Programmable Privacy

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Why SKALE for Programmable Privacy

Public blockchains are transparent by design. Every transaction amount, every contract interaction, every user intent is visible to the world. That’s fine for a public ledger — but it’s a dealbreaker for the applications that actually need blockchain. Payroll, supply chain, sealed-bid auctions, lending positions, gaming state, enterprise data — all of these require confidentiality. Not as an afterthought you bolt on with ZK proofs or trusted hardware, but as a first-class primitive in the protocol itself. SKALE is the only EVM blockchain where privacy capable of maintaining compliance is built into consensus, not appended as a layer. With Programmable Privacy, smart contracts define who sees what and when — all in Solidity, all composable, all without a trusted third party.

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How It’s Different

Other approaches to blockchain privacy come with tradeoffs you don’t want:

• ZK proofs — Powerful, but not composable. Every private operation needs a new circuit. Developers need specialized cryptography knowledge.
• FHE — Computes on encrypted data, but introduces significant computational overhead compared to plaintext execution. SKALE Programmable Privacy takes a different approach: threshold encryption for pre-execution privacy, programmable decryption, and selective disclosure — all with standard EVM execution performance.
• TEEs — Trusted hardware introduces a centralized trust assumption. If the hardware is compromised, privacy is gone.
• Separate privacy chains — Isolated ecosystems that can’t compose with the rest of DeFi.

SKALE’s approach is different. Threshold encryption is baked into the consensus layer. Validators jointly hold decryption keys — no single party can decrypt on their own. Privacy is enforced by cryptography, not by trust or custom code. No circuits to write. No hardware to trust. Just standard smart contracts on a chain where the protocol handles what stays private and who gets to see it.

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What You Can Build

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Start Building

Programmable Privacy is available on SKALE Base and SKALE Base Sepolia. All features work with standard EVM tooling — MetaMask, Foundry, Hardhat, Viem, ethers.js. No special compilers, no custom RPCs, no new languages.

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Learn More

• Encrypted Transactions — Architecture and API reference
• Conditional Transactions — On-demand decryption contracts
• Confidential Tokens — Encrypted balance ERC-20s
• Re-encryption — Selective disclosure cryptography
• BITE Encryption — The protocol layer powering it all
• Threshold Schemes — How threshold BLS and DKG work