Introduction
A sovereign SVM chain with privacy built in — shielded transfers, settled on a chain any Solana wallet already understands.
null is a sovereign SVM privacy chain. It runs its own block production and state, speaks standard Solana JSON-RPC so existing wallets and tooling work unmodified, and bridges value into a shielded pool where balances live as zero-knowledge commitments. Transfers inside the pool reveal only opaque nullifiers and new commitments — never the sender, the amount, or the link between a deposit and a later withdrawal.
Live on devnet — not for real value
null is live on a public devnet, but it is dev-grade and unaudited. The trusted setup is a single-contributor dev ceremony (see Trusted setup), and the network today is a single PoA sequencer with a single relayer. Do not use it, or any pool built on these keys, for anything of value. Two pieces are still pending: a real bridge-vault deployment and the BPF (on-chain program) verifier path — both described honestly below.
What null is
- A sovereign chain, not a Solana program. null produces its own blocks (PoA sequencer, fixed 500 ms slots) and executes real SVM transactions. It is not a smart contract deployed on Solana — the shielded pool and bridge are chain builtins, executed natively by the node.
- Solana-compatible. The JSON-RPC server mirrors Solana's method names and
response schema, so
@solana/web3.jsand thesolanaCLI talk to it unchanged. Any Solana wallet already understands the account and transaction model. - Private by default in the pool. Deposit ("shield") into the pool and your balance becomes an encrypted note. Move value between shielded identities ("transfer") with the sender and amount hidden. Exit ("unshield") to any public address, with the destination cryptographically bound into the proof.
Sovereign chain vs. Solana program — a fair comparison
null takes the sovereign-chain approach rather than deploying the pool as a Solana on-chain program. Both are legitimate; the trade-offs are real.
| Sovereign chain (null) | On-chain Solana program | |
|---|---|---|
| Verifier | Native builtin, real alt_bn128 arithmetic | BPF program calling alt_bn128 syscalls |
| Control | Own fees, slots, builtins, state machine | Constrained by Solana runtime + compute limits |
| Composability | Bridged; not natively composable with Solana DeFi | Composable with the whole Solana ecosystem |
| Trust to launch | PoA sequencer (centralized MVP) | Solana's validator set (decentralized) |
| Cost of a proof verify | No compute-unit ceiling | Must fit the CU budget per instruction |
The honest summary: a sovereign chain buys control (custom fee routing for
the relayer, a native verifier with no compute ceiling, freedom to evolve the
state machine) at the cost of composability and decentralization, which are
deferred. null's builtin verifier runs the exact arithmetic the Solana
sol_alt_bn128_* syscalls dispatch to, so it is bit-identical to what a BPF
program would compute — see Architecture → Shielded pool.