What is Armada?
Armada is a privacy layer for on-chain finance: a shielded pool where USDC can be deposited, transferred, and withdrawn privately — across chains, and optionally earning yield — without publishing who paid whom, how much, or what a balance is.
Public blockchains are transparent by default. That transparency is what makes them programmable, but it is also a liability for anyone running real financial operations on-chain.
Why Armada exists
INFO
This section summarizes the reasoning laid out in Armada's privacy thesis.
As stablecoins settle a growing share of global value, the transparency of public chains becomes an operational risk rather than a curiosity. The exposures are concrete:
- Payroll reveals personnel and compensation.
- Vendor payments expose commercial relationships.
- Treasury movements broadcast balances, runway, and strategy.
Chain surveillance grows more capable and more valuable as more of the economy moves on-chain. Existing privacy tools have mostly remained niche, consumer-facing applications — not something a treasury, custodian, or payments provider can build on.
Armada takes a different position: privacy as infrastructure, not an app. As HTTPS did for the web, privacy should disappear into the custody, treasury, and payments products organizations already use, rather than being a separate destination they visit. The result is privacy that does not require changing how an organization works.
The shared-pool network effect
Armada concentrates activity into a single shared shielded pool rather than spreading it across isolated privacy products. A participant's privacy comes from being indistinguishable among everyone else transacting in the same pool, so privacy strengthens as more products and organizations use it. A larger, busier pool is a stronger pool.
What Armada provides
- A shielded pool on a hub chain — shield USDC in, hold and move it privately, unshield back out whenever you want.
- Cross-chain settlement — USDC enters and leaves the pool from multiple chains via Circle's CCTP; you can shield on one chain and unshield to another.
- Shielded yield — earn on shielded USDC through an integrated vault without revealing your identity or balance.
- Credibly neutral access — pool access is unconditional by design. The protocol's governance rules forbid gating pool use on disclosure, allowlists, or identity checks, and that neutrality is a constitutional invariant rather than a current-team policy.
- Ownership and governance — the ARM token is an ownership stake in the protocol, carrying control over its parameters, treasury, upgrades, and eventual wind-down, and tying team token unlocks to real protocol revenue.
Durability
Institutional operations cannot depend on privacy that might be switched off, gated, or redefined later. Armada's core is therefore built to be durable: the cryptographic pool and its access guarantees are immutable, and the parts that are governable are bounded by explicit, public rules.
Status
ARM, governance, the treasury, and the revenue-lock and wind-down contracts are live on Ethereum mainnet. The shielded pool, fees, shielded yield, and cross-chain spokes are live on testnet and ship to mainnet in a later launch. These docs describe the protocol as it will operate once fully launched.
Where to go next
- Core concepts — the vocabulary: shielding, notes, nullifiers, keys, hub-and-spoke, relayers.
- Architecture at a glance — the moving parts and how they fit together, in one diagram.
- Building an integration? These docs cover the protocol conceptually; the TypeScript SDK reference documents the actual API.