Apex, Founder of Veil: Protocol to Shut Down, Deposits Halted Effective Immediately

Veil—a zero-knowledge privacy project founded by Apex, creator of the zk privacy protocol and previously backed by Coinbase Ventures—will officially shut down starting November 9. On that day, Apex announced the team would immediately stop accepting new deposits; the frontend interface and relay services will remain operational until December 21, 2026; thereafter, users may still withdraw assets via command-line tools. He acknowledged that, after two years of development, the project failed to achieve scalable real-world adoption of its intended privacy solution: although it experienced a period of active usage, that momentum did not sustain; moreover, Veil’s privacy guarantees were inherently dependent on network scale—declining user numbers directly shrank the anonymity set and weakened privacy protections. Over recent months, the protocol also failed to consistently deliver on its core value proposition. Apex noted that while Veil ultimately did not resolve the foundational challenges it originally set out to address, he remains convinced that privacy is the most difficult problem in crypto to date—and extended his gratitude to all supporters.