Moving Money Privately with Fluidkey

Fluidkey is a privacy app on Base. It centers around stealth addresses powered by private ENS domains and Safe smart accounts, with support for social logins (via Privy), multichain swaps (via SOCKET), and bank transfers (via Bridge).

The support for moving money onchain and offchain through Bridge is new, so let's recap the basics of Fluidkey and then get you up to speed on how to add this useful crypto ramp to your toolbox.

How Fluidkey works

Fluidkey offers onchain privacy by generating unique addresses every time you want to receive an incoming transaction.

This approach prevents external observers from linking payments to you. The general process here was possible manually before, but Fluidkey offers an automated and streamlined hub where you can readily create and manage all your one-time use addresses.

The spending UX is abstracted, too. Let's say you have $1,000 spread across 10 stealth addresses. Fluidkey allows you to spend from this sum as if you were holding it in a single wallet, so you don't have to go through the time-consuming flow of consolidating your funds with multiple transactions.

How private is Fluidkey?

Fluidkey offers unlinkability—i.e. obscuring wallet connections to outside observers. However, it doesn't provide full untraceability, as people can still trace back where stealth addresses received funds from and how these funds are spent.

In other words, you get sufficient privacy with Fluidkey.

Yet the onchain status quo is completely transparent transactions. As such, Fluidkey is a great first line of defense against wallet doxxing—it grants practical privacy without the complexities of mixers or the risks of illicit fund mingling, as it never pools funds.

How to make bank transfers on Fluidkey

If you're still new to Fluidkey, my previous 101 guide from last year covers the basics of setting up your account and sending and receiving transactions. Catch up there if you're just diving in.

Since I wrote that guide, though, Fluidkey's big addition has been its integration of Bridge, a payments platform for simplified, bank-friendly stablecoin transfers.

What does this mean for users? You can easily move money between bank accounts and onchain private wallets, adding a powerful fiat on/off-ramp to your privacy stack.

Specifically, with this feature you can receive USD and EUR transfers directly into your Fluidkey account, where the funds are automatically converted into USDC in a privacy-preserving manner. Here's how to get started:

✅ Enable bank transfers

• Head to the "Bank" tab in your Fluidkey dashboard.
• Accept Bridge’s Terms of Service to proceed.
• Complete Bridge's KYC process, which takes only a few minutes.

💰 Receiving bank transfers

• Once verified, you’ll get dedicated account details for ACH (USD) and SEPA (EUR) payments.
• Use your new bank details to receive fiat deposits.
• Funds will be converted into USDC and deposited into your Fluidkey stealth account, usually within the same day.

🪙 Sending bank transfers

• Select USDC (or another Base token) from your Fluidkey balance.
• Enter the recipient’s bank details via the Bank tab.
• Confirm the transaction, and Bridge will process the off-ramp conversion.

The Big Picture

In crypto, will stealth addresses become the default feature for personal finance, and not just a niche tool for privacy-conscious users?

Only time will tell, but if anyone's breaking ground here, it's Fluidkey. It's a new, important unlock to be able to easily maintain onchain confidentiality while receiving traditional payments like payroll, freelance earnings, etc.

This approach hints at a future where financial sovereignty and onchain usability are no longer tradeoffs. In the meantime, if privacy matters to you, consider Fluidkey to be among Base's must-try apps.