Private money, live on public chains

At 13:00 UTC today, Gloam went live on Robinhood Chain and Tempo mainnet. It has a simple job. It lets people and AI agents pay each other in stablecoins without publishing the details to everyone else. What follows is the case for why that matters, a plain account of how it works, and an honest list of what it does not do yet.

Money anyone can read

Public blockchains made a choice that suited their first users. Every balance and every transfer is visible to anyone, forever. That is how a stranger can check that the ledger adds up without trusting a bank. It is also why a stablecoin payment works less like a bank transfer and more like a postcard. Anyone who learns one of your addresses can read your balance, your income and the people you pay.

For speculation, that cost has been tolerable. For payments, it breaks fast.

Take salaries. A company that pays its team onchain publishes its payroll. Every employee can see what every colleague earns. Anyone who links a wallet to a name can see that person's pay, their savings and where they spend. No payroll provider would be allowed to work this way, yet it is the default on most chains.

Take businesses. A supplier's payments reveal its margins. A treasury's transfers reveal its runway. A competitor does not need to guess who a company's customers are when the ledger lists them. Public by default turns ordinary bookkeeping into a disclosure no company would choose.

Take AI agents. Agents are starting to pay for data, tools and compute on their own, often many times a minute. Every one of those payments is a signal. An agent's spending can reveal its strategy, its owner and the business behind it. If software is going to pay at that scale, it needs the same discretion a person expects from a bank card.

None of this is an argument against public ledgers. Settlement anyone can verify is the reason stablecoins are useful. The argument is narrower. The amount, the sender and the recipient of a payment should not be public by default.

What Gloam is

Gloam is private stablecoin payments for people and AI agents. It is self-custodial. Only you hold the keys to your money, and there is no admin function that can move it. There are no middlemen. No one holds your money for you, and no operator keeps a view of everyone's balances. That includes us. The Gloam team cannot see what you hold or who you pay.

How it works

On each chain, Gloam runs one shielded pool: a smart contract that holds everyone's private balances together. When you add money, the pool records a private note that only you can open. The contract releases money only for a valid zero-knowledge proof. The proof shows that you own a note in the pool and have not spent it, without saying which note is yours or how much it holds.

You get a private balance only you can see. Your public wallet no longer shows the money. The app reads your notes on your device and shows the total to you alone.

You can pay privately. A payment inside the pool moves value into someone else's note. On the explorer it is a private transfer, with no sender, recipient or amount.

You can pay with a claim link, which works like cash in an envelope. Whoever holds the link can claim the money, even someone who has never used Gloam. On claim, the money moves into a fresh note only they control, so the sender cannot take it back.

You can prove exactly what you need to, to whoever needs it. Private does not mean nobody can check anything. You can make a proof for one reader: that you hold at least an amount, that a payment was made, or that a payroll run added up to a total, and nothing else. Each proof names who it is for and when it expires. Anyone can check one at gloam.trade/verify without a wallet. Compliance travels with the user as a proof, instead of living with an operator as a standing view of everyone.

Agents can pay privately too. The Gloam MCP server lets an AI agent shield funds, pay for tools over x402 and prove what it paid. The owner sets the limits: which assets, how much per payment and per day, which recipients, and when access ends. The agent works with handles, never with the secrets themselves.

What went live today

On Robinhood Chain mainnet, the pool takes USDG and $GLOAM. On Tempo mainnet, it takes USDC.e, pathUSD, USDT0 and OUSD. The pool has the same address on both chains, 0x39e28cde55cab798874746ac52cb4b5cc99a0194.

Adding money and paying privately are free. Cashing out to a public address costs 0.25%.

This is a beta, so deposits are capped. Each stablecoin takes up to 500 per deposit and 25,000 in total. $GLOAM takes up to 25,000 per deposit and 250,000 in total. Cash-outs and private payments are never limited.

If your money sits on another chain, a bridge built on Relay deposit addresses lets you add it from 24 chains straight into Gloam.

The proofs use keys from a public trusted setup. Thirteen people contributed, the result was sealed with a public drand round, and the transcript is open to anyone. The deploy script would not create a pool unless its verifiers accepted proofs made with these final keys and rejected proofs made with the old development keys.

What is public, and what is not

Privacy claims are easy to overstate, so here is the line. Adding money and cashing out are ordinary public transactions. Anyone can see the address and the amount at both edges. What stays hidden is everything in between: how much you hold, who paid whom, how much, and the link between a deposit and a later cash-out.

The totals each vault holds are public on purpose. Anyone can read them at gloam.trade/transparency, straight from public nodes. You should be able to check that the pool holds what it should without trusting us.

Hiding in a pool also depends on the crowd. The mainnet pools are new, so the crowd is thin at first. It grows with use, and until it does you should treat the link between your deposit and your cash-out as easier to guess.

What it does not do yet

This is beta software holding real money. We would rather you know its limits than assume more than it offers.

The contracts and circuits were reviewed internally before launch. That review closed on 20 October with no Critical or High findings open. An external audit is planned and has not happened.

Private trading is not live. The mainnet pool has no swap code at all.

The Gloam team runs the relayer at launch. The relayer submits proofs and pays gas so your wallet does not appear next to your payment. It cannot move or redirect money, because the proof fixes where funds go. If it is down, you can send from your own wallet.

The owner is a single wallet today, and a multisig is planned. The owner can lower limits or close deposits at once, but has no way to take pooled funds. Raising a limit, adding an asset or changing a verifier waits a public 3-day timelock, so anyone can see a change coming before it takes effect.

What comes next

The next step is handing more of Gloam to the people who use it. $GLOAM holders will vote on what comes next: new assets, new chains, deposit limits and fees. The first votes run in the open. Private voting, where you prove your balance without showing your wallet, comes after. Later, relayers that help run Gloam will stake $GLOAM to take part. And we are bringing on more partners, so other apps can offer private payments to their own users.

The point

A payment between two people should be their business. Public chains got settlement right and left privacy out, and that gap matters more as salaries, invoices and machine payments move onchain. Gloam is our answer. Private by default, provable when you choose, and held by no one but you.

It is live now at gloam.trade/app. Read the privacy model before you add money, and start small.