privacy

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin transferred 50.25 ETH ($113,000) through Privacy Pools.

The encrypted messaging app Signal stated that if Canada's Bill C-22 is officially passed and requires platforms to establish "lawful access" monitoring capabilities, the company may choose to exit the Canadian market rather than weaken end-to-end encryption. Signal's Vice President of Strategy and Global Affairs, Udbhav Tiwari, indicated that the bill could force communication services to create technical backdoors, thereby undermining encryption security and making private communications more susceptible to exploitation by hackers and foreign attackers.Bill C-22 was introduced in March 2026 as part of a new round of regulatory measures in Canada, requiring electronic service providers to establish law enforcement monitoring capabilities and retain certain user metadata for up to a year to assist in investigations of crimes such as terrorism and child exploitation. Critics argue that the bill is similar to the EU's previously controversial "chat monitoring" proposal, which could threaten end-to-end encryption and user privacy. Canadian Conservative MP Jacob Mantle stated that nearly all Canadian MPs use Signal precisely because of its privacy and security features, yet the bill could grant the government the ability to read private messages.Tiwari stated, "Signal would rather exit Canada than violate the privacy commitments made to users." In addition to Signal, the VPN provider Windscribe also indicated that if the bill passes in its current form, the company may follow Signal in withdrawing from the Canadian market. Windscribe claimed that the bill could force VPN services to log data that could identify users, violating its core privacy principles.

YZi Labs announced the 25 graduation projects of its flagship incubation project EASY Residency for the third season, focusing on areas such as on-chain financial market structure reconstruction, AI agents, tokenization of real-world assets, prediction markets, and privacy compliance. The 25 projects include:Identity and payment infrastructure for AI agents on the BNB chain Bank of AI, litigation workflow legal evidence indexing tool Brief Tech, AI probability output verifiable reasoning platform Cournot, financialized social network and trading platform Dapital, programmable token issuance infrastructure Flap;On-chain marketplace for collectibles and intellectual property assets GEMINT, on-chain options and structured products platform LayerV, CEX-level on-chain liquidity platform LunarBase, multi-market agent capital acquisition platform L7, DeFi unified margin layer Möbius, permissionless margin trading protocol Nemesis;AI agent-driven automated financial decision execution layer Newsliquid, tokenized private market exposure DeFi platform Openstocks, on-chain poker skill game options market PokerFi, prediction market automation and intelligence infrastructure Polysights, physical collectibles RWA liquidity infrastructure Renaiss;Fixed-rate decentralized lending platform TermMax, compliance-oriented digital asset privacy infrastructure 0xBow, AI agent workflow self-custody authorization layer Functor, interest-free stablecoin new bank for the Muslim market Isaac, on-chain prime brokerage platform for the BNB chain MARGIN X;Frictionless stablecoin exchange N-dimensional AMM Orbswap, compliance-oriented cross-chain privacy exchange protocol SilentSwap, crypto market AI agent trading and automation infrastructure Taco AI, on-chain event-driven derivatives platform Vibe.fun.

According to CoinDesk, the three blockchains focused on stablecoins and tokenization, Arc, Canton, and Tempo, have collectively raised over $1 billion, reflecting an increasing demand from institutions for privacy-focused crypto infrastructure. Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan stated that as cryptocurrencies further enter mainstream finance, privacy features may become a key application scenario for the industry.Specifically, Circle recently raised $222 million for Arc, with a valuation of $3 billion; Digital Asset is reportedly raising $300 million for Canton, with a valuation of $2 billion; and Tempo, supported by Stripe and Paradigm, previously raised $500 million, with a valuation of $5 billion. Hougan also mentioned that the advancement of stablecoin legislation in the U.S. is providing a clearer regulatory environment for institutional investment in related infrastructure.

The Ethereum Layer 2 network Starknet developed by StarkWare officially launched strkBTC, a new type of asset based on Bitcoin, designed to achieve privacy balances and anonymous transfers through zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology, while maintaining composability with DeFi applications.After the launch of strkBTC, it supports "re-anonymization," allowing assets to be bridged back to a new, unassociated Bitcoin address, and provides compliance auditing and asset screening functions.

Grayscale has submitted a Zcash spot ETF application, converting the existing Zcash trust into a spot product, becoming the first privacy coin ETF seeking to be listed in the United States. At the same time, Multicoin Capital disclosed that it has been continuously building a position in ZEC since February, with co-founder Tushar Jain linking the investment logic to the proposed wealth tax legislation in the U.S., believing that the government's expansion of monitoring private financial holdings will drive structural demand for assets that shield regulation on a mathematical level.However, this application has also raised institutional custody challenges: approximately 30% of Zcash's supply is located in shielded address pools, the highest in history, but ETF custody must almost exclusively use transparent address pools to meet audit and balance proof requirements. Previously, the SEC concluded its long-term review of Zcash in January 2026 without taking enforcement action, significantly reducing regulatory uncertainty.

On May 10, Vitalik Buterin published a research article advocating that cryptocurrency payments need to shift from pseudonymity to default privacy, proposing the use of zero-knowledge proof (ZK) transactions to replace standard transfers, allowing users to prove payment validity without exposing their full balance or transaction history.Vitalik specifically pointed out that in the era of agents, autonomous AI agents need to pay service fees (such as LLM API fees) without leaving traceable footprints. By using recursive SNARKs and ZK APIs for points, Ethereum Layer 2 can handle privacy payments at the same speed and cost as transparent transactions. The proposal also includes selective disclosure and proof of innocence mechanisms, allowing users to provide specific proofs to compliance agencies or tax authorities without disclosing data to the public, in response to anti-money laundering regulatory requirements.Vitalik believes that the public transparency of blockchain is the main obstacle preventing cryptocurrency payments from replacing traditional payments, and the ZK payment standard aims to make privacy a default feature.

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Mysten Labs, posted on the X platform that confidential transactions will be launched on the Sui network this year, enabling large-scale, free, and privacy-protected payments.

Tushar Jain, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, disclosed on social media that he has significantly increased his holdings in the privacy coin Zcash since the beginning of this year. Multicoin Capital pointed out that Zcash has returned to the "cypherpunk" ideals on which cryptocurrency was founded. The proposed wealth confiscation bill in California is a warning signal.As the trend of confiscating private wealth through political means continues to grow, individuals and institutions will increasingly seek private assets that can protect their interests. Additionally, while Bitcoin has censorship resistance and cannot be frozen or blocked from use, this does not prevent governments from confiscating known held assets through wealth taxes. Therefore, assets that truly possess privacy, censorship resistance, and seizure resistance have a clear product-market fit, and the related demand is accelerating. In their view, ZEC is the most direct vehicle to express this investment theme in the public market.

According to The Defiant, Polygon Labs launched a stablecoin privacy payment feature in its consumer wallet on Monday, in collaboration with the privacy protocol Hinkal, currently supporting USDC and USDT.It is reported that the Polygon wallet has added a "Privately Send" option, allowing users to send stablecoins on Polygon through Hinkal's shielded pool, where the sender, receiver, and transfer amount will not be publicly disclosed on-chain. The related transfers will be verified through zero-knowledge proofs, enabling external observers to confirm that valid transfers have occurred, but they cannot see the participants or the amounts.Polygon Labs stated that this feature is aimed at institutional payment scenarios, designed to address the issue of excessive transparency in public chain payments. The design also incorporates Know Your Transaction (KYT) screening and operates in a non-custodial mode, meaning no operating party holds user assets during the transfer process.

Barry Silbert, the founder of Grayscale's parent company Digital Currency Group (DCG), stated on the X platform that the market has yet to realize the global demand for decentralized digital value storage tools like Bitcoin, which could be as high as $2 trillion. At that time, the industry generally believed that Bitcoin itself was sufficiently private and could serve as a relatively private global value storage and transfer tool. However, as market awareness increases, the demand for privacy is being more clearly identified, and therefore privacy coins like Zcash will benefit from the "first-mover advantage."

According to official disclosure from 0G Labs, 0G Private Computer has officially launched, providing privacy inference services based on TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) for AI agents and developers. Users can access the service through pc.0g.ai.The official statement indicates that the product utilizes a hardware isolation environment composed of Intel TDX CPU and NVIDIA H100/H200 GPU, with all inference requests completed within the TEE. Input content is transmitted in an encrypted manner, and output results will undergo signature verification, ensuring that service providers cannot directly view user data.Currently, the platform supports models such as DeepSeek DeepSeek Chat V3, Alibaba Qwen3.6 Plus, Zhipu AI GLM-5-FP8, Qwen3-VL-30B, OpenAI Whisper-large-v3, and z-image, and provides an interface compatible with the OpenAI API, allowing developers to complete migration by modifying the base URL.

According to Cointelegraph, Aptos recently launched the privacy token Confidential APT on its mainnet, which is pegged to APT at a 1:1 ratio. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide token balances and transfer amounts while maintaining wallet address visibility and transaction verifiability.Sherry Xiao, founding engineer of Aptos Labs, stated that the token aims to address the long-standing contradiction between blockchain privacy and compliance transparency, and can solve issues related to the public exposure of sensitive information such as on-chain salaries, treasury operations, and trading strategies. On the compliance front, the activation of the audit key must be approved through on-chain governance voting. The launch of Confidential APT stemmed from a governance proposal that was nearly unanimously passed. Xiao expects individual user adoption to be faster than that of enterprises, and if the mainnet operates stably for six months with good transaction volume, it will help shorten the sales cycle for enterprises.

Ethereum developer Tom Lehman has released a draft proposal for EIP-8182, which aims to make private transactions a native feature of Ethereum by introducing shared privacy pools, a fixed address system contract, and zero-knowledge proof verification precompiles at the Ethereum protocol layer.The proposal states that the solution will be implemented through a hard fork upgrade, without an administrator key, governance tokens, or on-chain upgrade mechanisms, with the goal of addressing the issues of decentralization and inconsistent trust models in privacy applications. As designed, users can make private transactions to any Ethereum address or ENS name using existing wallets, and it supports atomic "de-sensitization - interaction - re-privatization" processes.

The privacy protocol Umbra has shut down its hosted frontend website to prevent attackers from using the protocol to transfer stolen funds from recent security incidents.Umbra stated that approximately $800,000 had been transferred through its protocol, but the protocol is only used to hide the identity of the recipient, and the related transactions can still be tracked on-chain. This measure comes after the Kelp protocol was attacked, resulting in losses exceeding $280 million. Umbra stated that it will restore frontend services once it is confirmed that asset recovery efforts are not affected, but it cannot prevent users from continuing to use the protocol through smart contracts or self-hosted frontends.

The Layer 1 blockchain Tempo, developed jointly by Stripe and Paradigm, has launched a privacy feature called Zones. This is a solution for running permissioned parallel blockchains, specifically designed for enterprise-level use cases that require higher confidentiality, such as payroll, fund management, and payment settlement.It is reported that Zones, as a parallel blockchain connected to the Tempo mainnet, provides a private execution environment where internal transactions remain confidential, but assets and funds are fully interoperable with Tempo L1, other Zones, deposit channels, and liquidity pools. Each Zone is managed by trusted entities such as financial institutions or infrastructure providers, allowing operators to view all activities within their environment and implement access controls, but they do not control the underlying assets.

XRP Ledger announced the integration of zero-knowledge infrastructure provider Boundless to support banks and asset management institutions in executing transactions on the public chain that balance privacy protection and compliance.According to reports, this solution can hide sensitive information such as transaction size, frequency, and counterparties, while still allowing regulatory agencies to conduct audits through selective disclosure and role-based access control, thus achieving a balance between privacy and compliance. This integration will support institutional scenarios such as cross-border B2B payments, fund and capital management, over-the-counter (OTC) trading, tokenized asset issuance, and on-chain trading and lending.Industry insiders believe that the contradiction between the transparency of public chains and the demand for privacy has always been a significant barrier to institutional adoption, and this solution aims to reduce the so-called "transparency tax." Meanwhile, competition in the privacy track continues to heat up. Technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) are accelerating implementation, pushing privacy capabilities from optional features to underlying infrastructure. Data shows that the market size of tokenized assets has reached approximately $29.25 billion, with a monthly increase of about 7.9%.

TON Financial Company AlphaTON Capital announced a strategic financing agreement with Vertical Data totaling approximately $43 million.AlphaTON stated that this financing collaboration focuses on AI hardware deployment, which will accelerate its "privacy computing" and sovereign AI infrastructure development, and support the integrated development of AI, digital assets, and confidential computing. It is reported that its AI and privacy computing infrastructure will also provide underlying computing power support for related applications of partners such as Telegram and Animoca Brands.