# What is Kakushi Money is private. Not secret, not anonymous, just private in the ordinary way every bank, payroll system, and brokerage already assumes. Your balance is your business. Public blockchains broke that default by putting every balance, counterparty, and amount on a permanent, world-readable ledger. Kakushi puts the privacy back without leaving the chains you already use. A Kakushi zone is a private execution environment you operate on top of a public chain like Base. It behaves like the EVM you know, with one difference: balances and transaction history are visible to you and to the account holder, and to no one else. There is no new chain to adopt, no token, and no new wallet for your customers. You run the zone, you keep the customer relationship, and the privacy is the default state of the system. ## How it works at a glance Four parties, four different views of the same zone: * **The public** sees only what crosses the boundary: a deposit entering the zone and a withdrawal leaving it. Everything in between is invisible. * **The operator** (you) sees every account and every transaction in the zone, the way a bank sees its core ledger. * **The account holder** sees their own account, the way a bank customer sees their own statement. * **The regulator** sees whatever you disclose through legal process, exactly as today. Funds enter through a portal contract on the host chain. The portal locks the canonical asset and the zone mints a representation backed one to one. Funds leave the same way in reverse: burn the representation, release the canonical asset. Every state transition is verified with a proof, so you cannot create balances out of thin air, invent a withdrawal, or break the backing. The cryptography enforces honesty. The zone enforces privacy.  ## Who it is for Kakushi is one substrate that serves any institution that needs to move money on-chain without making it public. * **Banks** issuing tokenized deposits, with private interbank settlement zone to zone. * **Stablecoin issuers and infrastructure platforms** giving their own customers private balances and transfers. * **Payments companies and PSPs** settling across borders without exposing flows. * **Fintechs and neobanks** offering real on-chain accounts that are not public to the world. * **Payroll and contractor platforms** paying thousands of people without publishing a single salary. * **Trading and treasury teams** holding positions and cash without broadcasting them. ## Key concepts A short glossary. Each is covered in depth in [Core concepts](/concepts/zones-and-trust). * **Zone**: the private execution environment you operate. A private EVM with a single sequencer, which is you. * **Operator**: the institution running the zone. Sees everything inside, submits batches to the host chain. * **Host chain**: the public chain the zone settles to. Base is the primary host. * **Portal**: the host-chain contract that locks canonical assets on deposit and releases them on withdrawal. * **Canonical asset**: the real asset on the host chain, for example USDC. It stays locked in the portal while it is represented inside the zone. * **Zone representation**: the one-to-one backed balance a customer holds inside the zone. A tokenized claim on the locked canonical asset. * **Virtual address**: a host-chain address that routes incoming funds to a zone account, the way a bank virtual account number routes deposits into your real account. Many can map to one account. * **Batch**: a group of zone transactions settled to the host chain together, with one proof. * **Proof**: the cryptographic guarantee that a batch represents an honest state transition. * **Verifier**: the host-chain contract that checks a proof. Proof-agnostic by design.