The confidential settlement network for tokenized assets
Institutions will not settle on a chain where every position and every counterparty is visible forever. Cypher issues the private cash leg they settle against, and runs the attestation network underneath it.
The gap
Tokenization works. Institutions know it works. They are still not using it, and the reason is not speed or cost.
$98T
Investment fund assets under management
~$13B
Tokenized on public blockchains
<0.01%
Of fund assets that have moved on-chain
In December 2024 JPMorgan published Project EPIC, a study of privacy for tokenized finance. They tested five privacy solutions against three institutional use cases.
Every one of them required a trusted party holding a master decryption key. On a permissioned bank network that is workable. On a public chain it is the reason a compliance officer says no.
Their conclusion was that the blocker is not cryptography. It is trust frameworks, participation incentives, and the reliance letters that regulated institutions already exchange today. They said the industry needs a network of trusted institutions where identity verification becomes a service. Nobody has built it.
Source: JPMorgan, Project EPIC, December 2024, pages 12, 33 to 35 and 38.
What we build
Three parts. The first gets us into the settlement flow. The third is the company.
The private cash leg
A dollar that settles with the amount, the transaction type and the counterparty confidential. Delivery versus payment works without publishing the trade. The cash earns yield while it waits to settle instead of sitting idle.
Selective disclosure
The holder controls a viewing key, scoped per transaction and per counterparty. An auditor, a bank or a regulator verifies one transaction and learns nothing about the rest. No operator holds a master key, so there is nobody to subpoena and nobody to trust.
Reusable attestations
Verify an institution once. Every counterparty afterwards reuses that attestation instead of repeating the same checks. Each member makes the network more useful to the next one. This is the part that compounds.
What we own, and what we rent
We do not rebuild anything that somebody else has already built and audited. Encryption is a commodity input with several funded suppliers. The compliance layer is not.
We own
- The attestation and reusable identity network
- Selective disclosure and the compliance layer
- The cash leg and its reserves
- Regulatory authorisation
- Issuer and transfer agent integrations
We rent
- The encryption scheme
- The zero-knowledge and FHE circuits
- The underlying yield engine
- The chain
How it makes money
Three lines, priced for institutions rather than for speculation.
Assets under settlement
Basis points on tokenized assets that settle through the confidential rail.
The cash leg
We issue and hold the settlement cash, so the reserves earn while they wait.
Platform licences
Annual contracts with issuers, transfer agents and fund administrators for the disclosure and attestation stack.
We do not charge a percentage fee per transaction. Institutions do not pay fifty basis points to move money, and pricing that way would put us in the wrong market.
Where we are today
This is a demo. We would rather tell you exactly what is real than let you find out.
- Five contracts deployed on Base
- 55 Foundry tests passing, Slither clean, 100k Echidna calls
- Full mint, redeem, shield, transfer and stake flow
- Yield is simulated. No Lido, no hedge, no real staking.
- ETH price is hardcoded. No oracle.
- ZK verification is a stub. No real cryptography yet.
- No audit. No reusable attestations yet.
The contracts are deployed and tested. What they do internally is demo architecture, built to prove the flow before spending on circuits and an audit. Do not deposit real funds.
Why we are building it
The institutional case is the business. The reason is older than that. Privacy is the precondition for freedom, and financial privacy is the precondition for financial freedom.
Read the manifesto