Privacy dollars surge: why did Railgun's monthly funding volume hit an all-time high?

Railgun processed a record $117 million in stablecoin inflows and outflows in September, with stablecoins now accounting for 77.2% of all assets moving through its privacy pool, up from 33.7% a year earlier. The protocol's wallet toolkit 11.2.0, released September 30, used Ethereum's EIP-7702 upgrade to route DeFi interactions through one-time accounts, cutting weekly unshielding calls to the old shared relay contract from 612 to 21 while total interactions held near 600 per week. September also set a record with 13,918 private transactions across Ethereum, Arbitrum, BSC and Polygon, up 65.2% year over year, and the RAIL governance token has gained 35.3% this year versus a 21.7% decline in ETH. Stakers have received 524 ETH in cumulative payouts this year, half of it since a July 22 vote raised their biweekly revenue share to 4.2% of treasury funds. Watch for the approved deployment on Base and Ambire's upcoming integration via the Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku toolkit.