An opinion article argues that the long-discussed blockchain “trilemma” — the trade-off among decentralization, scalability and security — is no longer the central obstacle facing on-chain finance. According to the article, treating the trilemma as the main reason mainstream capital has not fully entered the sector misses the more important conflict now confronting public blockchain systems.
Legitimacy and Privacy as the Central Conflict
The article says the real constraint is the dual absence of legitimacy and privacy. The permissionless nature of public chains creates regulatory uncertainty, placing practical pressure on compliant use. At the same time, the default transparency of on-chain transactions exposes financial information in a public environment, which makes the infrastructure difficult for both institutions and ordinary users to use safely.
Within this transparent structure, users also face issues such as MEV exploitation. The article describes the resulting burden as a substantive “privacy tax”: the cost users bear when their financial information is exposed and their transactions can be exploited while using open blockchain networks.
The article argues that the solution is not to choose between privacy and regulation. Instead, it advocates privacy technology with provable compliance, including zero-knowledge proofs, so that privacy protection and regulatory requirements can coexist. On that basis, institutional capital and ordinary users would be able to use on-chain financial infrastructure in a safer manner.