Inco Lightning Launches on Base Mainnet

Confidentiality should be a fundamental tool for developers building onchain, just as it is in traditional software. Not something bolted on later, or reserved for niche use cases, but seamless, accessible, and deeply integrated into the developer experience.

With this in mind, we're excited to announce that Inco Lightning is now live on Base mainnet.

In April 2025, we launched Inco Lightning on Base Sepolia testnet. Since then, we've been working closely with builders, iterating on the developer experience, optimizing performance, and putting the system through extensive audits to make sure it's production-ready. Inco Lightning has been extensively audited by Trail of Bits.

Developers can get started building right away by visiting the docs.

What Inco Lightning Does

Inco Lightning enables developers to build confidential applications directly on existing EVM chains. There's no need to learn a new language, no new chain to deploy to, and no additional complexity introduced to the development stack. Just standard Solidity and a single import:

import {e, ebool, euint256} from "@inco/lightning";

That one line gives you access to encrypted data types and a full suite of confidential operations—all composable with the rest of your contract logic.

Confidential Smart Contract Features

Inco Lightning launches on Base mainnet with a host of features.

• Encrypted data types. Store private state directly onchain with euint256, ebool, and eaddress. These types slot into your existing Solidity contracts and work with standard mappings, structs, and function signatures.
• Confidential compute operations. Perform arithmetic (add, sub, mul, div, rem), comparisons (eq, gt, lt, ge, le), bitwise logic (and, or, xor, shr, shl), and conditional selection over encrypted values without ever decrypting them.
• Encrypted randomness. Generate verifiable random numbers onchain with e.rand() and e.randBounded(), enabling use cases like onchain games with private state, fair lotteries, and blind auctions.
• Programmable access control. Define exactly who can access encrypted data at the contract level. This makes it straightforward to program compliance rules, role-based permissions, and selective disclosure directly into your application logic.
• Decryption and re-encryption. When data needs to be revealed—either publicly onchain or privately to an authorized user—the decryption layer handles it securely through a quorum of TEE-based decryption nodes with verified attestations.
• JavaScript SDK. Connect your frontend to confidential contracts with Inco's client-side SDK, which handles input encryption, key management, EIP-712 signing, and local decryption. Learn more here.
• Encrypted lists (Preview). Store and manipulate ordered collections of encrypted values with EList, an encrypted array type supporting append, insert, slice, concat, reverse, and shuffle, all without revealing the contents. The shuffle operation makes it easy to build a confidential card deck for onchain poker or a provably fair raffle.
• Delegated viewing. Grant another address temporary, revocable permission to decrypt or compute over your encrypted data, entirely offchain. These vouchers (also called session keys) carry an expiry, can be scoped with a custom verifier (for example, gating access behind a payment), and can be revoked at any time.
• Attested compute. Run a comparison over encrypted data offchain and get back a signed attestation of the result that can be verified onchain to trigger an action, with no extra transaction. For example, prove that an encrypted credit score clears a threshold to approve a loan without ever revealing the score.

What You Can Build

Confidentiality unlocks a wide range of powerful onchain use cases that would be either impossible or deeply compromised without it. Private payments where balances and transfer amounts stay encrypted. Onchain games with private state, like poker. Confidential voting and governance. DeFi applications where trading strategies and position sizes aren't exposed to the world. 

For a comprehensive guide to what you can build with Inco Lightning, check out this extensive list of potential use cases.

Get Started in Under 20 Minutes

You can get started in under 20 minutes: write your confidential contracts in Solidity, connect your frontend via the JavaScript SDK, and deploy. No special infrastructure, no new tools.

Even easier: get started with the Inco Lightning Rod template.

Jump straight into the documentation at docs.inco.org to get started. We can't wait to see what you build.

Stay up to date by following @inconetwork, and reach out if you're building something with Inco Lightning—we'd love to hear about it.