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# Privacy Shield

Privacy Shield uses Ethereum Privacy Pools to move eligible ETH from a public
account into WalletChan's wallet-wide Shielded ETH balance.

It is available in production on Chromium and hidden on Firefox.

## Before you start

* The production pool is on Ethereum mainnet.
* The minimum Shield amount is 0.01 ETH.
* A 0.5% protocol fee is added to the public wallet debit.
* You also need normal Ethereum transaction gas.
* Back up the separate [Shield recovery
  phrase](/security/backups#shield-recovery-phrase).

## Shield

1. Switch Home to **Private** and choose **Shield**.
2. Select an eligible public source account.
3. Enter ETH or USD, or use the percentage/MAX control.
4. Review the exact public debit, Shielded ETH received, protocol fee, gas, and
   privacy explanation.
5. Complete the normal pinned transaction confirmation.

MAX accounts for gas and the protocol fee instead of spending the full public
ETH balance.

## Account support

Private-key, seed-phrase, Ledger, and Bankr source accounts can use supported
Shield paths. Ledger requires hardware approval. Safe and view-only accounts
cannot Shield.

An agent password cannot initialize, prepare, submit, reveal, restore, or
recover Privacy Shield authority.

## Deposit lifecycle

After the Ethereum receipt, the deposit enters compliance/association-set
processing. WalletChan separates:

* Submitted/confirming public transaction.
* Compliance pending.
* Ready private balance.
* Recovery or definite failure.

The UI presents an approximate one-hour compliance expectation and caps
progress below completion until the required state is actually observed.
Closing WalletChan does not cancel the operation.

## What privacy does and does not hide

The public Shield deposit is visible onchain. A private relay withdrawal is
designed to reduce the direct public link between deposit and recipient, but
amounts, timing, external behavior, relayer/network observations, and public
recovery choices can reduce privacy.

Privacy is a property of the whole usage pattern, not a guarantee from one
button.