iExec RLC

$27B in tokenized assets are live on public blockchains today, against a $100T addressable market. The gap is not demand. It is a technical problem nobody had solved at scale: how to keep data confidential on-chain without breaking composability or auditability. Public blockchains expose everything by default, and institutions cannot operate that way.
Today, iExec is launching the Nox protocol on Arbitrum Sepolia: a confidentiality protocol for on-chain finance that lets smart contracts and tokens process encrypted data without exposing the underlying values, while preserving full DeFi composability and on-demand auditability.
Builders and institutions can start integrating today. Anyone can deploy confidential smart contracts on Nox, compose its privacy primitives, and create their own use case.
<h3 id="where-nox-protocol-comes-from-br-br">Where Nox Protocol Comes From </h3>
iExec has operated confidential computing infrastructure since 2017. Eight years of TEE-based execution, 50+ ecosystem partners, and research collaborations with Ethereum Foundation, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA stand behind the protocol.
Those 8 years produced more than infrastructure. They produced clarity on what the market actually wants.
We spoke with TradFi institutions, RWA issuers, fund managers, and DeFi protocol teams across the conversations that shape every product decision. The signal is consistent: institutional capital is ready to move on-chain, but it cannot operate on infrastructure that exposes every position to the public. The solution they need is confidentiality. The technology that makes it production-viable is TEE-based, because TEEs are the only approach available today that is both scalable and ready for institutional throughput.
The market is now mature enough to absorb this technology. Nox is the product of that convergence. We removed the complexity of confidential computing and packaged it into ready-to-use confidential primitives, encrypted transfers, encrypted balance accounting, access control, attested computation, that plug into existing DeFi infrastructure as building blocks.
Full transparency works for retail DeFi. It is a structural blocker for everything else. Developers &amp; Institutions cannot ship a lending protocol that hides collateral ratios from liquidation bots, a yield vault that protects strategy positions from copy-trading, a tokenized fund that keeps investor allocations off the public ledger, or a payment system with hidden but verifiable amounts.
Institutional capital is ready to deploy. It will not deploy into infrastructure that publishes every position to a block explorer. Nox removes that constraint.
<h3 id="what-nox-is-br-br">What Nox Is </h3>
<ul>
 <li>Confidential by default. Balances and amounts are encrypted. Nothing is readable on-chain unless the data owner grants access.</li>
 <li>Auditable on demand. The data owner controls who sees what, when, and for how long. Regulators get scoped access. Auditors verify specific positions. Permissions are enforced on-chain.</li>
 <li>Composable through confidential primitives. Nox lets builders use confidential primitives through the Solidity Smart Contract library without migrating to a new language or ecosystem. These primitives act as building blocks for confidential DeFi workflows across the existing stack. We're enabling the Money Legos philosophy to Confidential DeFi.</li>
</ul>
Nox is built on three core privacy layers that make confidential smart contracts programmable.
<ol>
 <li>Handles. Encrypted data is referenced through 32-byte identifiers. Smart contracts work with these secure pointers without exposing the underlying values, which are stored off-chain.</li>
 <li>Access Control Lists (ACL). An on-chain permissions contract governs each handle. Read access can be granted to specific addresses, smart contracts, or auditors, and revoked at any time. Selective disclosure becomes programmable.</li>
 <li>Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). Computation on confidential data runs inside Intel TDX enclaves, isolated from the operating system, the cloud provider, and iExec itself. Every execution is cryptographically attested on-chain.</li>
</ol>
Together, Nox’s confidential primitives give builders a reusable foundation for DeFi and RWA workflows that need privacy, auditability, and control. Instead of implementing cryptography from scratch, developers can call Nox primitives from standard Solidity, deploy confidential smart contracts, and create their own use cases around encrypted balances, confidential transfers, selective disclosure, vault workflows, payments, lending, OTC flows, and tokenized assets.
<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/optimized-uploads/877fd05b9f8642a18e879bacf3a633c0.png">
The testnet ships with the full toolkit: a Solidity library for adding confidentiality through standard syntax, a TypeScript SDK for encryption and decryption, support for confidential smart contracts that process encrypted data end-to-end, and ERC-7984 confidential tokens that wrap existing ERC-20s or issue native confidential assets.
Users interact through any standard Ethereum wallet. No custom client, no migration, no UX friction.
The Confidential Token is live. Any ERC-20 can be wrapped into its confidential equivalent, used across DeFi with encrypted balances and amounts, and unwrapped at any time. Selective disclosure is built in.
The Confidential Vault is launched as the primitive for confidential strategy execution: vault structure stays public, positions and strategy logic stay encrypted.
Beyond these, the testnet opens the door to yield vaults protected from copy-trading, tokenized equity with confidential allocations, confidential payment systems, lending primitives that process sensitive collateral data privately, and selective disclosure workflows where users control exactly who reads their data.
<h3 id="who-is-nox-for-br-br">Who Is Nox For </h3>
<ul>
 <li>DeFi protocol builders who need confidentiality without rewriting audited contracts or migrating chains.</li>
 <li>RWA issuers and tokenized fund managers who need to issue on-chain securities without publishing investor allocations, while giving regulators scoped access on demand.</li>
 <li>Professional capital allocators who cannot deploy a strategy on infrastructure that broadcasts every move to copy-traders and MEV bots.</li>
 <li>Compliance teams building under MiCA and equivalent frameworks, where selective access, not full opacity or full transparency, is the actual requirement.</li>
</ul>
Nox is live on Arbitrum testnet for now, with expansion to other EVM networks coming next.
<h3 id="what-nox-brings-to-the-market-br-br">What Nox Brings to the Market </h3>
Five properties define why Nox is the right confidentiality layer for on-chain finance.
<ul>
 <li>Performance. Nox executes confidential operations at the cost profile institutional applications require. The protocol supports operations natively that other privacy approaches cannot match today, including division and signed integer arithmetic.</li>
 <li>Scalability. End-to-end latency fits the workloads institutions actually run: fund subscriptions and redemptions, vault rebalancing, OTC settlement, and regulatory access grants. Throughput scales horizontally as more operators join the network.</li>
 <li>Composability. Confidential tokens remain ERC-20 compatible. They integrate with existing DeFi protocols, wallets, and tooling without custom logic, isolated pools, or liquidity fragmentation.</li>
 <li>Developer experience. Builders write standard Solidity. No new language, no specialized toolchain, no cryptographic expertise required. Nox handles encryption, TEE execution, and attestation in the background.</li>
</ul>
Trust architecture. No single party, including iExec, has unilateral access to encrypted data. The protocol's decryption key is never held in one place. Instead, it is split into pieces across multiple independent nodes, with a minimum number required to cooperate before any decryption can happen. This is called Multi-Party Computation (MPC): collaborative cryptography that distributes trust rather than concentrating it. Even iExec cannot unilaterally reconstruct the key.This reflects the broader principle Nox is built on: no single privacy technology solves confidential DeFi alone. Trusted Execution Environments handle fast computation on encrypted data. MPC and threshold cryptography secure the keys. Each technology is applied where it performs best. The result is a confidentiality layer that is fast, scalable, trustless, and verifiable, none of which is achievable with any single approach alone.These are not future properties. They are measurable today on Arbitrum Sepolia. Proof of Cloud: Verifying the Hardware Itself Trusted Execution Environments protect data from software-level attackers, but hardware isolation is only meaningful if the machine sits in a location you can verify. iExec is a member of the Proof of Cloud Alliance, a coalition including Secret Network, Phala Network, Automata Network, Nillion, Oasis Protocol, Flashbots, and others, which shifts the security model from trusting that a cloud provider is honest to proving that the hardware is housed in a verified facility.The process combines physical inspection of professional data centers, cryptographic binding of each machine's hardware ID to its physical location in a public registry, and decentralized attestation by multiple independent alliance members. For Nox, this is the layer that completes the trust architecture: confidentiality is enforced cryptographically, physically, and verifiably, end to end. What's Already Built on Nox The Confidential Token is live. Any ERC-20 can be wrapped into its confidential equivalent, used across DeFi with encrypted balances and amounts, and unwrapped at any time. Selective disclosure is built in.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/optimized-uploads/a93f91d9f73d476e867938dd6ff9da8a.png">This is the missing privacy layer for on-chain assets, the foundation for RWAs, institutional payments, and confidential DeFi flows.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/optimized-uploads/73c43d291e184429b236ec04735a017c.png">The Confidential Vault launched in April as the primitive for confidential strategy execution. Built on Confidential ERC-7540, it keeps vault structure public while positions, balances, and strategy logic stay encrypted. Disclosure is scoped and revocable, matching the model regulated funds already operate under.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/optimized-uploads/bf024e5ac472436aab3259dc72e095fc.jpeg">Beyond iExec's own products, independent builders have already shipped on Nox through the Vibe Coding Challenge on testnet to date. 1.BangDropID , Diam is a confidential on-chain OTC desk where trade amounts stay encrypted end-to-end. It addresses a real market.&nbsp;Read more: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/43636 2.0xSelmgx , RWA OS is a confidential real-world asset platform handling the operational stack tokenized fund issuers actually need.Read more: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/43431 3.winsznx DarkOdds brings privacy to prediction markets. Outcomes and odds remain public; bet sizes are encrypted.Read more: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/43656
Two iExec use cases. Many community-built use cases. All on the same primitives. None required cryptographic engineering from the builders.
The testnet opens the door to more: yield vaults protected from copy-trading, tokenized equity with confidential allocations, confidential payment systems, lending primitives that process sensitive collateral data privately, and selective disclosure workflows where users control exactly who reads their data.
The Nox protocol on Arbitrum Sepolia is the first publicly accessible step toward what iExec is building: a confidentiality layer that any financial application on any chain can use without thinking about it.
The roadmap is already in motion. Mainnet is the next step. Expansion to other chains follows. One protocol, every chain.
iExec RLC Token sits at the core of this protocol. It is the native asset of Nox economy, capturing value from confidential execution at scale.
Confidentiality is not a chain you migrate to. With Nox, it becomes a primitive: as standard and accessible as any other DeFi building block.
The protocol is live on testnet. The toolkit is shipped. The benchmarks are verified. Institutional capital is waiting on this layer.
Start integrating today: https://docs.iex.ec/
Connect with our team: https://iex.ec/contact-us

Nox: The Confidentiality Protocol for On-Chain Finance

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iExec RLC

Other articles published on May 19, 2026

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