Platus Documentation
Platus makes onchain privacy usable and secure.
What Platus does
- Shielded balances: Assets are locked in a Vault and represented as encrypted cryptographic notes. On-chain, only note commitments are visible. Balances, assets, and recipients remain private.
- Stealth addresses: Every payment uses a one-time recipient address, making transfers unlinkable while allowing only the intended recipient to detect and spend the funds.
- Private DeFi composability: Shielded assets can interact with any smart contract through EIP-7702 AppAccounts, enabling swaps, lending, and deposits before automatically re-shielding the resulting assets.
- Post-quantum hybrid encryption: Note encryption combines BabyJubJub ECDH with ML-KEM-768, preserving confidentiality even against future quantum-capable adversaries.
How Platus compares
Platus follows the path of Ethereum privacy but with less friction and more freedom. Compared with Tornado Cash, Railgun, and Privacy Pools, what matters is simple: cost, time, and what your funds can do once they're shielded.
| What you care about | Platus | Tornado Cash | Railgun | Privacy Pools |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| On-chain gas, per private tx | ~350k/action in a 16-action batch | ~480k per deposit / withdraw | ~1.50M per private transact, ~762k to shield | deposit ~390k, private withdraw ~620k |
| Proof generation time | 0.57 s | 1.77 s | 0.50 s – 3.11 s by circuit shape | 0.82 s |
| First-use download | ~20 MB (one Action circuit + compressed CRS BN254 elliptic-curve points) | ~11.5 MB (proving key + circuit) | ~894 MB (proving keys across 91 circuit shapes) | ~20 MB (proving key + circuit) |
| Distinct circuits you download & trust | 1 | 1 (but one pool per fixed denomination) | 91 separate circuits, each its own key | 1 |
| Protocol fee | 0.1% on deposits only | None at the protocol | Shield (0.25%) + Unshield (0.25%) = 0.5% | 0% or 0.5% |
| Can use DeFi? | Yes with app accounts | No | Yes | No |
| Fresh stealth address every tx | Yes | No | No | No |
| Amounts | Any value | Fixed (0.1 / 1 / 10 / 100 ETH) | Any value | Any value |
| Post-quantum note encryption | Yes, BabyJubJub ECDH + ML-KEM-768 | No | No | No |
| Proof system / trusted setup | Noir + UltraHonk, universal parameters, no per-circuit ceremony | Groth16, per-circuit ceremony | Groth16, per-circuit ceremony ×91 | Groth16, per-circuit ceremony |
Trusted setup security comes down to one thing: at least one honest participant.
A Groth16 ceremony is secure only if at least one participant destroys their secret randomness ("toxic waste"). If everyone colludes, proofs can be forged. While ceremony transcripts are public and fully reproducible, trust still rests on a small 1-of-N honesty assumption and must be re-established whenever the circuit changes.
Platus keeps the same 1-of-N assumption but inherits it once from a large public universal ceremony shared across all circuits. As a result, circuit upgrades require no new ceremony and thus eliminate keeping trust.