Case study
Private Funding for Private Networks: Curvy × GnosisVPN
Privacy in a payment network shouldn’t start with the first payment. It should start with how money enters the system.
Over the past few months, Curvy has been working with the GnosisVPN team on integrating Curvy into PIX — the payment infrastructure behind GnosisVPN.
The goal is simple: allow users to fund and use a privacy-preserving service without creating a public financial trail before they even start using it.
The problem: funding is part of privacy
PIX enables users to pay for network services as they consume them. But before any of those payments can happen, the user needs to bring funds into the system.
A conventional crypto onboarding flow can reveal the user’s wallet, funding source, amount and timing on a public blockchain.
This creates an interesting privacy problem:
What is the value of private usage if entering the system already reveals who funded it?
For GnosisVPN, we’re working on solving privacy across both sides of that boundary.
Private onboarding
The first part of the integration focuses on getting funds into GnosisVPN.
A user should be able to start with a supported stablecoin, while the system handles the complexity of bridging, swapping and preparing the assets required by the service.
Curvy introduces a confidentiality layer into this flow, breaking the public link between the user’s source of funds and their activity inside the system.
Conceptually:
The objective is to make privacy part of onboarding rather than something users have to think about after they arrive.
Private usage with PIX
Once the user is inside GnosisVPN, PIX takes over.
PIX creates a payment system where network usage can generate payments between participants without requiring a conventional payment transaction for every interaction.
This is where the integration becomes particularly interesting for Curvy.
Rather than treating onboarding and usage as two unrelated systems, we’re exploring how Curvy can provide a common confidentiality and settlement layer across the full lifecycle:
The result we’re working toward is a system where neither entering the network nor economically participating in it requires publishing a complete financial history.
Where this could go
GnosisVPN is a useful first implementation because it combines many of the problems that private digital economies will have to solve: cross-chain funding, machine-generated payments, high-frequency economic activity, settlement and compliance.
Our longer-term roadmap is to turn what we build here into reusable infrastructure:
Phase 1 — Private onboarding
Confidential cross-chain funding into GnosisVPN.
Phase 2 — Private PIX settlement
Extend confidentiality from funding into the payment and settlement lifecycle.
Phase 3 — Agent-native payments
Allow software and AI agents to hold delegated balances and autonomously pay for services without exposing their complete financial activity.
Phase 4 — A reusable privacy layer for the Gnosis ecosystem
Make the same infrastructure available to wallets, payments and other applications across Gnosis.
GnosisVPN is the first use case.
The larger goal is infrastructure for a world in which humans, applications and autonomous agents can transact on public networks without making their entire economic activity public.
That is what we’re building Curvy for.
Build on the same infrastructure
The privacy layer behind this integration is open source, audited and available through the Curvy SDK.