Starknet Shadow Accounts: wallet privacy that hides the link, not the balance

Starknet Shadow Accounts give you a separate persistent address for each application you use. You fund it from a shielded balance in the STRK20 privacy pool that StarkWare shipped in June, connect the wallet, switch to private mode and move assets into a vault. The address that funded you stays hidden, and the position holds until you withdraw back to the shielded balance.

“Balances, transactions and positions of shadow accounts remain publicly visible onchain”

— Starknet, Shadow Accounts announcement

What stays visible

Everything else stays in the open. Starknet says the balances, transactions and positions of a shadow account remain publicly visible on-chain, so the feature hides the owner and leaves the position in plain sight. Watch the chain and you still see a vault of a given size opening at a given minute. What you lose is the arrow pointing back to the main wallet.

How thin the crowd is

Few depositors make that arrow easy to redraw. A privacy pool protects you by crowd: your deposit hides among deposits of similar size and timing, and a thin pool leaves a short list of candidates. Starknet holds $164.9m of value locked across the entire chain, 24th among chains and 0.18% of the $91.6bn locked everywhere. Base holds 37.7 times more, Arbitrum 8.5 times more.

The STRK token trades at $0.0821 for a market cap of $609.5m, down 98.1% from its February 2024 peak. The token carries 3.7 times the money sitting on the chain it secures.

Vaults are the only thing Shadow Accounts cover today. StarkWare lists liquidity provision, lending, borrowing, staking, derivatives, prediction markets and NFT marketplaces as what comes next, and it demonstrated a private KYC system in June, which points the same technology at regulated venues.

What to check next

Privacy coins spent the autumn as the one sector making highs, so demand for this exists. The DeFi side is where the concentration bites: 144 protocols hold 90% of the money in the sector, and we wrote in September about where that leaves a bill that tries to separate decentralised from not.

What to check is the pool size. Working privacy shows up as a growing shielded balance, because each new depositor makes the earlier ones harder to name. A shielded pool that stays thin while the feature list grows leaves unlinkability as a claim, and analytics firms publish that kind of finding before any team admits it.

Informational material, not investment advice. Chain and token figures were read on 14 October 2026 and move daily, while the privacy guarantee described here depends on how many people use the shielded pool.