What To Build With Inco

Inco is a full-stack privacy solution for public blockchains. Compatible with existing tools and chains, Inco Lightning, which provides confidentiality, is easy for developers to get started with: with the Inco confidential smart contract library (EVM) and Inco Rust crate (SVM), developers can build confidential applications by adding confidential versions of the operations they’re used to. Cool.

With Inco Lightning live on Base Sepolia and Solana Devnet, we're highlighting applications with clear demand and strong potential. These have been prioritized based on feasibility, developer accessibility, and the ability to unlock entirely new onchain categories.

Looking to get started? Check out the docs and quickstarts for the Inco Lightning testnet on Base Sepolia and Solana Devnet (currently in beta). And don’t forget to connect with fellow developers in the dev-chat channel of the Inco Discord. If you have an idea you want consultation on, schedule time with the Inco dev rel team.

DeFi

Private Trading

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Transparent DEXs expose positions, order sizes, and strategies to MEV bots and front-runners. This makes large trades expensive and pushes serious volume to centralized exchanges.

With Inco, traders can convert tokens to confidential equivalents and trade without revealing position sizes or timing. Settlement remains verifiable, but extraction becomes impossible.

Blind Auctions

Onchain auctions expose bids in real time, enabling last-second sniping and strategic manipulation.

With Inco, sealed-bid auctions work as intended: participants submit encrypted bids, and only the winner is revealed after close. Bidders enter their maximum price once; no gaming, no sniping. This unlocks fairer price discovery for NFT drops, token sales, and any auction mechanism.

Confidential AMMs

AMM pools expose exact compositions and rebalancing patterns to MEV bots, enabling sandwich attacks that extract value from liquidity providers.

With Inco, pool compositions and liquidity amounts stay private while price discovery and trading continue normally. This protects LPs and reduces MEV extraction.

Private Lending

DeFi lending protocols expose loan amounts, collateral balances, and liquidation thresholds. This enables targeted liquidation hunting and exposes user financial positions.

With Inco, loan amounts and collateral stay confidential while automated liquidation mechanics and interest calculations work normally.

Prediction Markets

Prediction markets aggregate beliefs about real-world events — elections, sports outcomes, economic data — and resolve against external truth. They work best when participants express genuine confidence levels rather than copying visible positions.

The problem is that transparent markets leak information. When bet sizes are public, whales can signal and manipulate sentiment, smaller participants herd toward visible majorities, and sophisticated players exploit retail positioning.

With Inco, prediction markets can keep bet amounts and position sizes encrypted until resolution. Participants commit to positions without seeing what others have wagered. This prevents position copying, reduces whale manipulation, and surfaces more accurate probabilities since prices reflect actual beliefs rather than social signaling.

Resolution integrity is another challenge: when oracle inputs or settlement votes are visible, coordinated groups can tilt outcomes. Inco enables encrypted oracle submission and private dispute resolution, ensuring that settlement reflects truth rather than token-weighted influence.

Payments and Consumer

Confidential P2P Transactions

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Venmo and banks hide transaction details by default. Users expect this. But crypto payments expose amounts and balances to anyone who looks.

With Inco, tokens can be wrapped into confidential versions. Balances and transfer amounts stay private while settlement remains verifiable. Check out Comfy to see this in action.

Confidential Streaming Payments

Streaming payments — continuous token flows rather than discrete transfers — are novel to crypto and useful for subscriptions, compute billing, and hourly work. But transparent streams expose exactly what you're paying and earning.

With Inco, streaming amounts and accumulated balances stay private while the payment logic executes normally.

Private Token Vesting

Traditional equity vesting keeps schedules and amounts confidential. Onchain vesting exposes cliff dates, amounts, and unlock schedules publicly.

With Inco, vesting contracts can keep all compensation details private while maintaining programmable automation.

Private Ticketing

Onchain ticketing exposes which events you attend, what you paid, and your seat location.

With Inco, ticket prices and purchase details stay private while blockchain verification and fraud prevention work normally. Event organizers also avoid the "empty room" problem where visible low sales discourage attendance.

Check out Inco’s work with Blocklive on this use case.

Gaming and NFTs

Poker and Games of Chance

Onchain poker should be obvious: remove the house, enable trustless payouts, prove fairness. But transparent blockchains make it impossible, because cards and hands are visible to everyone, destroying the game.

With Inco, values are encrypted onchain while still being computed upon. Developers can build poker, blackjack, and casino games using standard smart contracts while keeping hands hidden until reveal. Inco also generates verifiable randomness with hidden outputs, which is critical for any game operator who wants to prove fairness to players.

Fog of War Strategy Games

Strategy games depend on hidden information: troop positions, resource levels, tactical decisions. Transparent blockchains expose all of this, eliminating the core mechanic.

With Inco, unit positions and player moves live in encrypted state, revealed only when gameplay requires it. This unlocks Dark Forest-style games, real-time strategy, and any genre where scouting and surprise matter.

Guessing Games

Wordle, Sudoku, Geoguessr, Hangman…none of these games are possible to build onchain when the answer is readable from contract state.

With Inco, target values stay encrypted until the round ends. Players submit guesses against hidden solutions, and only results are revealed. This makes competitive onchain puzzle games actually playable.

Check out the Hangman game live on the Inco Lightning Base Sepolia testnet for an example.

Confidential NFTs

Standard NFTs expose all metadata and attribute rarities immediately on mint. This eliminates surprise mechanics and makes lootbox-style reveals impossible.

With Inco, NFT metadata stays encrypted until reveal conditions are met. This enables genuine lootbox mechanics, hidden attribute reveals, and encrypted premium content. NFTs can have stats that remain hidden until gameplay triggers, or collectible packs where rarity is unknown until the owner reveals.

Confidential NFT Ownership and Trading

High-value NFT traders often prefer privacy around their holdings and purchase prices. Transparent markets expose exact prices, current owners, and collection compositions.

With Inco, NFT platforms can offer confidential ownership records and private sale amounts while maintaining verifiable authenticity and provenance.

Governance

Confidential DAO Voting

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Public voting creates herding effects: participants see early votes and follow majorities instead of expressing true preferences. It also exposes individual voting patterns to potential retaliation.

With Inco, votes stay encrypted until tallying. The final result is revealed with proof of correct counting, but individual votes remain private. No offchain infrastructure required.

Confidential DAO Treasury

DAO treasuries expose exact holdings and spending decisions, creating competitive disadvantages and exposing activity that the DAO might want to keep private.

With Inco, treasury balances and transactions stay confidential while governance approvals and accountability remain transparent.

Identity

Confidential Onchain Identity

Identity verification often requires revealing more than necessary. Proving you're over 21 shouldn't require exposing your exact birthdate.

With Inco, identity credentials are stored encrypted with selective disclosure. Users can prove specific attributes (age, citizenship, accreditation) without revealing underlying data. This enables compliant DeFi access, age-gated content, and KYC flows that minimize data exposure.

Start Building

Inco Lightning is live on Base Sepolia and Solana Devnet. Simply use the Inco libraries and start building use cases that weren't possible before.

Resources

• Base Sepolia docs
• Solana Devnet docs
• Builders Office Hours
• Inco Discord (join dev-chat)