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MagicBlock brings transaction privacy to Solana

Solana is a pretty fast blockchain at a ~500 millisecond optimistic confirmation. But even Solana has its limits, and that’s where providers like MagicBlock come in.

MagicBlock pioneered “ephemeral rollups” in 2023: just-in-time, temporary execution environments that apps can use to process transactions at sub-50ms latencies while keeping state and data availability on Solana. 

These rollups run on ephemeral validators, a pluggable runtime that existing node operators (or apps) can host themselves. Because ephemeral validators operate outside Solana’s consensus, MagicBlock pairs them with Jito restaking, requiring operators to post stake and become slashable for invalid state transitions or misbehavior. The tech was open-sourced in December 2024. 

MagicBlock announced earlier this month “private ephemeral rollups” that would be able to execute transactions inside TEE-secured enclaves, bringing institutional-grade privacy to Solana apps.

This latest release targets a “completely different market” from the onchain games that MagicBlock has historically focused on, MagicBlock’s co-founder and CEO Andrea Fortugno told me.

“With privacy, we’re targeting payments providers facilitating stablecoin payments, or private swaps and OTC trading. All these products were impossible before but are now available with ephemeral rollups because you can delegate the state, execute transactions privately and get back the state.”

Conceptually, MagicBlock’s approach seems to echo Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap — offloading execution to a separate environment.

But there is a crucial distinction: The state never leaves Solana L1. There are no bridges and no liquidity fragmentation or separate L2 token economies to manage; developers retain blockchain composability and a familiar build environment while gaining a hardware-verified privacy layer and fast latency.

Fortugno emphasized to me that ephemeral rollups are additive, rather than parasitic, to Solana. MagicBlock enables transactions that would otherwise have migrated to centralized servers, rather than siphoning activity from Solana’s base layer. It’s a framing dovetails with Solana’s “single global state + fast performance” philosophy. 

The below chart shows a daily average of 2725 active sessions in the last 30 days. Sessions are the temporary execution windows where Solana accounts have delegated state to an ephemeral rollup.

Fortugno referenced early users of MagicBlock’s technology as reflecting that vision. One example is XO, an Asia-based dating app with 1.5 million users moving its millions of social interactions onchain.

Gaming titles like Supersize and Block Stranding also use MagicBlock’s ephemeral rollups for real-time, hidden-move logic without sacrificing onchain settlement. On the markets side, Rush.trade, a perps DEX, chose ephemeral rollups for CEX-style latency, cancel-before-take sequencing and MEV-resistant order handling. 

For institutions, the pitch is straightforward: private order books, compliant payments and auditable enclaves — with Solana’s speed left intact.

It’s the summer of DATs and Solana has arrived at the party. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from these meta-defining voices on where things stand and where they’re headed.

Get your ticket today with promo code: LIGHT100 for £100 off

📅 October 13-15 | London

Whale deposit to INF:

77,380 wrapped SOL ($18 million) was swapped into INF 19 hours ago. INF is the Sanctum team’s “basket of liquid-staking tokens” yield-bearing product.

Historically, INF has outcompeted the yields of JitoSOL. Based on Sanctum’s calculator, staking 100 SOL in INF about a year ago would have yielded an additional 2.08 SOL ($484) compared to JitoSOL.