Mirage Says Privacy Doesn’t Need a Trench Coat—Seed Round Closed and Alpha’s Dropping Like It’s 2021

Zug, Switzerland, April 15th, 2026 — In a move that’s equal parts impressive and suspiciously Swiss, Mirage—a privacy protocol for stablecoin transfers on Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains—has quietly closed its seed round led by Seed Club Ventures and Kyber Knight, because nothing says “privacy” like naming your investors in a press release. Deltatiger, Valeriy Zamaraiev, and Brian Gerrard also chipped in, presumably after checking that the whitepaper had at least one diagram with arrows.

Mirage previously dipped its toes into funding waters with a pre-seed raise via Code & State back in Q1 2025, then swam full-gorilla into the seed round by Q4 2025. Founded by Nima Rasooli in November 2024—because why wait for permission when you’ve got an idea and a caffeine problem—the protocol is tackling the crypto world’s awkward elephant: how to move digital dollars privately without looking like you’re laundering a cartoon villain’s ransom. Most solutions so far have been either slow, sketchy, or scream “I HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE” louder than a guy using Monero to buy gas station sushi.

Closed alpha access is now trickling out to the waitlisted few who didn’t give up after the third reminder email. A full mainnet launch? Slated for later in 2026, because in crypto, “later” is basically a core feature.

Most onchain privacy tools are like bad dating profiles: they promise a lot but require you to accept some truly cursed tradeoffs. Want invisibility? Congrats, now you’re interacting with a known mixer—chainalysis just added a bookmark. Want speed? Hope you like your privacy pooled with that guy who definitely stole funds from a DAO last week. Want usability? Too bad, here’s a CLI interface and a 47-step guide. Mirage’s whole vibe is: nah, we can do better.

It’s built so that using it doesn’t wave a red flag the size of Mt. Rushmore. No shared pools, no mixer graffiti on your transaction history, and settlement in seconds on fast EVM chains or under two minutes on Ethereum mainnet—because privacy shouldn’t require a meditation subscription just to wait it out.

That means Mirage actually works for real stuff, like paying your dev in Bali without leaking his salary to the entire Telegram group, or moving treasury funds without giving competitors a live feed of your burn rate. Even payroll, B2B payments, and contractor ops can finally go dark without going full cypherpunk.

"When privacy is expensive, risky, or harder than solving a Rubik’s cube blindfolded, people just quit. They retreat to KYC’d exchanges or, gods forbid, fiat. Mirage is designed so you don’t need a PhD in cryptography to pay your friend back for lunch." — Nima Rasooli, Founder of Mirage, probably while sipping espresso in a hoodie that costs more than your laptop.

Mirage doesn’t funnel your cash through a communal hot tub of anonymity. Instead, it uses transaction-specific escrow and a choreographed settlement dance that keeps sender and recipient unlinkable onchain. No new tokens, no bridging to some obscure L2 with a single active user (we see you, ZKChain7), and no need to learn a new wallet. It just works—on the chains and stablecoins you already use, like $USDT, $ETH, and $MATIC, because let’s be real, nobody’s building an empire in DAI anymore.

The goal? Make privacy boring. Like, so indistinguishable from normal transactions that even a forensic bot would shrug and move on. Recipients get clean stablecoin drops, deployments cost less than $5 on Ethereum mainnet (yes, really, at current gas), and an SDK lets wallets and dApps embed Mirage like it’s just another button, not a criminal mastermind toolkit.

"We’ve seen the pain firsthand—teams paying global contractors with stablecoins and leaving a transparent trail that screams ‘hack me’ or ‘audit me.’ Existing privacy tools are either vaporware or require a blood sacrifice. Mirage actually feels like something a CFO might approve, which is basically a miracle." — Cédric Wal