Privacy with an operator, and privacy without one

There are now two serious answers to that question on the same chain. One keeps your payments from the public and gives an operator the full view. The other keeps them from everyone, including the people who built it, and lets you prove what you need to without showing the rest. Both are real engineering. They are built for different people, and it is worth being precise about the difference, because the word “private” now covers both.

What Tempo Zones are

A Zone is a dedicated chain rooted to Tempo. One sequencer controls block production and what is visible, and it posts commitments and validity proofs back to Tempo so money can move in and out. Tempo's docs are direct about the trust model: “The operator can see the entire Zone state.” Inside the zone, outsiders, explorers and other users see nothing. Each account sees only its own balance and history.

The operator also runs compliance. It decides who can join, which assets are allowed and how incoming funds are screened, and it can pause transfers when it needs to. Every token keeps its issuer's rules inside the zone, the same TIP-403 policies that apply on Tempo. The validity proofs mean the operator can order and include transactions but cannot take deposited money. At the edges, entering and leaving a zone stays public: a deposit shows its amount and sender, and a withdrawal shows its amount and recipient. In Deel's case, the treasury deposit is visible on Tempo, while who gets paid and how much is not.

For a company like Deel this is the right shape. It has to reconcile, support its users and report, and it already holds its contractors' records. A zone keeps those records away from competitors and onlookers while the company keeps the view it is required to keep. Zones are available to enterprises by contacting Tempo.

What Gloam is

Gloam is a shielded vault: a contract on a public chain that holds everyone's private balances together, and only releases money for a valid zero-knowledge proof. The design comes from the Zcash line of work that started in 2016, the same pattern Tornado and Railgun use. When you add money, you get a private note that only you hold the secret to. When you pay someone, a proof shows you own a note in the vault and publishes a spent-marker, without saying which note was yours. The person you pay gets a new note sealed to them.

There is no operator in that picture. Gloam's team cannot see your balance or your payments, and there is no admin function that moves your money. When the Gloam relay submits a payment for you, so your wallet never appears next to it, the proof fixes where the money goes, and the relay can only submit it or refuse. If you need someone to see something, you make a proof for that one reader: that you hold at least an amount, that a payment was made, or that a payroll run added up to a total, each bound to who it is for and when it expires. Anyone can check one at gloam.trade/verify with no wallet.

The edges are public here too, and we say so in our docs: each deposit shows its address, asset and amount, and each cash out shows its amount and destination. What stays hidden is the link between them, how much you hold, and who paid whom inside the vault. That unlinkability depends on how many people use the vault, because a crowd is what you hide in.

The compliance question, honestly

The reason operator models exist is not technical. A pool with no operator has a harder legal history. In August 2022 the US Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash. In November 2024 the Fifth Circuit ruled that its immutable smart contracts were not property that could be sanctioned, because no one owns them or can stop others from using them. In March 2025 Treasury removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list, while the criminal case against its developers went on. The law moved toward code being code. It did not hand out a blank check, and any team building a permissionless pool should say that out loud.

The research community has spent the same years on a middle path. In 2023 Vitalik Buterin and co-authors proposed Privacy Pools, where a user can prove their money came from a set of deposits that excludes known bad ones, without revealing which deposit was theirs. Zcash has offered viewing keys since its early days. The common thread is that compliance can travel with the user as a proof, instead of living with an operator as a standing view of everyone.

That is the line Gloam takes. On Tempo, issuer policies still apply at every edge of the vault: an address an issuer has blocked cannot add that token or cash it out. An issuer could even freeze the vault as a whole, a risk we document openly rather than hide. Screening against sanctions lists is built into the app and is part of our mainnet checklist. And when someone needs to see a payment, the user shows that one payment to that one reader, with an expiry, instead of an operator seeing all of them forever. It is a different bet than Zones makes. We think both bets are needed.

Who should use which

If you are an enterprise that must keep records of every payment and wants a vendor to run the rails, a Zone is a strong choice, and Tempo has done careful work on it. If you are a person, a contractor, a small team, a DAO or an AI agent, and you do not want any company to hold a view of your money, that is what Gloam is for. You do not need an introduction call. You need a browser.

There is a practical gap Zones do not try to fill, too. Privacy inside a zone covers the people the operator admits. A Gloam claim link pays anyone with a link, even someone who has never used Gloam: they tap it, claim the money on their phone with a passkey or a wallet app, and the explorer shows nothing about who got paid or how much. And agents can pay each other privately over x402 and the Machine Payments Protocol through Gloam's MCP server, with handles instead of secrets and spending limits they cannot exceed.

What is on the ground today

Gloam has run one private core on two testnets since its hardened vaults were redeployed on September 29: Tempo Moderato and Robinhood Chain. Read from the chain on October 14, the two vaults together had taken 80 deposits, settled 29 private transfers and carried 16 private payment messages. Those are public totals anyone can check on our transparency page. The amounts inside are not public, which is the point.

What works today: adding money privately in stablecoins and, on Robinhood Chain, ETH and tokenized stocks; paying a Gloam address; claim links, live since yesterday; payroll for up to 200 people per run; proofs of funds, payments and payroll totals; passkey sign-in on Tempo with network fees covered; wallet apps on phones through WalletConnect; and the agent tools, listed in the MCP Registry.

What does not, yet: mainnet. Private trading is built but switched off until its accounting is proven safe. The proving keys come from a development ceremony, and a public production ceremony plus an external audit come before any real money. The vaults are young, so their crowd is small, and you should treat unlinkability as weak until it grows. We would rather tell you that than let you assume more privacy than you have.

The point

A payments chain spent its launch day saying balances should not be public by default. We agree, and we are glad it is no longer a fringe view. The open question is whether private has to mean someone else gets the view instead. For the companies Zones serve, that trade makes sense. For everyone else, we are building the version where the only person who sees your money is you, and whoever you decide to show.

Try it on testnet at gloam.trade/app, read the privacy model, or compare us with other approaches in the comparison.