Introducing zkAPI: private usage credits for any API

What happened

Introducing zkAPI: private usage credits for any API (the interface one piece of software uses to talk to another) Posted by Vittorio Rivabella, dAI Team on October 1, 2026 Research & Development tl;dr: zkAPI lets you pay for a metered API without being known. Your API key points to an account, the account to a payment method, and every prompt you send joins the record attached to both.

tl;dr: zkAPI lets you pay for a metered API without being known. Deposit credits into an Ethereum vault once, then authorize bounded usage with zero-knowledge proofs instead of an identity.

The provider sees the requests, and the payment layer sees the spend. The Open Anonymity Project built it with the Ethereum Foundation, and it runs on Ethereum Mainnet today.

The problem Every AI API call today carries an identity. The provider can connect years of your usage into a single profile.

People ask AI models about their health, their finances, their doubts. Under the current model, using AI means handing a running transcript of your thinking to whoever holds the billing relationship.