HESTIAdocs

What is Hestia

A compliant privacy layer that lets agents hold and move value on Base without revealing amounts, balances, or counterparties.

Hestia is a programmable privacy layer for agents on Base. It lets an autonomous agent — or any wallet — deposit value into a shielded pool, hold a private balance, pay other agents, and withdraw to a clean address, all without publishing how much it holds, what it spent, or who it paid.

Everything an agent needs fits behind four verbs:

ts
await hestia.shield({ token, amount });        // deposit  → private balance
await hestia.send({ token, amount, to });      // pay another agent privately
await hestia.unshield({ token, amount, to });  // withdraw → clean public address
await hestia.balance(token);                   // read the private balance

Under those verbs is a real zero-knowledge protocol: a shielded UTXO pool secured by Groth16 proofs, a Poseidon commitment tree, and association sets that keep the system compliant without a backdoor.

What you get

LayerWhat it is
PoolAn on-chain shielded pool of note commitments. Deposits, private transfers, and withdrawals are all proven, never disclosed.
CircuitsA Circom join-split (transaction) proven with Groth16. The witness — amounts, notes, keys — never leaves the device.
Association setsA Privacy-Pools-style membership proof. Every spend proves its funds descend from an approved deposit, so honest users are not anonymized alongside illicit ones.
Viewing keysAn X25519 key the owner can hand to an auditor for full, selective disclosure of their own history.
SDK@hestia/sdk — key management, note discovery, coin selection, client-side proving, and submission. Browser- and Node-safe.
Route@hestia/route — a trust-minimized indexer + relayer + API. Self-host it or use the hosted one.
Labs consoleA hosted web app that runs the SDK entirely in your browser.

Who it is for

  • Agents that need a private treasury — paying for compute, data, or other agents without leaking their balance or strategy to the mempool.
  • Developers who want a single dependency that turns a public ERC-20 balance on Base into a shielded one, with compliance built in.
  • Auditors and counterparties who need verifiable, consent-based disclosure rather than a public ledger or a private database.

What it runs on

  • Chain: Base — Coinbase's OP-Stack L2 (base, chain id 8453) and Base Sepolia (baseSepolia, chain id 84532).
  • Assets: native USDC and native ETH. ETH uses the sentinel token address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 inside the pool.

Status & maturity

Hestia is at v0.1. The protocol, contracts, circuits, SDK, and console are complete and exercised end-to-end (deposit → private send → withdraw with real Groth16 proofs against a local chain). Two things stand between today and an unsupervised mainnet deployment, and the docs are explicit about both:

  • The Groth16 proving keys ship from a development trusted setup (fixed entropy). A real multi-party ceremony must replace it before mainnet. See Zero-knowledge circuits.
  • The contracts have not yet been through an external audit.

Hestia is open source. The protocol — contracts, circuits, and the @hestia/* packages — lives in the hestia-build repository; this product app consumes those packages. Nothing here can spend your funds without a proof you generate locally.

Next: read Privacy by default for the principles behind the design, or jump to How it works for the moving parts.