An employer needs to account for payroll without publishing every employee’s compensation to the world.
01 / The problem
Privacy is not the whole brief.
Public blockchains make money movement inspectable. That is useful for some forms of accountability and a poor default for salary information. But hiding an amount does not answer who can approve a payment or how a treasury stays under control.
PayrollPro joined those questions in one prototype. I led a three-person team at the OnionDAO Hackathon, framing the payroll problem and coordinating the work across payment flows, confidential-transfer patterns, and treasury controls.
Prepare. Describe the payroll obligation without making private salary information the public interface.
Authorize. Apply treasury approval controls before release. Privacy does not grant spending authority.
Release. Make the payout flow understandable without claiming the prototype has production hardening.
Conceptual payroll flow. Salary amounts and wallet information are intentionally absent.
02 / The work
Build around the payment lifecycle.
The prototype explored confidential salary payments, multisig approval, and payout flows using Solana tooling. A teammate’s public recap describes Token-2022 confidential transfers, multisig wallets, Solana Pay, and QR payouts.
The useful design unit was the payroll batch: prepare the obligation, apply the required authority, and release the payment through a controlled flow. Privacy belongs alongside authorization, not in place of it.
03 / The judgment
Finish a coherent prototype.
A hackathon forces a choice between breadth and a convincing end-to-end idea. We focused on a payroll system whose parts made sense together: private compensation, controlled treasury access, and a clear payment experience.
The team took first place. The next engineering step would be hardening the financial paths and adding end-to-end tests, not treating a competition prototype as production payroll infrastructure.
04 / Decisions
What I chose.
And why.
- Privacy plus approval
- Confidential transfers address visibility; multisig controls address authority. Neither replaces the other.
- A payroll lifecycle
- Preparation, authorization, and release form a clearer operating model than disconnected payment features.
05 / Result
What came out of it.
First place at the OnionDAO Hackathon, with a three-person team and a working payroll prototype.
Status & source notes
Placement and leadership follow my project record, with the team and win corroborated by a teammate recap. The prototype is not an audited custody service or production-ready payroll system. The linked source archive includes upstream confidential-transfer examples, not solely original PayrollPro code.
Case study updated September 12, 2026.