Use Cases

Sombra is a protocol, not an app. These are the products it is worth building on top of it.

Two of them work with what runs today. Three need private swaps.

Payroll and contractor payments

Works today.

Paying salaries on a public chain publishes every salary. Anyone can read what each person earns, and who left when their stream stopped.

An employer deposits once, then pays everyone out of a shielded balance. The amounts are not published and the recipients are not linkable. When someone needs to prove their income to an accountant or a tax authority, they hand over viewing keys for the weeks that matter and nothing else.

Builders: payroll platforms, DAO contributor tooling, grant and bounty programs.

A private balance inside a wallet people already use

Works today.

Most people are not going to move wallets. They will add a private balance to the wallet they have.

A wallet integrates Sombra as a second tab: deposit from the public balance, hold notes, send privately. The user's public address and history stay exactly where they are. This needs no protocol change — only the SDK.

Builders: Solana wallets, neobank-style apps, anything with a balance screen.

Private staking and yield

Needs private swaps.

Stake from a shielded balance and hold the staking token as a note. Because the token's exchange rate rises instead of its balance, the position earns with no transaction at all. No claim, no restake, nothing on chain to watch. The same shape works for lending receipts and tokenized treasuries.

This is the clearest version of what Sombra is for: a balance nobody can see, earning a yield nobody can see, with nothing recurring to leak.

Builders: liquid staking providers, lending protocols, yield apps, anyone who wants private deposits.

Treasuries and trading desks

Needs private swaps.

A fund that rotates a position on a public chain publishes its strategy while it executes. Everyone can see the rebalance happening and trade in front of it.

Sombra keeps the rotation invisible until it settles. The same applies to OTC desks moving size, market makers shifting inventory between venues, and treasuries that would rather not announce a move in advance.

Builders: treasury management tools, OTC and market-making desks, fund operations platforms.

Tokenized stocks and real-world assets

Needs private swaps.

Solana carries most of the on-chain tokenized-equity volume there is. Holding those tokens in a normal wallet publishes your portfolio — every position, every size, permanently.

Held as notes, the portfolio is private, and the yield-bearing ones keep working the way the staking case does. One caveat worth stating up front: these tokens are not all alike, and some issuers keep powers over the token after issuing it. So this is a curated list rather than everything that exists.

Builders: brokerage-style apps, RWA issuers and distributors, wealth tools.

Also within reach

Shorter notes on things the same two capabilities cover:

• Cross-border payments. A corridor where the amounts are not public, settled in stablecoins.
• Recurring payouts. Scheduled payments from a shielded balance — grants, retainers, vesting-style distribution.
• Agent and machine payments. An agent that pays per task from a shielded balance, so its budget and its counterparties are not an open ledger.
• Merchant settlement. Take payment privately and settle into whichever token you actually want to hold.

Next, the roadmap: Compliance, and Private pools and private actions — one direction we are still thinking about.