Getting Started
How It Works
A plain-language walk through what actually happens when you bank with AIDOS — from deposit to spend to managed yield — and why none of it ends up readable on-chain.
The core idea
On a normal blockchain, your balance and every transfer are public numbers. AIDOS replaces those public numbers with commitments — cryptographic stand-ins that prove a value exists without revealing it. The protocol can check that your money is real and that the math adds up, yet it can never read the amounts. Privacy isn’t a mode you switch on; it’s the only state your money is ever in.
Three primitives, one experience
1. You deposit
You move funds in — by card/IBAN on-ramp or an on-chain transfer. The protocol mints a shielded balance (e.g. zkUSDC): a commitment that represents your money as encrypted state, not a public ledger entry. From this moment, your total is mathematically opaque to AIDOS, to chain observers, and to anyone trying to reconstruct your finances later.
2. You spend
When you pay with the Aidos Card, the app unshields exactly the purchase amount and nothing more, and generates a zero-knowledge proof that you hold sufficient funds — without revealing how much you hold. The merchant settles in ordinary USDC over normal Mastercard rails. What the chain records is a single line: USDC moving from the Aidos pool to a merchant. Your total, history, and the rest of your portfolio never appear.
3. You earn — privately
Deposits can earn yield while staying shielded: your APY is visible, your yield amount is not. If you’d rather have it managed, you deploy an Aidos Agent into a hardware secure enclave (TEE). The agent reads your portfolio and trades on your behalf, but the enclave is sealed — even the machine’s operator can’t see inside. You verify it’s running your exact strategy through remote attestation.
4. You swap — without a trace
Trades route through the Darkpool: orders never hit a public mempool, so there’s nothing for MEV bots to front-run or copy-traders to clone. Orders are matched in batch auctions at fair midpoint prices, and only a single ZK proof — carrying no amount, pair, or trader address — settles on-chain.
5. You prove only what you choose
When a regulator, lender, or counterparty needs assurance, you use selective disclosure: generate one cryptographic proof of exactly that fact — “KYC passed”, “funds sufficient”, “not sanctioned” — without exposing your documents, balance, or history. Compliance without surveillance.
What the chain actually sees
| Hidden from everyone | Visible on-chain |
|---|---|
| Balances, totals, transaction counts, counterparties, yield, spending patterns, salary, strategy, P&L. | Valid ZK proofs that the math is sound, and the occasional settlement line to a merchant or counterparty — never an amount that ties back to you. |
You always hold the keys
Where to next
New to the vocabulary? See Key Concepts. Want the engineering view? Read the Architecture, or jump into a product: Aidos App, Agent, Darkpool.