Before confidential smart contracts, on-chain payments forced a choice between transparency and privacy. StreamVeil removes that trade-off for streaming payments: money settles and accrues on-chain with full correctness, while the sensitive amounts stay private — and the right people can still see the truth.
| Approach | What it gives you | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Public streaming protocols (e.g. transparent token streams) | Continuous, trustless, composable payments | Every salary, rate, and balance is fully public |
| Off-chain / centralized payroll | Privacy | No on-chain settlement guarantees, no composability, a trusted operator who does see everything |
| Mixers / shielded transfers | Hide who or that a transfer happened | Not built for continuous accrual, programmable schedules, or selective audit |
| StreamVeil | Continuous on-chain streaming and encrypted amounts and selective auditor reveal | Runs where Zama's fhEVM is available (currently Sepolia testnet) |
StreamVeil sits precisely in the empty cell that earlier tools left open: private, programmable, continuously-settling payments with built-in, opt-in auditability.
- A DAO can run real payroll on-chain without publishing every contributor's salary to its competitors — while still proving solvency and letting a treasurer or auditor verify the books.
- Grant programs can disburse over time without revealing award sizes that would distort applicant behavior or invite gaming.
- Teams can vest tokens privately, with the ability to pause or cancel-and-refund, without broadcasting individual allocations.
- Contractors can be paid by the second, with the flow paused exactly when work pauses, and amounts kept between the two parties.
In every case the previously unavoidable leak — how much — is closed, without giving up the settlement, correctness, and composability that put these payments on-chain in the first place.
Confidentiality is the missing primitive that keeps serious organizations off public chains for anything money-sensitive. Payroll is one of the clearest, most universal examples: every organization has it, and almost none can put it on a transparent ledger as-is.
By implementing a complete, demoable confidential-payroll protocol on Zama's fhEVM — using a real ERC-7984 confidential token, homomorphic accrual math, on-chain access control, and client-side decryption — StreamVeil shows that this missing primitive is not theoretical. It is buildable today with the ecosystem's standard tools, and it directly expands the set of real-world applications that belong on-chain.
See PROBLEM.md for the problem in depth and SOLUTION.md for exactly how it's built.