After V. Buterin gave some funds to the Railway project, I was curious to try it. I am a sucker for all anything that boosts privacy. That is why I wrote clear-wallet. I also used a lot of privacy tech long before web3.

Since Tornado Cash was battered, it's still used a lot, but people tend to stay away from it, as when dealing with third-party entities, you might encounter all kinds of regulatory issues.

To be honest I think the Tornado Saga was a disaster not only for the crypto space but in general because let's face it, people should be provided their privacy rights. People don't understand that if we want to restrict privacy we should do so starting with people who are most capable of abuse. Examples: public offices, extremely wealthy people, powerful institutions, etc. These are the entities that should have the least privacy, but in reality, it's the inverse.

The average Joe who is incapable of doing large-scale abuses has his rights of privacy intruded on, and the people who are vulnerable to corruption and large scale-abuses, the powerful entities have all the privacy in the world, so privacy for me but not for thee. Such tendencies create an unhealthy police society that hinders our ability to feel safe, avoid unjust persecution, incentivize good relations and communications, express ourselves freely, etc.

Back to Railway, I used it with the desktop wallet provided. It works by generating proofs. You can shield assets and send them privately. It supports various EVM networks, but IMO, the best part is that it supports Polygon, which is the cheapest.

One characteristic I didn't appreciate is that the Railway desktop wallet only supports importing wallets by mnemonics but not by using PKs. That will force you to create an unnecessary wallet and do an additional transfer if you only have the PK.

In a simple scenario to anonymize some assets, you would do the following steps:

1 - create two new wallets ( wallet-1, wallet-2)

2 - transfer an asset to the first wallet-1 that will always be public from the personal wallet

3 - shield & transfer the asset from wallet-1 into wallet-2 ( wallet-2 will be the private one)

4 - unshielded the asset from wallet-2 into wallet-2 5 use your assets from wallet-2 not linked with the rest of the wallets

I would say UI is pretty simple for someone with a bit of EVM knowledge. I know that the Railway project even has an SDK to integrate it into any EVM wallet. But in my case, I would not rush adding it to Clear Wallet or most of the wallets because it adds a lot of complexity for the user. Specialized Railway wallets make the most sense. Also, some steps in Railway will take some time, and if you don't know what you are doing you'll potentially lose funds.

In conclusion, in my case, the protocol is useful and while I only tested it with ERC20 it will work with other standards too. I would recommend using it on Polygon because it's probably the cheapest, it might cost a few $ to complete the cheapest anonymizing route, but IMO in most cases that's worth it.