Railgun (RAIL) has reached a key milestone that could improve DeFi privacy like never before. Privacy mania has been so strong on token prize gains, but the underlying protocols haven’t been very useful or scalable so far.
From Zcash to Tornado Cash, users could only deposit funds and protect (hide) them from the public or explorers. You can only park funds there with limited utility.
However, to move to a DeFi or use a lending protocol, one had to unprotect and move funds, making it easier to correlate and track activity – zero usability aside from hiding balances which limits existing privacy protocols.
Now, the Ethereum (ETH)-based project has successfully tested Railgun_connect on CowSwap, allowing private wallets to use DeFi platforms without raising or moving funds.
The project said,
“RAILGUN_connect is the first privacy tool of its kind and is a big step forward in making private addresses as functional as public addresses.”
The team presented the feature as a “universal plug-and-playThis will “eliminate the tedious work required to create an integration to use a DeFi application from a private balance.”
Railgun leverages zero-knowledge proofs for protected transfers, so interactions with DeFi interfaces do not compromise decentralization or privacy.
Railgun traction reaches record level
Promoting DeFi privacy at scale aligns with Ethereum’s vision and the growing appetite for such solutions.
In fact, the number of shields per day for tracking private wallets has increased sharply since 2025. At the start of 2026, the average daily shield reached an all-time high of 326, once again confirming the massive demand for privacy protection.
Source: X/Etherscan
Additionally, the cumulative volume on the privacy protocol reached a record $4.5 billion, up from $2.4 billion a year ago. This translated into growth of almost 100%, or 2x, on a year-over-year (YoY) basis.
Source: Dune
The native governance token, RAIL, has not been lagging behind amid this growing network traction. In fact, after the pullback earlier this week, the token recovered 25%.
It was part of a larger privacy coin rally after tensions between the EU and the United States eased, following US President Donald Trump’s tariff pause in favor of a possible deal with Greenland.
Source: RAIL/USD, TradingView
Final Thoughts
- Railgun unveiled Raingun_connect, a plug and play feature to scale DeFi privacy
- The Privacy Project saw a record daily shield of 326 amid growing demand for privacy solutions.
