— Swish Cash (@swishdotcash) May 20, 2026
Solana already has credible privacy protocols. To pay with any of them, you had to learn how it works first. The missing piece was never another protocol. It was the layer above them: routing, distribution, and UX.
That is the whole Swish insight, and it generalizes past privacy. I read about Swish and it inspired this post. Swish lives on Solana mainnet at swish.cash. You pick a recipient. You pick an amount. The payment goes through privately, and you never choose a protocol or learn how one works. Great UX abstracts the protocols on its users’ behalf.
I like this idea because different protocols - privacy protocols especially - simply confuse the people trying to use them.
The protocols are good. The problem is what they ask of the person paying.
Each one implements privacy with different math, and that math has to live somewhere. Handed straight to the user, it lives in the interface. One uses shielded balances around an encrypted pool, deposits in and withdrawals out. One wraps SOL into a privacy-aware token you unwrap on the other side. One uses ephemeral wrappers around regular accounts. So before you can send $20 privately, you have to know which protocol the recipient can even receive on, manage a wallet for it, sign a session message, and wait through its particular confirmations. Send to someone on a different protocol and you start over.
Each protocol locks users into its own privacy track. And because the tracks never meet, the choice is not a menu. It is a barrier.
The interface is leaking the cryptography. That is the whole problem in one line.
It is not a flaw in any protocol. It is what happens when primitives get handed straight to the person trying to pay. We watched it play out with nearly everyone who tried: they opened a wallet, read about shielding and wrapping, asked whether it was worth it, and went back to a public send. A payment that should have been private just wasn’t.
Interfaces are the problem. One of my favorite books, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, makes the standard plain: the interface should be self-evident. Most users are not crypto-native, and most should not even know crypto is running behind the scenes.
Every road but one ends in more fragmentation. The answer that kept holding up was the layer above. Aggregate the protocols that already exist, and hide the choice.
So how many protocols are we talking about?
Solana Compass indexes about 1,664 projects, and new ones appear constantly. I did a quick online search and found that the reusable ones - the settlement rails, financial primitives, and infrastructure networks, not the memecoins and front ends - organize into twenty-four categories. Execution. Credit. Privacy. Payments. Bridges. Data. Authorization. Assets.
Each category has more working options than one product could ever use. Execution alone: Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Meteora, Phoenix. Credit: Kamino, Loopscale, marginfi, Huma, Maple. Privacy: Arcium, Helius Privacy, Umbra, Privacy Cash. Payments: Solana Pay, Sphere, TipLink, Streamflow. Cross-chain: Wormhole, deBridge, Mayan, CCTP. Data: Pyth, Switchboard. Authorization: Squads. Assets: Metaplex, Token-2022.
The point was never any single name. It is that every primitive a financial application needs already exists, in multiple working versions, on one chain.
That is the abundance.
So what is missing? Not protocols. Look at what happens when a product wants to use them. Someone has to pick a protocol per function, learn its interface, manage its wallet, and string the pieces together by hand. Intent dies in the seams.
User intent -> routing layer -> best protocol or combination of protocols -> settlement -> distribution
That pipeline is the missing layer. Swish built it for privacy. I envision a routing product that coordinates across the whole stack, and the choice per function is already embarrassingly wide:
| Function | Protocols |
|---|---|
| Execution | Jupiter or Titan |
| Credit | Kamino or Loopscale |
| Confidentiality | Arcium or Umbra |
| Delivery | Solana Pay or Sphere |
| Cross-chain movement | Wormhole or CCTP |
| Data | Pyth or Switchboard |
| Authorization | Squads or Asigna |
| Assets | Metaplex or Token-2022 |
Solana does not primarily lack protocols. It lacks a universal intent, routing, distribution and UX layer that makes the protocols disappear beneath the outcome. The protocols are the wealth. The routing layer is what turns that wealth into abundance.
If you are a founder of one of these Solana protocols, feel free to DM me on X and tell me why I should update this post to mention your project.