TOKYO, April 29, 2026 – On April 28, 2026, Tokyo-based Startale Group said it had partnered with Sunnyside Labs and named Privacy Boost the official privacy partner for the Startale App. That app is pitched as an everyday entry point to Soneium, the Ethereum Layer 2 from Sony Block Solutions Labs. The hook for users is self-custodial privacy inside one consumer product instead of bouncing across specialist tools.
The Startale App already bundles custody-facing features (assets, payments, ecosystem rewards, and Mini Apps). Startale plans to wire Privacy Boost in through an SDK so the protocol runs beside the rest of the stack. The sell is familiar: default public chains leak amounts, balances, and who paid whom. Startale's own release cites survey-style figures on how many crypto users rank privacy highly; treat those numbers as marketing-adjacent unless you see the underlying methodology.
Privacy Boost blends zero-knowledge proofs with trusted execution environments (hardware-isolated compute). The partners advertise sub-500 ms proof generation and throughput above 1,800 transactions per second, with custody staying user-controlled. Those benchmarks are worth the usual grain of salt until independent reviewers stress the live deployment.
Users get three advertised modes: full shielding (assets go into private pools and become private notes so the public ledger no longer shows the plain balance), private peer-to-peer transfers (amounts and counterparties obscured), and privacy-preserving payment rails aimed partly at future card-style spending.
The UI is meant to read simply for newcomers while power users still get batch private sends (payrolls, B2B, or remittance-style batches). Sensitive flows default to privacy on, with an explicit toggle if someone wants a public send.
Privacy Boost is deployed natively on Soneium (contracts plus TEE infrastructure). Startale claims third-party builders on the chain can reuse the same private transfer primitives from launch day.
Audit View is the compliance piece: transactions stay off the public ledger, but authorized parties can peel back specific records when law and regulation require it. That is the standard tradeoff label (privacy plus selective disclosure), not a guarantee about every jurisdiction your reader lives in.
Sota Watanabe, Startale Group CEO, said not every payment has to be private, but users should always have the option. Taem Park, CEO at Sunnyside Labs, framed Privacy Boost as built for consumer-scale privacy inside mini apps and payments.
Corporate backdrop, all from public messaging: Startale runs Astar Network, co-develops Soneium, and counts Sony, SBI Holdings, and the Astar Network Foundation among its backers. Sunnyside Labs points to ongoing work on Ethereum and the OP Stack with a privacy-first infrastructure focus.
Soneium exercised these privacy features on testnet before rolling them toward production mainnet; if you are reading this in 2026, assume deployment timelines in older press clips may be stale.
Future roadmap items from Startale include confidential smart contract calls, decentralized identity hooks, and cross-chain private transfers.
Sources
- Startale Group: Privacy Boost partnership (April 28, 2026)
- Markets Insider (April 28, 2026)
- Dailyhunt syndication (Bitcoin World News) (April 28, 2026)
