What is Lateo?

Lateo is a privacy pool for x402 agentic payments on Stellar. It breaks the link between AI agents and the services they pay for, using zero-knowledge proofs verified on-chain.

The Problem

Every x402 payment creates a public on-chain record. Any observer can reconstruct:

Which agent paid for a service
What it searched for (from payment metadata)
How much was spent (budget and priorities)
How often (behavioral patterns and urgency)

Research shows 98.45% accuracy in de-anonymizing blockchain transactions using ensemble learning. Without privacy, enterprises will never deploy autonomous agents on public blockchains.

The Solution

Agents deposit USDC into a shared privacy pool. When they pay for x402 services, payments come from the pool — not individual wallets. Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs are verified on-chain via Stellar Protocol 25 BN254 primitives.


Agent Owner → deposits USDC → Lateo Privacy Pool
                                      │
                              ┌───────┼───────┐
                              ▼       ▼       ▼
                          zkSearch  Service  Service
                                  B        C

On-chain: "Lateo Pool → zkSearch"
NOT visible: which agent, what query, whose money

Association Set Providers ensure only verified participants can use the pool — privacy for honest users, transparency for regulators.

Three Privacy Layers

Layer	Mechanism	Protects Against
Deposit/Withdraw	Groth16 ZK proofs verified on-chain via `transact()`	Correlation of deposits to withdrawals
Payments	Temporal batching from shared pool wallet	Linking agents to specific services
Compliance	Association Set Providers (ASP membership proofs)	Pool misuse — only verified participants

Architecture

Lateo is based on the Privacy Pools architecture co-authored by Vitalik Buterin — the same model that 0xbow launched on Ethereum mainnet. It uses Nethermind’s stellar-private-payments as the foundation for its Soroban contracts and Circom circuits.

Built on Stellar Protocol 25 “X-Ray” — native BN254 and Poseidon2 host functions that make on-chain ZK verification practical for the first time on Stellar.