How this makes money
A page most privacy projects do not write, because the answer is usually “a token, later”. Ours is a fee on a payment, it is in the code today, and the numbers below come from that code rather than from a slide.
01 The charge
A 100 USDC payment costs the sender 101. A 1 USDC payment costs 1.1 — the floor dominates at small amounts, and deliberately: a private payment costs us the same rent and compute whether it moves one dollar or ten thousand. Below roughly ten tokens a percentage alone would mean paying people to use us.
No subscription, no listing fee, no access charge. If nobody pays anybody, we earn nothing — which is the correct incentive for a payment rail.
02 The fee is collected privately
It does not land in a visible account. It is deposited as its own stealth note to the operator’s reader key, so an observer cannot separate “fee income” from any other payment in the pool, and cannot count our revenue by watching the chain.
We can. Nobody else can. That is precisely what we sell, applied to ourselves.
03 What it looks like at volume
| payments / month | average size | fee revenue |
|---|---|---|
| 1 000 | 50 USDC | 500 USDC |
| 10 000 | 50 USDC | 5 000 USDC |
| 10 000 | 500 USDC | 50 000 USDC |
| 100 000 | 200 USDC | 200 000 USDC |
The interesting column is the average size, not the count. Payroll and contractor invoices — the case this was built for — sit in the hundreds, not the single digits. Ten thousand payments a month is one mid-size company paying two hundred contractors twice a month, plus a handful of others.
04 Who has to adopt it
Not a large number of people. A small number of integrators, because the unit of adoption here is a program or an agent, not a person:
Each of those brings a stream of payments rather than one. That is why the SDK, the MCP servers and the CPI example matter more than a consumer interface.
05 What is not true yet
Today the operator funds the wrap
In the current demo the operator wraps with its own tokens, so “amount plus fee” is a number it moves for itself. The revenue model turns real when the sender’s own tokens fund the wrap — that path exists in the code and the browser flow already uses it. Until there are senders who are not us, this page describes a mechanism, not an income.
Collecting the fee privately is solved; spending it is not
Revenue accumulates as stealth notes. Turning that into an operating account is a withdrawal like any other, which means our own income becomes linkable at the moment it is cashed out.
The operator sees the send side
Wrapping into confidential Token-2022 requires the mint authority, so the operator knows which wallet paid how much. Privacy from the public is complete; privacy from the operator on the send path is not, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim this project exists to avoid.
06 Why there is no token
There is none and no plan for one. A privacy rail that needs its own asset to work has a second reason to exist, and that reason competes with the first. Fees in the asset being moved — USDC and USDT — keep the incentive single: make payments people want to make.