What Is Inco Network? How to Use the Confidential Token cToken That Hides Crypto Balances, and Its Fees

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Table of Contents

What Is Inco Network? A Confidentiality Layer on Base

How Confidential Tokens Work: What the TEE Hides

How to Use cToken: What You Need and the Fees

Apps You Can Try on Inco and Actual Usage

Risks to Check Before Using Inco

Inco Network's Funding and Token Status

Summary

Disclaimer

Inco Network is a confidentiality layer that bolts onto existing blockchains such as Base and hides token balances and transfer amounts. It is not a new chain: with the wallet you already use, you can wrap ERC-20 tokens such as USDC on Base into a confidential version. It went live on Base mainnet in June 2026, and the consumer-facing cToken app was released in September. No native token has been issued, and there has been no official airdrop announcement.

What Is Inco Network? A Confidentiality Layer on Base

Inco is short for incognito, and it is a layer that adds confidentiality to existing chains. The official homepage's pitch is to bring privacy to where users already are, and it does not ask you to switch to a new chain or wallet.

Image: screenshot of the Inco official site (captured October 27, 2026)

Item	Details
Chains	Base mainnet and Base Sepolia (Solana devnet is in beta)
Stage	Live on Base mainnet since June 15, 2026; cToken released September 2
Token	Not issued

Note that the FAQ on the official homepage still contains an outdated line saying it is running on the Base Sepolia testnet, which is easy to misread if you only skim the top page.

Inco Lightning and cToken: The Two Products

Inco Lightning, aimed at developers, is a building block you can use by importing a single library line into a Solidity contract. Encrypted values (encrypted types such as euint256) can be added or compared as they are. cToken, aimed at the general public, is a web app that wraps ERC-20 tokens on Base and handles everything from confidential transfers to unshielding back to the original in the browser. This is the entry point for individuals to try Inco.

How Confidential Tokens Work: What the TEE Hides

A confidential token does not make every part of a transaction invisible. What cToken hides is only the balance and the transfer amount.

What cToken Hides and What Stays Public

What is hidden is each address's cToken balance and the amount moved in a single transfer. The sender's and recipient's addresses, and the fact that a transfer took place, remain visible to anyone, just as before. A balance is shown only when the owner presses Reveal.

Image: from the Inco official docs (retrieved October 27, 2026)

How Inco Lightning's TEE Decryption Network Works

Additions, subtractions and comparisons on hidden balances are computed inside a TEE (an isolated execution area built inside the CPU). The SDK on the user's side encrypts the input and receives a reference called a handle, and the contract simply calls add or compare operations on that handle. The actual computation is done by the Confidential Compute Server running inside the TEE, which watches on-chain events and returns the results directly.

Image: screenshot of the Inco Lightning product page (captured October 27, 2026)

There are three paths back to plaintext. In each, the decryption network checks the permission granted via e.allow, and the contract verifies the signed attestations returned by each node before using the plaintext.

How It Differs from Zama and Railgun

Even among tokens that hide balances and amounts, approaches differ by what they put their trust in. The FHE (fully homomorphic encryption) used by Zama and Mind Network computes on data while it stays encrypted. Zama's cUSDT had a cumulative $131.3 million shielded by mid-September 2026. However, FHE confidential transfers cost more gas than ordinary ERC-20 transfers, and Zama charges its fees in the ZAMA token.

Railgun is a UTXO-based approach using zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs). Base is not among its supported chains, and it has no viewing key for regulators.

Inco trusts the hardware isolation of a TEE instead of a mathematical guarantee. Fees stay in ETH on Base, and you keep using your existing wallet.

How to Use cToken: What You Need and the Fees

The cToken app (ctoken.inco.org) is not invite-only, and anyone can use it by connecting a wallet.

Image: screenshot of the cToken official app (captured October 27, 2026)

There are three operations: shielding, which wraps an ERC-20 you hold into a cToken; confidential transfer, which sends with the amount hidden; and unshielding, which converts back to the original.

What You Need to Get Started (a Wallet and ETH on Base)

You need three things: the EVM wallet you already use, ETH on Base mainnet, and the ERC-20 on Base that you want to wrap. The first time, you sign a message titled "CToken - Terms Acceptance" with your wallet, which records your agreement to the terms of service.

There is no KYC (submitting ID). You self-declare that you are 18 or older and not a resident of a sanctioned country or an FATF high-risk jurisdiction, but access may be restricted by IP address in some regions. On the testnet version (ctoken.testnet.inco.org), you can try the same operations for free with faucet USDC or USDT.

Fees for Confidential Transfers on Base

Inco's fees apply to operations such as bringing encrypted inputs on-chain and generating random numbers, and on Base they are paid in ETH. The amount is fetched each time via getFee, and the official example value is 0.000001 ETH. Operations such as addition and comparison are free, and only the usual gas applies. In cToken, a confidential transfer costs this network fee plus Base gas in ETH, while shielding and unshielding cost only gas.

Apps You Can Try on Inco and Actual Usage

Here is what individuals can try on Inco today, and the actual numbers on how it is being used.

How Much Is cToken Being Used?

According to the official indexer (an API that aggregates on-chain records), as of October 27, 2026 there were 118 wrappers (types of wrapped token) on Base mainnet, of which 92 had some activity. Looking at cUSDC alone, roughly 43,079 USDC had been wrapped in total and roughly 42,999 USDC unwrapped, leaving a net of only about 80 USDC still shielded. The 4,734 public-side records show 454 unique addresses. Most wrappers other than cUSDC are meme tokens.

Demos You Can Try and Integrations (Prism and Celo)

What individuals can try is the official demo collection Inco Arcade (experiences.inco.org). Payment-focused integrations are still at the testnet stage.

App	What it does	Can you use it now?
cToken (official app)	Shield, confidentially transfer and unshield ERC-20 tokens	Base mainnet, gas at your own expense
Hangman	A game where you guess an encrypted word	Free via Inco Arcade after connecting a wallet
Prism	A payment app that lets foreigners pay via Vietnamese bank QR codes	Base Sepolia only

Prism's mainnet support has remained "very soon" since its July 15, 2026 announcement. Celo aims for confidential stablecoin transfers in a limited testnet beta, and confidential stablecoin payroll with Toku has been announced but is not yet live.

Taken together, most cToken usage so far consists of trial runs that wrap, send and unwrap right away, and holding balances in shielded form has barely begun. The use cases where confidentiality really matters, such as payroll and payments, are all on testnet or not yet live, and have not yet flowed into cToken on mainnet. The two things to watch next are whether the gap between cUSDC wrapped and unwrapped starts to widen, and whether Prism goes live on mainnet.

Risks to Check Before Using Inco

If you treat it as an "anonymous coin", it will differ from your expectations on three points: freezing by the issuer, disclosure to authorities, and trust in the TEE.

Freezing by the Issuer and the Blocklist

You can unshield a cToken at any time, but the issuer of the underlying token (the Asset Issuer) retains powers such as freezing assets, blacklisting specific addresses and restricting transfers. In fact, the cToken factory (the contract that creates wrappers) is deployed with the blocklist enabled.

Disclosure to Authorities and the Operating Entity

What is hidden is the balance and amount on-chain, not your identity from the operator. Inco may disclose user information, including IP addresses, to authorities and law enforcement. Beta-stage services are for experimental purposes with no guarantee of operation. The operating entity is Liquidbox Corp, with an address in Miami in the United States, doing business as Inco.

Trust in the TEE and the Status of Published Audits

Decryption on Base mainnet is handled by a quorum of TEE-based decryption nodes with verified attestations. The basis for security is not a mathematical proof but trust in the hardware and the node operators. The official site says it has been audited by Trail of Bits, but no published report can be found. The docs also do not say who runs the decryption nodes or how many there are.

Inco Network's Funding and Token Status

Here are the investors and founder, and what became of the INCO token reported in 2024.

Investors and Founder Remi Gai

Item	Details
Founder	Remi Gai (Founder)
Seed	$4.5 million (February 2024), led by 1kx. Circle Ventures, Alliance DAO, Polygon Ventures and others
Strategic round	$5 million (April 2025), led by a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX). Coinbase Ventures joined as a new investor
Advisors	Rand Hindi (Zama CEO), Mike Mosier (formerly FinCEN/OFAC) and others

In the April 2025 funding announcement, Remi Gai said that now that scalability and chain abstraction have been solved, confidentiality is the last remaining challenge for blockchains.

The Shift from the 2024 FHE Chain Plan

Around the February 2024 seed round, Inco planned an FHE (fully homomorphic encryption) chain built with the Cosmos SDK, secured by dual staking of ETH via EigenLayer and the INCO token. On April 24, 2025, it released the TEE-based Inco Lightning on Base Sepolia. The same week, it founded the Confidential Token Association with OpenZeppelin and Zama.

Is There an Inco Airdrop or Token?

The February 2024 seed was structured as a SAFE with a token warrant (the right to receive future tokens), and at the time there were reports of plans to use the INCO token for staking. As of October 27, 2026, however, nowhere on the official site, docs, blog or terms is there any announcement of an airdrop or points, and there is no announcement of a token distribution, nor has a token itself been issued. No Inco Network token is listed on CoinGecko, and the ticker INCO belongs to an unrelated asset, InfinitiCoin on BSC.

Summary

Inco Network is a confidentiality layer that wraps ERC-20 tokens on Base and hides only balances and transfer amounts. The cToken app is usable today once you connect a wallet. However, usage is still mostly wrap-and-unwrap trials, integrations are stuck on testnet, and there is neither a token nor an airdrop announcement. Given that confidentiality rests on trust in the TEE and that the issuer keeps its freezing powers, this is the stage to decide whether to run a confidential transfer end to end with a small amount of USDC, or to wait for integrations to go live on mainnet.

Sources

Disclaimer

・This article is created for informational purposes only and should not be used to solicit the sale, purchase, or underwriting of cryptocurrencies, securities, or other financial products, nor should it be considered an invitation to engage in such transactions, or constitute financial or investment advice.
・The information and opinions in this article are obtained from sources that we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee their accuracy, completeness, suitability, timeliness, or truthfulness.
・We, the authors, and all related parties are not responsible for any damage or loss caused by or related to the information published in this article. Cryptocurrencies involve hacking and other risks, so please conduct thorough research before using them.

Supervised by

Shingo Arai

CEO, Rokubunnoni Inc.

After completing a Master's degree in Management Engineering at Tokyo University of Science in 2013, Shingo Arai worked as an engineer, data scientist, and data analyst at multiple companies in the web, app, and advertising industries. He entered the cryptocurrency and blockchain space around 2017, founded Rokubunnoni Inc. in January 2018, and launched Crypto Times — a blockchain-focused media outlet — in February 2018. With approximately 9 years in the industry, his expertise spans DeFi, L1/L2 protocols, tokenomics, ZKP, and domestic/international regulatory trends. He actively conducts on-chain asset management and research. He has authored and supervised hundreds of articles, spoken at conferences in Japan and abroad, served as a DeFi investment seminar instructor, and operated KOL ambassador programs.

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