Agents that pay privately, and check before they pay
AI agents now spend real money. They pay for APIs, data, compute and each other, often without a person in the loop. Every one of those payments has two problems, and this week two Gloam partners started solving them.
1
Your agent
Gets a price back: pay 2 USDG for this
2
Agent Wormhole
Checks the payment request. Only allow goes on
3
Gloam
Pays from a private balance
4
The service
Gets paid. Nobody else sees how much, or by whom
Refuse, abstain, an error or no answer in time: nothing moves.
Two problems with agent money
The first is that it is public. Fund an agent from your wallet and the chain keeps a permanent record that anyone can read: which wallet pays for which agent, what it buys, how much it spends, and when. For a company, that is its product roadmap and its vendor list, published. For a person, it ties an agent's whole history back to their own wallet.
The second is that agents believe what they are told. When an agent asks a paid service for something, the service answers with a price, an HTTP 402 under standards like x402. That answer is just text from a stranger. It can be padded, swapped for a different one, or carry instructions written for the model instead of the human. An agent with a budget and no second opinion will pay it.
Gloam works on the first problem. Agent Wormhole works on the second. Raeto is the first platform running private agent funding in production.
Raeto: funding agents without a trail
Raeto sells AI credits on Robinhood Chain. Since October 23 it has taken payments through Gloam in production, using our SDK. It works like this:
- Each Raeto account or agent gets its own Gloam payment request link.
- Whoever is topping it up pays from their private Gloam balance. The payment moves inside the vault, so the explorer shows no amount and no link between payer and payee. An encrypted heads-up goes onto Gloam's payment board, readable only by Raeto.
- Raeto's server reads the board about every 30 seconds with
scanIncomingPayments. - Before crediting anything, it moves each payment into a fresh note only Raeto knows, with
sweepReceivedNote, through the Gloam relay. Credit happens only once that sweep lands.
The sweep is the part people miss. A private payment arrives as a note the payer created, so until the receiver moves it into a note of their own, the payer could still spend it back. Crediting only after the sweep closes that gap. Raeto's first live payment, $5, was credited in under a minute.
The partnership runs both ways. Glim, the helper in Gloam's community group, picks the model for simple questions through Raeto's routing.
What stays private, and what does not
Here is what a stranger with a block explorer can learn from a private agent top-up.
| On chain | Visible? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Who funded which agent | No | Not on chain. The payment moves inside the vault |
| How much each top-up was | No | Not on chain |
| Which payments Raeto received | No | Not on chain. Raeto sweeps each one into a note only it knows |
| Money added to Gloam | Yes | The wallet, the token and the amount, like every shielded pool |
| Raeto's cash-outs to its treasury | Yes | The amount and destination, on Raeto's schedule, not one per user |
The two public rows are the edges of the vault, and every shielded pool has them, Zcash and Railgun included, because a token contract records money going in and out. What matters is that the edges do not connect to what happens inside. We keep working on them anyway. The relay submits payments so a payer's wallet never appears next to them. Cash-outs can go out privately, split into ordinary-looking pieces and spread over time, so an amount coming out does not match one going in. And every new person and agent using the vault makes everyone in it harder to pick out.
Agent Wormhole: a check before every payment
Agent Wormhole builds security for AI agents that spend money. Its check reads a payment request before an agent acts on it: it looks for hidden instructions and tells whether the request changed since it was first seen. Since October 23 it is built into Gloam's MCP server, version 0.4.0, the tool agents use to pay through Gloam.
When an agent is about to pay, the order is fixed. First the agent's own spending limits. Then, if the operator turned the check on, the payment request goes to Agent Wormhole. Only an answer of allow lets the payment go ahead. A refusal, an abstain, an error, an answer the server does not recognise, or no answer within five seconds all mean the same thing: the agent does not pay, and nothing is spent.
It is also careful about what it shares. Agent Wormhole sees the payment request and nothing else: never a note, a balance, the wallet or a key. The payment itself still goes through Gloam privately. The check is off by default; an operator turns it on by setting GLOAM_WORMHOLE_KEY.
One honest gap: each answer comes with a signed attestation. Agent Wormhole has not yet published the exact form its check attestations are signed in, so the MCP server keeps the attestation in its result for the operator instead of verifying it itself. We will verify it on our side once that format is documented.
Put together
An agent on Gloam can now be funded without tying it to the person behind it, receive money without a public trail, and refuse to pay a price that looks wrong. Private by default, checked before it spends. None of it asks the agent's owner to trust Gloam with their money: the vault only releases funds for a valid proof, and the relay can submit a payment or refuse it, nothing more.
What comes next
Paying by name is next: send money privately to an ENS name like alice.eth, with the lookup itself kept out of view. After that, more agent platforms on the same rails as Raeto, and a growing crowd in the vault, which is the privacy feature that compounds. Gloam has been live on Robinhood Chain and Tempo mainnet since October 21; anyone can follow the public totals on our transparency page.
Try it
Builders can start with the agent docs and @gloamtrade/mcp. To top up agents privately, see raeto.cc. To add the payment check, get a key at agentwormhole.com.
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