How does Kusama Shield work?

Kusama Shield is a Zero Knowledge powerd multi-asset shielded pool, allowing anyone to deposit any supported token into the shielded pool and withdraw without a link inbetween, providing unlinkable transactions.

The project is being run as several autonomuos EVM compatible smart contracts on Kusama Assethub, powered by Risc-v PVM.

Smart contract architecture:

Kusama Shield consists of 4 main contracts that interact with eachother. For a more detailed view read the Zero Knowledge Circuit section here on the documentation page.

View source:
https://codeberg.org/KusamaShield/Solidity_helpers

How anonymous is the system?

Kusama Shield provides unlinkable transactions, a more detailed guide on how this works can be found in the ZK Ciruit section.
The privacy score can be measured by the K-anonymity score. Which roughly translates to the more users that deposit and withdraws at the same time, the higher anonymity the systems gets, the goal is to get lost in the crowd.

How does it compare to Monero?

Monero relies on decoy transactions. To calculate the anonymity score of your Monero transaction we need to look at a block explorer, and calculate

\( k = \frac{\text{Total number of decoys in the block}}{\text{Total number of transactions in the block}} \)