I spent an hour looking over @Seismic documentation and their project is a game changer for onchain privacy. Instead of privacy on a wallet level that just hides transaction information, their system implements privacy at the protocol level. How? Through shielded variables.

Solidity is a programming language used for developing smart contracts. Since a blockchain is a public ledger, the variables used within a smart contract will also inherently be public. Here's a sample contract that tracks how much ETH each wallet added to it (read green text)

While a public ledger is great for a lot of things, it's not great for businesses that want to move onchain but don't want everyone to know the info of every transaction they're involved in. Seismic solves this through the introduction of shielded variables.

Shielded variables work the same way as normal Solidity variables but without revealing transaction data. Only those directly involved in the transaction can see the unshielded data, while everyone else can view the transaction itself but none of the actual variable values.

If we were to implement these shielded variables into the contract, here's how the new outputs would look like onchain

How is this different from Zero Knowledge proofs? ZK proofs take the entire transaction and store it offchain, only returning a mathematically proven proof that the transaction is valid. @Seismic operates fully onchain and encrypts the variables themselves rather than the entire transaction. Their system embeds privacy at the core of the chain's operations instead of only providing it at the transactional level.

I'm very excited about this project and its potential for taking onchain privacy to the next level. Cw to see what @Lyron - who I actually got to meet recently at @Penn Blockchain 2025 conference, awesome dude - and the rest of the @Seismic team do with this project!