Cloak Launches Private Payroll on Solana for USDC and USDT Salaries

Cloak, a zero-knowledge privacy protocol on Solana, launched Cloak Payroll, a private payroll tool, on 28 September 2026. A business uploads a spreadsheet of recipients and amounts, approves the run once, and each employee or contractor is paid in USDC or USDT through Cloak's shielded pool, so no recipient can trace the payment back and read what colleagues earn. "Paying 40 people onchain shouldn't mean showing all 40 what everyone else earns," Cloak wrote in its launch post.

Why stablecoin payroll on Solana leaks salaries

A normal stablecoin payroll sent from one company wallet is a public list. Any employee can open a block explorer, click from their own payment to the employer's wallet, and see every other transfer that went out the same day, with amounts. SolanaFloor described the new Cloak feature as letting businesses make private onchain payments to employees and contractors, and Cloak's own pitch in a reply to that post was that paying contractors "shouldn't mean publishing the whole cap table."

Salary flows are already a meaningful slice of Solana's stablecoin traffic: our June report on USDC transfers found salary payments near record levels on the network. Cloak Payroll targets the companies behind those payments that would rather not publish their pay scales.

How Cloak's shielded pool hides payroll amounts

Cloak Payroll works by putting a pool between the employer and the staff. According to Cloak's how-it-works documentation, anyone watching the chain sees the employer's wallet deposit into the pool, and each recipient sees a payment arriving from the pool; "Neither can link it back to your wallet." Every withdrawal is authorised by a Groth16 zero-knowledge proof, a short cryptographic receipt that lets the Solana program confirm the money is backed by a real deposit without revealing which one. Cloak says the proof is generated in the user's browser in under 3 seconds.

The one-click send bundles the employer's approvals, while each salary still settles as its own transaction. Asked whether a payroll run settles as one batched transaction, Cloak answered that each recipient gets a separate transfer with its own proof, because batching them together would reveal who was paid in the same run.

Cloak Payroll fees: 0.3% plus 0.45 USDC per payment

Getting money into the pool is free. Each payment out costs 0.3% of the amount plus a fixed 0.45 USDC or USDT, according to Cloak's fee schedule, and the recipient receives the exact amount listed. On that schedule a 2,000 USDC salary carries 6.45 USDC in fees, so paying 40 people that amount would cost about 258 USDC. Cloak's docs say other Solana privacy protocols charge a flat 1% per withdrawal. For the launch, Cloak is offering 0% fees, per the reply to SolanaFloor; it has not said how long the offer lasts.

Viewing keys, audit status and the limits of Cloak's privacy

Cloak's privacy is selective by design. The Cloak SDK registers a viewing key tied to the user's wallet by default, and Cloak's compliance documentation says "Compliance services can only process history for keys users have registered", meaning a company can open its own records to an auditor without exposing anyone else in the pool.

Cloak's security page says the protocol cannot spend, freeze or seize user funds, and it also cannot recover a lost private balance: the backup file is the money. The program has been live on mainnet since 24 August 2026 and, per the same page, is built from audited source, but the audit report has not been published and the auditor is not named. Upgrades require three of four signers on a Squads multisig plus a one-hour timelock.

The privacy is only as strong as the crowd. Cloak's documentation says each token has its own pool and that correlation gets harder as more deposits and withdrawals pass through it, so a young pool gives employers less cover than a busy one. An employer that deposits and pays 40 people in one sitting leaves a timing pattern a watcher can look for, which is why Cloak advises separating deposits and payments in time. And once staff move their pay out of the pool, "they are public again from that point on."

The pool is still small. Solana Compass tracked 520 transactions involving Cloak's shield-pool program over the past 30 days to 28 September 2026, between zero and 58 a day, with 50 on 28 September, the day Payroll launched.

Cloak founders: BTG Pactual alumni with a Colosseum pre-seed

Cloak Privacy Corp. has four co-founders, according to its company page: CEO Arthur Bretas (formerly at SonicSVM and Txtx), CTO Marcelo Feitoza (formerly a founding engineer at Compute Labs), and COO Matheus Macedo and CFO Victor Carvalho, who both previously worked as software engineers at Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual. The company raised a $250K pre-seed through the Colosseum Accelerator and lists Superteam Brasil, Turbin3 and Blueshift among its supporters.

Cloak Payroll sits alongside Cloak's private send and swap features in the web app, which works with Phantom CASH$1.000+0.1%, Solflare and Ledger wallets, according to Cloak's wallet and token list. Payroll is limited to USDC and USDT for now.