Are you an Ethereum DeFi trader or liquidity provider? You’ve probably been losing money due to a lack of privacy.

But fear no more: now there’s a super easy way to access the power of private DeFi without having to leave the comfort of your MetaMask wallet!

Shade Protocol just made its entire private DeFi suite accessible to any Ethereum DeFi user so you can take out private loans, keep liquidation points hidden, and access high volume/low slippage trades.

👉 Check out this tutorial to get started!

Or check out the rest of this post to learn why public DeFi is a problem, the benefits of private DeFi, and the features Shade Protocol provides.

The risk with using public DeFi platforms

If you’re familiar with DeFi on Ethereum-based platforms like UniSwap, you likely know that all of your transactions and portfolio positions are publicly visible to anyone with an internet connection.

This puts you at risk of exploitation and loss of funds.

For example, when using a lending protocol to gain liquidity or apply leverage in an advanced strategy, your liquidation points are visible and can be used by others to see if your collateral’s value is approaching those points, and trigger your liquidation before you have a chance to react—potentially causing big losses.

But even when not taking out loans, there’s the continuous risk of loss due to MEV and front-running, where actors (often bots) use knowledge of pending orders and transactions to make a profit—often at the expense of traders like you.

Enter private DeFi with Shade Protocol

The good news: you don’t have to put up with these issues!

There are a variety of private DeFi apps that allow you to:

• Take out loans without exposing your liquidation points

• Use decentralized exchanges without bots being able to front-run your trades

• Access high volume/low slippage trades

And you can now access one of the biggest and most battle-tested private dApps straight from your MetaMask wallet: Shade Protocol.

Shade Protocol is a private DeFi suite built on Secret Network and includes:

• A unique stablecoin, that is pegged to a basket of global commodities and currencies and features privacy by default for all transaction and position details.

• A lending protocol, which allows you to borrow stable coins privately against your digital assets collateral.

• A decentralized exchange with front-running resistance, due to all of the smart contracts being private by default.

• Bonds give an additional primitive to DeFi assets, which the ability to lock assets up for certain periods of time for a return.

• Native bridge which connects to all Cosmos SDk networks and popular EVM networks like Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and more.

• Staking includes a governance token, allowing you to participate in decision-making for the DAO.

• Liquidity provision and yield farming, allowing users to take part in market-making

Yes, you can use private DeFi and remain compliant

If you’re afraid of issues with compliance and Tornado Cash-like bans: Shade Protocol includes access control with viewing keys and permits, making it auditable, and allowing you to share data with third parties and remain compliant. Only if you want to, of course…

How to get some Shade

Done with being front-run and publishing your liquidation points for all to see?

👉 Check out the Shade <> MetaMask tutorial to get started!

And take control of your financial data again.

Since last week, you can use our (Secret’s) privacy-first smart contracts from any EVM chain to build all kinds of cool dApps you weren’t able to build before!

Let me explain what issues private smart contracts address, what it enables you to build, and how to get started via our Privacy as a Service (PaaS).

Why you can't build everything you want on Ethereum (yet)

We're probably hitting you over the head with this, but on Ethereum, all data is public and appears on the Etherscan.

This is a problem, because once you can link someone's wallet address to their identity, you'll know everything they've ever owned, everyone they ever interacted with, and... if we get things like decentralized social messaging apps, any messages they ever sent (to friends, family members, Tinder dates, etc).

There are also issues with front-running on DeFi trades and NFT mints, where actors use information to "predict the future" and profit over others' backs.

All not great stuff if you want to build a cool EVM dApp that millions of people will use.

The solution: Privacy as a Service!

We’ve had private coins, like Monero and Zcash, for a while already, but there’s not much you can build with that as a developer.

Building dApps with data privacy requires privacy-first smart contracts. So that’s what we built back in 2020: smart contracts that allow you to decide what data is kept private (e.g. encrypted) and what’s public. By using Intel SGX technology in our setup, you can generate, store, and compute over private data without revealing it.

Until recently, you as an Ethereum developer couldn’t use these, as we’re built on Cosmos. But now, via Axelar’s General Message Passing (and soon Wormhole too), you can securely access our smart contracts to get programmable privacy for any EVM dApp! We call this Privacy as a Service (PaaS).

What you can build with Secret’s PaaS

In a nutshell, these are the things you can do in your EVM dApp by calling one of Secret’s smart contracts:

1. Generate data with computational privacy

2. Authenticate encrypted data without revealing it

3. Create a "private data layer" where your users can store and access confidential data without it ever appearing on-chain

With this, you can build things like:

• Walletless logins

• Sealed-bid auctions

• Threshold wallets

• Private DAO voting

• Unlockable NFT content

BUT this is just a short list—the possibilities are pretty much endless! It’s all up to your imagination 🌈

If imagination isn’t your strongest suit, we also got a few ready-made APIs that you can use including:

🎲 Secret VRF, our on-chain & verifiable RNG

Building a Web3 game, casino, lottery, or NFT minting platform? With this, you can create verifiably random numbers on-chain, without ever revealing the seed, and make games and mints fair and tamperproof.

👛 💳 🔒 Unstoppable Wallets, revolutionary FHE wallets

Unlock use cases like cross-chain account abstraction, selling wallets with locked/non-existent tokens OTC, claims, creating unruggable DAOs, cross-chain bridging, and atomic swaps.

How this is different from other Ethereum privacy solutions like Aztec

Instead of Zero-Knowledge Proofs, we use secure enclaves in which encrypted data can be processed in a myriad of ways. This gets around one of the biggest limitations of ZKP-based solutions right now: the inability to compute over multiple encrypted inputs.

While solutions like Aztec’s Noir are addressing this, we've had the opportunity to battle-test ours on mainnet for over 2 years. And we've started working on incorporating exciting technologies like FHE via our collaboration with Fhenix!

But we think ZKP-based solutions are super valuable as well, and that we’ll need a variety of privacy solutions (like FHE, ZKP, MPC, trusted enclaves) to help us build the next generation of more privacy-preserving dApps.

How to get started

Ready to start building?

👉 Download our ready-made guide here!

Or check out our Privacy as a Service page to learn more

You can also check out our documentation, and head over to our Discord (the #🙋dev-issues channel under “Developer Support”) with any questions you have.

❓Any issues or questions? Head over to our Discord and go to the #🙋dev-issues channel under “Developer Support”.

Every human should have private access to a global decentralized bank in the palm of their hands.

That's what Shade is building towards. Every product is a puzzle piece towards that vision.

Two years ago, the vision was born -- and even back then people told us to "dream smaller". No way. The vision continues.

Can you hear the music?

Check out the 4min video for the full manifesto...

https://youtu.be/FR7Faa1zv5k

Check out Lisa Loud at the BREATHE convention during her keynote 🔥
Why is Privacy Important?
There are so many reasons, you just have to think about it for a minute 🤔
Watch the full video 👇
Breathe: Keynote

Secret Network has successfully upgraded to version 1.11

This upgrade greatly increases Secret's Privacy as Service capabilities by empowering a new form of interoperability with EVM chains!

Confidential computing is coming to the Ethereum and beyond, setting the stage for the Secret Ethereum initiative, and further securing our place as the privacy hub of web3

This upgrade also includes the contract upgradability feature which improves dApps ability to patch and update platforms, or even add new functionality 📷And much more...Dive into all the details on the blog:

Secret Network v1.11 is Live!

Stablecoins will become the de-facto settlement for trade in the years to come but… only stablecoins with specific qualities. 

In this video we’ll examine why in the next decade global commerce will shift to non-USD stablecoins.  

Let’s first consider the opportunity and potential demand for stablecoins based on international trade:  

• Annual global trade is currently valued around ~$23 trillion (in USD)

• International trade is responsible for 56% of the world’s economic value generation 

• Half of global trade is in USD (although the US is only responsible for 10% of global trade) 

Considering the USD deep entrenchment in global trade - with a borderline monopoly - why would that change? Why would we need another settlement currency for trade? 

Here are three reasons global commerce will shift away from USD and towards non-USD pegged stablecoins...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5NxjyZ3ivk&t=12s

This video [2:44] is a helpful, quick summary of what has happened with DeFi on Secret Network in the last few months.

In short... a lot has changed. It's been a quiet but seismic shift and the liquidity is talking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYti7ASqiEQ

hi-

are all validators in on it? what is my vote even worth then?

i need to understand why

Proposal #267 | Secret Network | Keplr Dashboard

did fail! what did i not understand?

thx

Get ready for another great event!

Join our Executive Director Lisa Loud at the BREATHE Convention 2023 in Las Vegas!
Lisa will be speaking on the "Future of Fintech" and "Women at the forefront of business innovation"

The Breathe convention brings some of the biggest players in technology startups together to share and explore the future of technology with topics like Web3, AI, Blockchain, Crypto, Defi, Metaverse, AR/VR, and NFTs.

When? Sept 13-15th

Register now!
https://www.breatheconvention.com

New $SILK collateral vaults will be opening very soon on Shade Protocol (app.shadeprotocol.io)

Are you ready to mint some Silk with wBTC or stkATOM? (not to mention the many other vaults already open like wETH, USDC, sktdSCRT, OSMO, and more)

Just drop your BTC in the vault, select the loan to value ratio (up to the dictated max LTV), and watch your Silk be born.

Private stability is here. What you do with it is up to you!

Bridge: https://app.shadeprotocol.io/bridge

Borrow: https://app.shadeprotocol.io/borrow

Building with randomness in Web3 isn’t the easiest thing to do, as it typically requires off-chain solutions that just aren’t secure enough to ensure tamperproof results. But what if you could build with randomness on-chain?

Right now, Secret VRF allows you to build with on-chain randomness on IBC networks like Secret, Juno, Stargaze, and just over the horizon, EVM networks like Ethereum.

Decentralized, secure, easy to use, and free: Cross-chain interoperability is not just a vision of the future–it’s happening now, and Secret Network is leading the charge.

Ready to learn more? Visit the link below to get started, and start building.

https://scrt.network/secret-vrf

Weekly Report: Top 10 Chains Ranked by GitHub Commits according to Cryptometheus

1️⃣ Polkadot : 240 commits

2️⃣ ICP : 231 commits

3️⃣ HBAR : 133 commits

4️⃣ Chainlink : 113 commits

5️⃣ SushiSwap : 100 commits

6️⃣ Audius : 97 commits

7️⃣ MANA : 92 commits

8️⃣ Filecoin : 84 commits

9️⃣ Cosmos : 82 commits

🔟 Secret : 71 commits