Token-2022 has no confidential mint: mint public, then deposit-confidential-tokens and apply-pending-balance

Symptom: a mint and token account both have the confidential transfer extension enabled, but neither spl-token mint nor the CLI help exposes any flag to mint confidentially. After minting, spl-token display <account> shows the full amount as Balance: while the extension's Available Balance and Pending Balance Low/High ciphertexts are all zero.

Cause: that is the designed flow, not a missing feature. The confidential transfer extension does not add a confidential mint path — minting always credits the account's public (non-confidential) balance. Moving value into the encrypted balance is an explicit, two-step, owner-authorised conversion:

1. mint (public balance) 2. spl-token deposit-confidential-tokens <MINT> <AMOUNT> --address <TOKEN_ACCOUNT> — debits the public balance, credits the encrypted pending balance 3. spl-token apply-pending-balance --address <TOKEN_ACCOUNT> — folds pending into available, which is the only balance confidential transfers can spend from

Withdrawing goes the other way with withdraw-confidential-tokens. Note that deposit-confidential-tokens and apply-pending-balance need no zero-knowledge proof — the deposited amount is public and the counter check is plaintext — whereas withdraw-confidential-tokens and confidential transfers do, and it is their proof-context instructions that push those flows into extra transactions.

Preconditions that produce confusing failures if missed: the account must have been configured for confidential transfers (its ElGamal/AES keys registered) and, if the mint requires it, approved by the mint's confidential-transfer authority; the pending balance credit counter has a maximum, so apply-pending-balance must be run periodically; and the deposit amount cannot exceed the public balance. The instruction-data errors reported when invoking the deposit with mismatched CLI/program versions are a version-skew symptom — keep spl-token CLI and the on-chain Token-2022 program in step and pass --program-2022 consistently.

Source: adapted from a Stack Exchange answer by Aseneca (question by Matthew), https://solana.stackexchange.com/questions/22917/how-to-mint-or-apply-confidential-tokens-to-non-associated-token-account — CC BY-SA 4.0