Ekubo enables private swaps on Starknet for shielded tokens

Ekubo, the dominant automated market maker on Starknet, has added support for private swaps of shielded tokens, letting traders execute transactions without linking their identity or wallet history to the trade. The feature builds on Starknet’s STRK20 privacy framework and routes through a specialized intermediary called the ShieldedSwapRouter.

For a protocol that already controls roughly 60% of AMM total value locked on Starknet, the addition of on-chain privacy is a meaningful expansion of what concentrated liquidity DEXs can offer.

How the privacy layer actually works

Zero-knowledge proofs and Merkle proofs work together to confirm that a user has valid funds and authorization to trade, without ever broadcasting who that user is.

Practically, the flow works like this: a user’s shielded token balance sits inside a privacy contract, the ShieldedSwapRouter constructs the necessary proofs, and then it hooks into Ekubo’s existing ILocker callback interface to execute the swap inside a standard liquidity pool. The pool itself sees a normal trade. The identity of the person behind it stays hidden.

One important caveat: swap amounts and price impacts remain visible on-chain. Privacy here means anonymity of the trader, not secrecy of the trade size.

The ShieldedSwapRouter charges a 30 basis point fee for facilitating this process, on top of Ekubo’s standard pool fees.

Why this matters for Starknet’s DeFi ecosystem

Ekubo announced the anonymous swap capability on March 10, 2026, with implementation confirmed in the months that followed. The first highlighted use case was strkBTC, a shielded representation of Bitcoin on Starknet, which can now be swapped privately through Ekubo’s pools.

The design choice to route private and public swaps through the same liquidity pools avoids fragmenting liquidity into separate isolated pools, which has undermined previous DeFi privacy implementations. Public traders keep their deep liquidity; private traders get anonymity without paying a slippage premium for it.

What the integration does not change is Ekubo’s core architecture. The protocol’s concentrated liquidity model, its fee structure for public swaps, and its position in the Starknet ecosystem remain unchanged. The new code path runs through the ShieldedSwapRouter and the Obelysk-built contracts rather than touching Ekubo’s core pool contracts directly.

For traders on Starknet, shielded tokens like strkBTC need to be held in a compatible shielded balance before the private swap route becomes available. The swap itself then executes through Ekubo’s pools with the same price discovery and liquidity depth as any public trade, minus the identity footprint.