You wouldn't hand your bank statement to a stranger on the street. Yet every payment on a public blockchain is permanently, irrevocably visible to anyone who cares to look. Lucent fixes that — without hiding who you paid, only how much.
The problem
Public blockchains expose every transaction to everyone, forever. Your salary, your vendor payments, your treasury moves — all permanently readable by competitors, data harvesters, and anyone with a block explorer. No traditional financial system would accept this level of exposure if it fully understood what it was publishing.
Existing privacy tools — mixers, shielded pools, fully opaque coins — solve transparency by hiding everything. You lose the auditability that makes blockchains useful in the first place. Counterparties can't verify who they paid. Compliance becomes impossible. You swap one problem for another.
The approach
Lucent takes a surgical approach: addresses stay fully visible on-chain, but amounts are held as Pedersen commitments and moved with zero-knowledge proofs. You can verify that a payment was made from wallet A to wallet B — but you cannot read how much was sent. Counterparties remain auditable. Amounts stay confidential.
The result: payroll can be distributed without exposing individual salaries, escrow can be settled without revealing the locked sum to third parties, and payments can be made without your transaction history becoming a public business-intelligence dataset.
Trust model
No off-chain operators
Every proof is generated in your browser and verified natively by Stellar's Protocol 26 host functions — no separate privacy infrastructure to trust.
No operator keys
There is no private key that could be stolen to decrypt your balances. The encryption is enforced by mathematics, not by a trusted party.
No bridge custody
Your USDC stays in Soroban contracts on Stellar. There is no bridge, no wrapped token, and no custodian holding your funds.
Lucent inherits its security guarantees entirely from Stellar's native UltraHonk verifier — a zero-knowledge proof system verified inside Soroban itself. Encryption is enforced at the protocol level. No configuration, no trust assumptions, no operator.
Who it's for
Stellar teams
Pay contributors and vendors without publishing your treasury's payment history to competitors.
DAOs
Run payroll with per-person confidential salaries. No member can see another's compensation on-chain.
Freelancers
Invoice and get paid in USDC without your entire client list and rate card becoming public record.
Protocols
Need confidential escrow in your settlement layer? Integrate PrivateEscrow directly into your Soroban contracts.
Built on
Soroban is Stellar's smart contract platform, and Protocol 26 shipped native ZK host functions that verify UltraHonk proofs on-chain without a coprocessor. Lucent builds on OpenZeppelin's confidential-token module — Pedersen commitments, Poseidon2 hashing, and a Rust contract stack — to bring amount-hidden payments to Stellar.
Learn about Stellar