The Gloam thesis
Stablecoins are becoming how businesses and AI agents pay each other, and every one of those payments is public. Gloam makes them private, and lets the payer prove exactly what someone needs to see.
On a public chain anyone can see who paid whom, how much, and when. Pay your team in USDC and every salary sits on the explorer. Pay a supplier and competitors read your costs. Run an AI agent and its spending shows what it buys.
Payroll today, on any explorer
The same payroll with Gloam
Illustration. Names and amounts are examples.
The people building stablecoin payments say the same thing. Paradigm's Matt Huang calls public payments "a non-starter for many businesses". Tempo's own launch post says payroll on a public ledger would publish every salary. JPMorgan lists privacy beside compliance and finality as what institutions need.
It is a safety problem too. Recorded in-person attacks on crypto holders doubled from 42 in 2024 to 86 in 2025. Address poisoning has taken at least $83.8M of stablecoins from people picked by their visible balances.
Privacy in crypto splits into two different jobs, and they need different tools.
Shared secrets
FHE and MPC
Many people's hidden data has to be combined: a sealed-bid auction, a private order book, a lending pool. Someone has to compute on it, so a group of servers holds the key.
Zama, Arcium
One owner
Zero-knowledge proofs on your device
Your money is yours alone. You prove the payment on your own device and the chain only checks the proof. No group, server or operator ever holds a key.
Gloam: payments, payroll, proof of funds
Payments are the biggest one-owner job in finance. That is where Gloam lives.
We do not invent new cryptography, and for payments we should not. Gloam uses the zero-knowledge maths Zcash has run on for years and builds the product on top, the way Stripe built payments people wanted on top of the card networks. Zama and Arcium spent years and over $100M building encryption engines for shared secrets. A payment does not need one.
The thesis
Privacy for payments should belong to the person who owns the money, not to a network that holds the keys.
When a committee or operator holds the keys, one breach can expose everyone, including every past payment. When the owner holds them, a breach exposes one person. That is the property finance needs, and it is the one Gloam is built on.
Committee modelZama, Arcium, Tempo Zones
GloamClient-side proofs
Money goes into a shared private balance on the chain. Inside it, payments move as sealed notes that only the owner can open. A private payment proves in under a second on a laptop and runs on normal contracts on Tempo and Robinhood Chain. There is no admin withdraw, and any rule change waits three days in public.
| You do this | The public sees | Hidden |
|---|---|---|
| Add money privately | Your wallet, the asset, the amount | Where the money goes next |
| Pay someone privately | That a private transfer happened | Sender, recipient, asset, amount |
| Cash out | The asset, amount and receiving wallet | Which deposit paid for it |
| Share a proof | Nothing; only the person you send it to | Everything except the one fact proved |
Every serious player now agrees payments need privacy. They differ on one question: who do you have to trust?
| Who | Who can see your payments | If they are hacked | Live on Tempo or Robinhood Chain | Prove one fact to one person | Private payroll | Agent payments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gloam | Only you | One person is exposed | Both, on testnet | Yes, with a label and expiry | CSV runs and schedules | MPP, x402, MCP |
| Zama FHE |
Any quorum of its 13 key holders | Every balance ever encrypted | No | Grants decryption rights | Possible, not a product | Not found |
| Arcium MPC |
A node cluster; safe while one node is honest | That cluster's data | No, Solana | Not found | Not found | Not found |
| Tempo Zones Operator chain |
The zone operator sees everything | The whole zone | Tempo only, limited preview | The operator sees all instead | A stated use case, operator-run | Not found |
| Helius Privacy Server-made ZK |
Helius's proving server | Every proof it has made | No, Solana devnet | Auditor access | Not found | Not found |
| Railgun Client-side ZK |
Only you | One person is exposed | No, Ethereum and L2s | Viewing keys show your whole history | Not found | Not found |
"Not found" means we could not find it in public docs as of 10 October 2026. On a phone, scroll the table sideways.
We found no other product on Tempo or Robinhood Chain that combines owner-only privacy, proofs for one reader, and payroll and agent rails.
Where Gloam is behind today: testnet only, a single-person setup ceremony, internal audits only, and a small crowd to hide in. The risks page covers each one.
Judges will ask whether this has been done before. Here is the exact answer.
Not new, and we say so
New, as far as we found
In crypto, a primitive is a building block other people build on. That is how Gloam ships these pieces: the payroll total proof and sealed proofs are open to any wallet, payroll tool or agent through the SDK, the API and the MCP server, so nobody has to build their own.
Honest limits: whoever receives a proof can still pass it on, and a proof of payment shows a payment was made, not yet which side of it you were on. Locking a proof to one named reader, and giving payees a key only they hold, are the next steps.
Gloam is not a new cipher. It is a new building block for finance: private payments you can prove.
Hiding money is not enough for a business. An auditor, a lender or a client needs to see something. Gloam lets the owner prove one fact and nothing else.
Other private systems hand over a viewing key, which shows your whole history forever. A Gloam proof names who it is for, expires, and can be checked by anyone in a browser with no wallet.
| Proof | What it shows | What stays private |
|---|---|---|
| Proof of funds | You hold at least X | Your exact balance and wallet |
| Proof of payment | A private payment of at least X was made | Who paid, who received, and the rest of your money |
| Payroll total | A run of up to 32 payments adds up to exactly the total, all funded by the prover | Who got what |
Private balances in stablecoins, ETH and Robinhood Chain stock tokens, private payments, claim links and payment requests.
Private payroll from a CSV, scheduled runs, and the payroll total proof for auditors.
A private payment method for Tempo and Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol, private x402 payments, and an MCP server with spending limits.
Gloam leads with stablecoins, payroll and agent payments because that is where the money is moving. It is not only stablecoins.
Today, on testnet
Underway
Before real money
First commit 14 July 2026. As of 10 October:
2
testnets live: Tempo and Robinhood Chain
100+
tester applications in about three days
88+
Telegram members in two days, with Glim, our AI helper, answering questions
4
packages on npm: SDK, MCP server, MPP plugin, app starter
93
contract tests, after two internal audits with fixes deployed
1
private payment method proposed to Tempo and Stripe's MPP spec
0.1% on deposits and 0.1% on cash outs, from mainnet. Railgun charges 0.25% each way.
A fee per payroll run with the auditor proof included, then team plans for approvals and accountant proofs.
Partner API and SDK usage, including proof checks for apps and agents.
People already pay for privacy. Railgun charges 0.25% in and 0.25% out of its pool and earned about $4.3M in fees over the last twelve months. Because Tempo and Arc may bundle basic privacy for free, Gloam prices what they do not offer: payroll, proofs and agent payments.
| Step | Who | Why them |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Land with payroll | Crypto teams, DAOs and startups paying people in stablecoins on Tempo and Robinhood Chain | Deel's stablecoin payouts settle on Tempo; Toku says public salaries were the blocker |
| 2. Expand to business payments | Suppliers, contractors and treasury moves for the same teams | Business to business is 58% of stablecoin payments, $226B in 2025 |
| 3. Distribute through builders and agents | Wallets, payment apps and AI agents via the SDK, MCP, x402 and MPP | Agent spending is public today and indexed by explorers |
| 4. Partner with the chains | Tempo and Robinhood Chain ecosystems | Self-custody privacy for everyone Zones do not serve |
| 5. Keep the community close | Testers become first users and ambassadors | 100+ applicants, an active Telegram, support at near-zero cost through Glim |
Across five Colosseum hackathons, privacy projects took 6 of 180 placed awards. Payments and stablecoin projects took 30.
Every privacy project that placed opened with a user's problem and won through a money track. Projects that led with the technology stopped at honorable mention. So Gloam leads with private stablecoin payments for people, teams and agents, and uses the trust model as the reason a committee design cannot copy it.
Risk
The setup ceremony had one participant, so in theory that person could forge proofs.Answer
A public multi-party ceremony, like Zcash and Railgun ran, before real money.Risk
Audits so far are internal.Answer
An external audit of circuits and contracts, then a capped launch.Risk
A payer can take back a payment until the payee moves it.Answer
Being fixed now: claiming a payment moves it to a note only the payee controls.Risk
The crowd to hide in is small on testnet.Answer
Payroll brings many payees at once, and agents bring volume.Risk
A stablecoin issuer can freeze the pool contract.Answer
Screen deposits so flagged funds never enter, so an issuer never needs to.Risk
Privacy apps can fade, as Hinkal did.Answer
Grow through payroll and payments that need privacy to work, not a pool people visit to hide."What is Gloam standing on?"
Zama has FHE and Arcium has MPC. Both compute on encrypted data, and both need a committee to hold the key. Gloam stands on zero-knowledge proofs made on your own device. For payments that is the stronger foundation: every dollar has one owner, so nobody else ever needs a key, and a breach exposes one person instead of everyone. On top of it we built what finance actually asks for: proofs of funds, payment and payroll you can show to one person, for a set time. Private by default, provable on demand. Live on Tempo and Robinhood Chain testnets today.