
START HERE
DOCS & CODEREAD
The 101 → use cases → developer guide path at docs.railgun.org; Wallet SDK and Cookbook recipes at github.com/Railgun-Community. Everything an integrating wallet needs is public.
MORE FRONTENDSPICK
Anon Wallet: Chromium extension with passkeys and built-in swaps. Terminal Wallet: keyboard-driven CLI. TokenShielder: shield straight from any browser wallet into a 0zk address.
Evaluating Railgun but not sure if it fits your product? Talk to Ben.
TALK TO BEN →WHO'S PLUGGED IN
Deliberately frontend-agnostic: no official wallet, an SDK anyone can build on. The EF does.
KOHAKU — EF WALLET STACKWALLET
Railgun ships as @kohaku-eth/railgun in the EF's privacy-first wallet stack, and the Kohaku reference extension is built in collaboration with Railgun (plus Ambire, Helios and PSE). Vitalik's April 2025 L1 privacy roadmap names Railgun as the tool wallets should integrate.
COOKBOOK — ZKAPPSBUILD
Cookbook recipes turn any dApp into a zkApp: unshield → act → re-shield, atomically. It's how Railway ships private swaps against 0x-aggregated liquidity (Uniswap, Sushi and friends); the same pattern works for lending, yield, anything callable.
WAKU — BROADCASTERSINFRA
The relayer layer is self-federated over Waku, the decentralized messaging network: Broadcasters discover each other and receive fee-encrypted requests peer-to-peer, with no central server. Anyone can run one; the reference node guarantees a PPoI for every relayed transaction.