On-chain Privacy

On-chain Priv
2026-10-15 12:46:00

Why privacy coins may not be enough to protect on-chain trading strategies

A PANews-translated article argues that renewed interest in on-chain privacy goes well beyond a niche cypherpunk theme. In a market where public ledgers expose wallet balances, trading habits, venue preferences and even activity patterns, the piece says privacy tools that only hide value transfer fail to protect the parts traders care about most: intent, trigger conditions, timing and execution parameters. The article reviews existing approaches across dark pool trading and spot execution. It cites Renegade, which uses MPC for matching and zero-knowledge proofs for on-chain verification, Aster’s hidden orders and hidden positions, private RPC systems such as Flashbots Protect and MEV Blocker, and Shutter’s threshold-encrypted mempool. In the author’s view, each tool helps at one stage of the trading lifecycle, but none provides a general privacy layer for programmable strategies. The report then focuses on Nillion’s proposed primitive, Covenants, described as sealed "if-this-then-that" instructions that remain hidden until preset conditions are met. It says the first implementation under the project’s "Dusk" phase is planned for Ethereum mainnet, with later stages extending to multiple chains, external data sources and more complex private logic. The article also points to use cases including sealed-bid auctions, protocol safeguards, private conditional orders and cross-chain triggers, while presenting Covenants as part of a broader push toward what it calls "encrypted markets."

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Why privacy coins may not be enough to protect on-chain trading strategies
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Ethereum
2026-08-29 02:52:10

EthSystems says privacy, not demand, is the main barrier keeping large institutions off Ethereum

EthSystems, a newly independent team spun out of the Ethereum Foundation, argues that institutional adoption of public blockchains is being held back less by a lack of interest and more by a structural mismatch between Ethereum’s radical transparency and the confidentiality requirements of large financial firms. In a Bankless interview, co-founders Mo Jalil and Oscar Thorne said major institutions generally care most about business continuity, operational security, and compliance. Public-chain liquidity and composability are attractive, they said, but exposing balances, positions, or execution logic on an open ledger is a non-starter for many firms. The pair described EthSystems as the continuation of work already developed inside the Ethereum Foundation around institutional privacy, including architecture analysis, workshops, proof-of-concept efforts, and public research. They said the harder problem now is not basic cryptographic theory alone, but fitting tools such as zero-knowledge proofs into real financial systems with strict latency, audit, settlement, and jurisdiction-specific requirements. Among the examples discussed were inter-dealer compression in global derivatives and FX markets, and a national-scale blockchain payment system that would require four-way cryptographic coordination among sender, receiver, a licensed compliance auditor, and a state regulator. EthSystems said its longer-term plan is to turn insights from these hard, customized deployments into open standards and modular infrastructure for the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

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EthSystems says privacy, not demand, is the main barrier keeping large institutions off Ethereum
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ZAMA
2026-07-29 06:00:20

ZAMA nearly doubles in two days as private RFQ launch and buyback-burn model draw focus

ZAMA climbed from $0.035 to above $0.065 in less than two days, setting a new all-time high and rising nearly 100%, according to Foresight News. The token’s market capitalization reached $188 million and its fully diluted valuation rose to $700 million. The rally has brought renewed attention to Zama’s core pitch: adding practical confidentiality to public blockchains through fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, without requiring users to move assets to a new chain. A major catalyst was the July 23 launch of the test version of Confidential RFQ, an on-chain sealed-bid request-for-quote protocol designed for larger trades. Zama said 100% of trading fees generated by Confidential RFQ will be used to buy back and burn ZAMA, with no front-end fees. The protocol currently supports cUSDT/cUSDC, cZAMA/cUSDC and pairs tied to confidential yield positions, while a public release is scheduled for September. The project has also highlighted operating milestones across the network, including confidential stablecoin transfers, a confidential USDC vault built with Morpho and Steakhouse, compliance wallet screening with Elliptic, and a confidential transfer benchmark of about 1,000 TPS on commodity GPUs. Foresight’s report also pointed to staking growth, shielded TVL in the $40 million to $50 million range, and token unlocks that keep larger allocations locked until Feb. 2, 2027.

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ZAMA nearly doubles in two days as private RFQ launch and buyback-burn model draw focus
Multicoin co-founder Tushar Jain rejects calls to pre-disclose trades, says privacy is essential