Miden's privacy chain is live with real money. Private from everyone except the validators, for now.
The Polygon spinout opened an invite-only partner mainnet on Oct. 26. Your phone proves each transaction with STARKs, usually in under three seconds, and the chain stores only hashes of your account. Balances are capped below $1,232.462, a nod to Miden's favorite prime.
The guardrails: validators get encrypted copies of your private inputs to double-check proofs, and enough of them together can decrypt specific transactions after a major exploit. Swaps are public, block production is centralized, and the network resets before public mainnet.
Founder Bobbin Threadbare calls it bank-level privacy now, Zcash-level later. The bank part shipped on time.
Source: Bankless