How to Shield Your ETH from Your Mum, Compliantly
Devcon 8 · 4 Nov 2026 · 7:45
Sunnyside Labs core engineer Harry Jeon introduces Privacy Boost, a self-custodial private transfer protocol for treasury operations such as payroll. Transfers are batched into one zero-knowledge proof at about 90,000 gas each, with proofs generated inside a TEE enclave in about half a second. The talk argues that handing auditors a viewing key reveals a whole account, and shows how the protocol works with Safe and Fireblocks wallets.
Speakers
Topics
From Devcon 8, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.
Transcript
Yeah. Hi. Um I'm Harry from Sunnyside Labs and I'm going to talk about like how to shield your ETH from your mom completely. Yeah. So um I think that I'll never ever reveal my address to my mom. Like if so, like she would know my balance, but critically she would know I bought some like coins and like sold it with tons of losses, right? So um then we'll then maybe she'll kill me. So yeah, that's a treasury for me. But um but mom is a funny version. So if you are a company, it's a like total disaster. Um so it can
be your um competitors, your counterparties or the whole market uh reading your treasury, your payroll and every trade you do on chain. So uh we we built private privacy boost for this. So it's a shielded pool and you keep the cost of your funds compliantly with uh good UX. So I'll start with the UX of privacy boost. So usually in um privacy pools uh based uh protocols that use zk uh requires your device to generate the zk proof uh which takes like uh several seconds but privacy boost uh uses generates it inside of a t enclave on
behalf of the user. So um uh usually the proof generation ends under a um like half a second which is very fast and it batches multiple like transfers into a single ZK proof so that the each transfer costs like um uh 90,000 gas and the most important part is that the contract uh checks that ziki proof and it has the zik circuits and the contracts has all of the logics that um um uh that is used to um make a state transition. So um the contract holds the money not the enclave.
So um we built a tool for um the self custody. So the enclave does not hold your money and um uh most of the actions on privacy boost is done by the relayer um inside of the TE but even if the relayer is gone or like we disappear you can still uh withdraw your funds from privacy boost is called like forced withdrawal. So all you need is your keys and your the public chain data. So um your money is still yours on privacy boost.
And also a good thing on privacy boost is that it works smoothly with um safe and fire blocks uh which are uh some of the most um frequently used wallets by companies managing the treasury. So um if you use privacy boost with safe like you just only thing you have to do is just sign on a opaque hash of the intent. uh you want to do on the privacy boost. So um nothing including like token like amounts and recipient is not revealed like onchain and you don't have to like install like specific modules on your safe just like existing wallet works uh on privacy boost. So if you
send um uh pass the opaque hash um from the safe to the privacy boost contract and then you send the request to our um TE server, it will like handle your requests and generate proof on behalf of you so that you can make state transition inside uh privacy boost privately. So and same holds for the Fireblocks accounts too. And secondly um you can also interact with external defies. So if you have private private nodes on private privacy boost uh you can withdraw it to the gateway do some swaps or like deposit
into vaults and then reshows it into a private nodes like in an atomic way. And the last part is the compliance. So um the usual way that many privacy protocols uh recommend is to uh for the audits like reporting taxes or something is to hand over your viewing key but it will reveal your whole account and you all you cannot take it back and you never see what they look looked at. So we um access it to like different way.
So um the rule the auditors will get the answers directly from the T server not the keys but the rules uh are defined on the enclave so it can be programmable so that um you can narrow down the rules to a token or like date range whatever you want and the query is like logo on chain. Yes. So um that's it. So uh privacy boost is private to the market open to your auditor. So if you run a treasury like build a wallet or operate a chain just um let's chat or try it today at app.privac boost.io.
Thanks. >> Great. Thank you so much Harry. We have about minute and a half for uh questions. So in case you have a question, feel free for free to raise your hand and then we will uh throw a little box to here that you can speak into and and ask your question. So any questions for Harry over here? Oh. Oh, nice. Yeah. Hi. Thanks. Um, so my question, uh, I don't know if this, uh, maybe a silly question, but like if you're doing a transaction on the safe, for example, uh, for multisigs or whatever, and you're intentionally signing a opaque hash, how would the other signers actually know that you're signing
something that you meant to, not some attacker uh, created hash or something else? >> Oh, yeah, sure. So um basically it would be uh the sign uh that would be um expressed on our like um website the the screen of the website but like since uh that's a valid point since like other signers will see only the hashes. So um I think some coordination will would would need um to prevent such cases some like offchain coordinations um so that um they can um
they can calculate recalculate it to check the hashes right or not like um you can you can do that on our like SDK functions but we are not like uh actively like providing that function funality on our website. So maybe we can improve our product. Yeah, >> great. Thanks,