Swap tokens privately with Silent Swap
Bridge and Swap privately across several major networks
TLDR:
Silent Swap is an incredibly easy to use privacy preserving swapping tool that already supports 8 major chains and several major tokens.
Silent Swap makes use of the Secret Network to acheive privacy and is able to perfom swaps in as fast as 2-3 minutes.
Follow along with the tutorial below to see how quick and easy it is to use Silent Swap, and how fast privacy tech in crypto is improving.
After a great DevConnect event in Argentina I’m back to my regular weekly posts.
One hot topic of the moment is privacy as we’ve seen with ZEC’s recent meteoric rise and new privacy solutions coming out like Aztec’s Ignition L2 chain, and a few weeks back I made a post re-sharing the importance of privacy on public blockchains.
Given this, this week I decided to look at a new easy to use solution for swapping privately across several major chains called Silent Swap.
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Privacy
Privacy is one of crypto’s hot topics of the moment as illustrated by ZCash’s recent meteoric 10x price rise since September and the Ethereum Foundation pushing privacy more than ever with their “commitment to privacy” post from October.
Given privacy’s recent spotlight I re-shared an old post of mine 4 weeks ago about the “importance of privacy in a world of public blockchains”.
Over the years I’ve also written several other posts on privacy solutions such as Veil.cash:
On Umbra.cash with its stealth payments:
And on the infamous Tornado.cash:
To understand the importance of privacy I recommend reading a post Vitalik Buterin (the founder of Ethereum and one of the most important thought leaders in the Web3 space) released earlier this year where he argued that:
Privacy is freedom: Privacy gives us space to live our lives in the ways that meet our needs, without constantly worrying about how our actions will be perceived in all kinds of political and social games.
Privacy is order: A whole bunch of mechanisms that underlie the basic functioning of society depend on privacy in order to function.
Privacy is progress: If we gain new ways to share our information selectively while protecting it from being misused, we can unlock a lot of value and accelerate technological and social progress.
The crucial take away here though is that privacy is important and consequently so are privacy preserving technologies in crypto. I highly recommend reading his blog post to go deeper into all of this.
And so today I decided to take a look at another privacy preserving tool that I had not yet written about, namely Silent Swap, which provides private token swaps across 8 major chains.
Silent Swap
Silent Swap is an app that in their own words allows for “fast, secure, and fully decentralised cross-chain swaps that keep your financial activity confidential.”
On opening the app at app.silentswap.com you’ll find a very similar interface to what you’ll see with most bridge and swap apps like I’ve shown before with the likes of Jumper.exchange, you can read this previous post I’ve done on it if you’d like.
The first thing you’ll want to do is hit the “Connect Wallet” button, which will initiate a few immediate steps.
First it will simply connect the wallet, then it will request a signature to prove that you own the wallet, and after it will request a second signature to create a “temporary anonymous wallet” for you, which is part of how Silent Swap does its privacy magic in the background.
Performing the swap is then super simple.
Perform a private Swap
With your wallet connected you’ll simply want to select the asset you want to swap on the chain you want to swap, followed by the asset you want to receive on the chain and address you want to receive it.
Silent Swap currently supports 7 EVM compatible chains plus Solana, along with some of the most well known tokens on these chains like ETH, BNB, WBTC, USDT and USDC.
For the sake of this tutorial I went with ETH on Base as the source token and chain, and decided to send approximately $10, which is the minimum amount you can send. And on the receiving side I selected SOL on a Solana wallet of mine.
In adding a receiving address it asks if you want to give it a name that gets saved locally, but I chose not to.
Now with the sending token selected plus the receiving token and address, the final step is to simply hit “swap” where you’ll be asked to sign an internal swap message, plus a transaction to send the money over.
The resulting swap transaction is then pretty fast, in this specific case it took only 2 minutes and 13 seconds in total!
Another neat feature worth noting is that you can split the output to up to 10 wallets, in the example above I did it only to one receiving wallet but I could have kept adding more up to this maximum.
Onchain privacy
Congrats, you’ve now successfully swapped entirely privately!
In my specific case if we look onchain it looks like a swap was done from Base ETH to USDC on Avalanche.
Then if you keep tracing those tokens further you’ll just find those tokens being burned with Circle’s own USDC burn mechanism.
Meanwhile the receiving Solana address received the equivalent SOL making its way to the correct address.
So this method breaks the link between sender and receiver without using mixers or custodians.
In the background this privacy is acheived by making use of the Secret Network, a chains that’s private by default, as a messaging layer for routing the liquidity.
If there was one thing to improve on it would be that they have a better visualisation of the steps involved within the Silent Swap app.
Private swaps are now easy
Above you saw how crazily simple, quick and easy Silent Swap makes it to do a private swap.
This is a far cry from some of the other apps I’ve detailed before like Tornado.cash and Umbra.cash, which requires a fair bit more complexity as you try to track your funds across different wallets.
Privacy tech is clearly levelling up!
This sort of solution makes it trivial to stay private onchain, without using a custodial solution or any additional complexity, all with such a slick and simple interface.
And all they charge is a 1% fee plus gas for these swaps, which feels super fair given that Uniswap charges around 0.25%.
Silent Swap really marks a game changing UX in privacy tech in crypto and its impressive to see how fast this sort of technology is evolving.
Given that the desire for privacy is growing larger within the crypto ecosystem you can be certain that privacy tech will continue to advance and become even simpler and more integrated over time.
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