Umami adds shielded tez transactions and makes a long-standing protocol feature easier to explore
Privacy on Tezos isn’t new, but it hasn’t always been easy to use. While the protocol has supported shielded transactions for some time, they’ve largely stayed out of sight for most everyday users.
With a recent update, Umami Wallet brought support for shielded tez transactions directly into the wallet. It’s not a brand-new concept, and it’s not the first time this functionality appears on Tezos, but it does make privacy more accessible and easier to use in practice.
To understand why this matters, it helps to step back and look at what shielded transactions actually are, and why privacy looks very different on a public blockchain than it does in everyday finance.
Why Privacy Matters on a Public Blockchain
Most people don’t think much about blockchain privacy until they imagine using it in a normal, everyday setting.
Take a simple example: paying for a coffee using a public blockchain. The payment itself might be small, but the person receiving it can see far more than just the price of the coffee. They can see the address the payment came from, how much it holds, and every other transaction associated with it. That information is public by default and remains so indefinitely.
In traditional finance, this would feel unusual. Paying someone doesn’t give them access to your full bank account history. Yet on most blockchains, that level of exposure is the norm.
Privacy in this context isn’t about secrecy or avoiding responsibility. It’s about basic financial boundaries, not publishing more information than necessary just to make a payment. For individuals, this can mean reducing risks like profiling or doxxing. For businesses, it can mean protecting counterparties, strategies, or cash flows that don’t need to be public.
Shielded transactions exist to bring blockchain usage closer to these everyday expectations.
What “Shielded Tez” Actually Means
On Tezos, privacy is achieved using Sapling, a privacy technology originally developed in the Zcash ecosystem and later integrated into Tezos in 2021. Shielded transactions are handled through smart contract systems supported by the protocol. Each system manages its own set of private transactions, which we can refer to as a shielded set.
You can think of a shielded set as a part of the chain where transactions are still validated and enforced, but their details are private. Amounts and counterparties don’t appear on block explorers, even though the network can still confirm that all the rules are being followed. The chain still enforces correctness and prevents double-spending.
Like with any blockchain using Sapling technology, the privacy a shielded transaction provides depends on the size and activity of the shielded set. The larger and more active the set, the stronger the privacy.
In practical terms, shielded tez can allow users to transact on Tezos without publishing their full financial history to the public by default. That’s the core idea, and it’s enough to understand why this feature exists.
How Shielded Transactions Work in Umami
Umami makes shielded transactions easy to use with a familiar wallet interface. The process works in three main steps:
Shield your tezFrom your normal account, you can move funds into a separate shielded address (they start with “zet…”) using the “Shield” button. This transfers your tez into the shielded set, where transaction details are private.
Transact privatelyOnce your tez is in the shielded set, you can send shielded transactions between shielded addresses within the same set. These transfers do not appear on block explorers, keeping amounts and counterparties private within the shielded set.
Unshield when neededIf you need to interact with dApps or services, you can move your funds back to a normal address using the “Unshield” button. The unshielding action is visible on-chain, but the activity inside the shielded set remains private.
To further protect privacy, Umami handles the fees required for shielded transactions through a dedicated account. This means you don’t need to pay those fees from your normal address, which could otherwise make it easier to correlate shielded activity with publicly visible transactions.
Try It, Break It, Get Comfortable With It
If you’ve never used shielded transactions before, the best way to understand them is simply to try them with small amounts and see how the flow works in practice. Shielding, sending between shielded addresses, and unshielding again is much easier to grasp once you’ve gone through it yourself.
Features like this tend to feel abstract until they’re familiar. Wallet-level support makes experimentation low-risk and approachable, and that’s often how more advanced features slowly move from “interesting” to “normal”.
There’s also room for this to grow. Tezos already supports shielded transfers beyond tez itself, opening the door to future support for shielded token transfers, something we’ve already seen explored on platforms like Shield Bridge. Bringing similar capabilities into wallets over time would make private transactions even more practical across the ecosystem.
Personally, I’d also like to see more wallets and applications converge around shared shielded sets, rather than each tool creating its own isolated one. Privacy strength improves with activity and liquidity, and concentrating usage makes shielded transactions more effective for everyone.
Umami’s update doesn’t try to solve everything at once, and that’s fine. It gives users a clean entry point into of Tezos’ privacy. What comes next will depend on how many people decide to actually explore it, so don’t just read about it, go test it!
Shielded Tez Comes to Umami was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
