# Introduction

Curvy is a privacy solution for secure, fast, and compliant cryptocurrency payments.

We are a team of engineers, cryptographers, and product designers who were driven to Web3 by programmable fairness and neutrality.

But without privacy, even systems designed as fair and neutral end up with a massive data theft problem.

We are immensely proud and humbled to be working on technology that can help establish privacy as a human right.

Our approach to building Curvy is to follow these four principles without compromise:

- **Privacy**: No party must, under any circumstance, be able to reconstruct your transaction history and balance without your approval.
- **Compliance**: A well-known and credible party must be able to block malicious addresses or identities, both proactively and retroactively, from using the payment protocol.
- **Utility**: The payment protocol must be as easy or easier to use than competing Web3 wallet products and Web2 payment solutions.
- **Self-custody**: Any interruption of any part of Curvy, excluding the underlying blockchain networks, must not prevent, delay, or partially limit access to users' funds.

Curvy software ecosystem consists of:

- **[Curvy App](https://app.curvy.box)** the non-custodial privacy interface developed and maintained by us, built on top of Curvy SDK.
- **[Curvy SDK](https://github.com/0xCurvy/sdk/)** complete open-source framework for building privacy-enabled dApps and wallets
- **[Curvy Smart Contracts](https://github.com/0xCurvy/contracts)** on-chain contracts that facilitate private payments.