Privacy Comes to Monad: Unlink Goes Live
On June 25, 2026, the Monad Foundation announced that Unlink, a privacy infrastructure layer for public blockchains, is now live on Monad mainnet. Public blockchains record all activity on a shared ledger that is open to everyone, which makes settlement verifiable and trustworthy. However, this openness also exposes the details of an organization's onchain activity – including its balances, counterparties, and the timing and size of its transactions. For institutions, such visibility carries a heavy cost: a fund rebalancing a portfolio, a trading desk managing positions, or a company running payroll cannot operate on infrastructure that makes confidential business parts public. An address reveals position sizes; a transaction history can expose strategy; a single payment discloses both a counterparty and an amount. For any operator moving meaningful volume, this exposure is a strong reason to keep onchain activity limited. Unlink addresses this dilemma, allowing capital to benefit from the onchain economy while protecting business secrets.
What Gets Exposed and Why It Matters
Putting capital onchain can reveal far more than the details of a single transfer. From an address alone, an observer can identify which markets a desk supplies into, how much sits in each position, and how those allocations shift over time. Position sizes indicate conviction; reallocations indicate a change of view, which together expose the kind of strategy a firm would ordinarily protect. For institutions, that level of visibility is a competitive liability. The common response has been to move activity onto a separate private chain. That removes the exposure but introduces a different problem: capital on an isolated network loses access to the liquidity, the markets, and the composability that made going onchain worthwhile in the first place. One constraint is traded for another.
How Unlink Works
Unlink is a privacy layer that deploys as a smart contract on Monad. There is no separate chain and no bridge. Users deposit ERC-20 tokens into the Unlink contract, hold balances as encrypted notes, and move value between private accounts using zero-knowledge proofs. The contract verifies each operation without learning the sender, the recipient, or the amount of a private transfer. Builders integrate through an SDK built around four operations: deposit, transfer, withdraw, and execute. Transfers between private accounts keep all details hidden. The execute operation lets a private balance fund an action on an external contract, such as supplying to a lending market, without tying that activity back to a public wallet. Integrations can run non-custodial or custodial, with keys held in the user's browser or a server holding accounts on the user's behalf. Unlink is also built to produce scoped audit views: a finance team, compliance function, or external reviewer can be granted visibility into the records they need without the full account graph becoming public. Confidentiality and reporting coexist in the same system.
Why This Belongs on Monad
Unlink works on Monad for the same reason most EVM infrastructure does. Monad is fully EVM-compatible, so Unlink extends the contracts, tooling, and liquidity that already exist on the chain rather than asking anyone to rebuild somewhere new. Privacy becomes a property that capital can carry into the existing economy instead of a reason to leave it. That is the difference that matters. Capital routed through Unlink keeps access to what is already live on Monad: Aave, Morpho, Uniswap, and Curve, with $350M in TVL alongside tokenized assets and more than 30 fiat on- and off-ramps. A position can stay private and still be supplied, borrowed against, traded, and settled across that economy. Composability is preserved, and privacy is added around the activity rather than walling it off. Privacy usually comes at a performance cost. The cryptography behind private transactions is computationally heavy, and many privacy-preserving systems throttle throughput sharply as a result. Building on Monad changes that trade-off. A chain that delivers 10,000 TPS, 400ms block times, 800ms finality, and near-zero fees gives a privacy layer enough headroom to operate without passing a performance or cost penalty to the users. A separate private chain cannot offer that combination of performance, composability, and now privacy on one EVM chain.
A Foundation for What Comes Next
Going live is the first step. Private accounts and private transfers on Monad are the base layer, and the same model extends in two directions that matter for the economy Monad is building. The first is private DeFi. Through the execute flow, a private balance can supply to a lending market, allocate across vaults, or rebalance a position without tying that activity to a public identity. Capital can do something on Monad without broadcasting the strategy behind it. The second is payments. Payroll, vendor payouts, treasury movement, and business-to-business settlement all depend on keeping amounts and counterparties confidential. These are the flows that have stayed offchain precisely because a public ledger broadcasts them. A privacy layer on a chain that already has this liquidity and live payment rails is what makes them workable onchain. Money moves on Monad. With Unlink, it can move privately, and it keeps everything else the economy makes possible once it arrives.
About Monad
Monad is a high-performance, institutional-grade Layer 1 blockchain built to power the financial layer of the internet. Fully EVM-compatible, Monad delivers 10,000 TPS, 400ms block times, 800ms finality, and near-zero fees, without requiring specialized hardware. The network runs on consumer-grade machines, supporting accessible participation and decentralized network operation: over 200 independently operated validators across 30+ countries and 55+ cities secure the chain today.
About Unlink
Unlink is a privacy layer for public blockchains that lets institutions and businesses hold, move, and use capital onchain without exposing balances, counterparties, or transaction history. It deploys as a smart contract on the chains teams already use, with no separate network and no bridge, and uses zero-knowledge proofs to keep transfers private while producing scoped audit views for compliance and reporting. Built for fintechs, payment processors, and treasury teams, Unlink supports private payments, treasury operations, and private DeFi through a single EVM-compatible SDK.