privacy

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost stated that a recent paper explored the possibility of implementing privacy transactions on Bitcoin, characterized by the ability to achieve this directly on Bitcoin L1 without the need for a soft fork, making privacy transactions a native feature.Darkfost mentioned that he is not a developer and lacks the relevant technical background, but this idea is quite appealing. He believes it could be an important direction for Bitcoin's evolution according to Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision, while potentially diminishing the appeal of privacy projects like Zcash and Monero.

Two ChatGPT users from California filed a proposed class action lawsuit against OpenAI in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California this month, accusing the company of failing to adequately inform users that their real conversations were being handed over to external contractors for processing. The lawsuit was served to OpenAI on September 2, focusing on its internal initiative Project Lily. According to the complaint, "AI data reviewers" and "chatbot evaluators" recruited through a third-party staffing company read real ChatGPT prompts and complete conversations, summarize user intent, and score and comment on responses from four models on a scale of 1 to 7.This process is known in the industry as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is a fundamental method for enhancing chatbot capabilities. The complaint states that users were never explicitly informed that a person, rather than a machine, might be reading their conversations. OpenAI filters conversations through an automated system before human review, but the complaint alleges that the filters cannot intercept all content, and personal details sometimes still reach contractors. 404 Media first reported on the project on September 14 and found that the reviewers' dashboard included "user memory summaries," which could expose users' approximate locations, occupations, or private life information, even though usernames had been removed.OpenAI stated that such reviews aim to reduce two behaviors: chatbots behaving too much like humans and overly catering to users, referred to by researchers as "flattery." The complaint raises eight legal claims, including violations of California's Unfair Competition Law, Consumer Privacy Act, and common law claims for intrusion into private affairs, with the plaintiffs seeking damages, restitution of unjust enrichment, and punitive damages.

NEAR Protocol posted on platform X that the NEAR platform has launched a privacy limit order feature, supporting assets from any blockchain.Users can set a target price, and when the market price reaches the target price, the order will be executed automatically. The order will not be publicly displayed while waiting to be executed.

According to Bitcoin.com, the market capitalization of the privacy coin sector has increased from $11.97 billion to $36.51 billion over the past five months, an increase of $24.54 billion, or approximately 205%. Among them, Zcash (ZEC) saw an increase of $20.27 billion, while Monero (XMR) increased by $4.33 billion.In January, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concluded its investigation into the Zcash Foundation without recommending any enforcement action. On August 25, digital asset management company Grayscale converted the Zcash Trust into the ZCSH spot ETF and listed it on NYSE Arca, becoming the first publicly listed privacy coin spot ETF in the United States. On September 8, Digital Currency Group (DCG) exchanged ZEC for approximately $100 million in ZCSH ETF shares. During the same period, the price of ZEC rose from $319 to $1,507, while XMR increased from $330 to $555.

According to Specter Investigation monitoring, the privacy stablecoin payment network Payy Network is suspected to have been attacked, with approximately 1.8 million USDC transferred away.The attacker previously obtained initial funds through the privacy protocol Railgun, then exchanged the stolen USDC for ETH and dispersed the funds to three addresses.

Meta's personal AI assistant Muse has been accused of reading users' private iMessages without permission and providing false explanations about how it accesses this information. Technology columnist Jason Aten installed the assistant on his iPhone and Mac when Muse launched on September 8 and explicitly refused to grant it access to personal data such as information and calendars.A few days later, Muse sent Aten a notification suggesting he write a column about the new iPhone that he had just discussed with his podcast partner, also mentioning a deadline reminder from the editor. Aten asked Muse how it knew this, and it replied that the Mac application only forwards notification previews and does not involve the content of messages. In reality, Muse had synchronized over 187,000 records from the local private information database on the Mac, an operation that requires full disk access permissions on macOS.David Singleton, head of Meta's superintelligent lab, responded on Threads that this feature requires users to actively choose to opt-in. Aten denied ever turning on that switch and stated that Meta had not answered related questions. Amazon has banned Muse from shopping on its site, stating that the assistant did not indicate its AI identity while browsing and seemed capable of capturing and storing user credentials. Since its launch, Muse has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, with its promotion emphasizing user control over access.

According to official news, Citrea announced the acquisition of the self-custody privacy Bitcoin wallet Crest, which will become Citrea's flagship privacy product. Its founder Meliksah Gurtemel will join Citrea as the head of product.Citrea stated that Crest will launch a Bitcoin mobile wallet in the coming weeks, supporting automatic privacy protection, private BTC transfers, and cross-linking from Bitcoin and Ethereum. It plans to support private cross-chain exchanges and exit paths, allowing users to privately pay USDC or ETH to EVM addresses using privacy BTC.

According to internal information obtained by 404 Media and Reuters, after Meta expanded the Muse "Call for You" testing, it was revealed that some calls were actually completed by real people. Muse can transfer tasks to real contractors at call centers, who then make calls on behalf of users and fulfill requests. Some testers only realized there was human intervention after the call ended.Meta adopted this approach mainly to improve success rates. Internal testing showed that the success rate of phone tasks could reach 95% to 98% with human intervention, higher than pure AI. Some merchants hang up directly when they hear the other party is AI, and there are also testers in the community who reported that merchants hung up after Muse identified itself as an AI assistant.Human intervention raises privacy concerns, as users originally believed their information was only shared with AI, but it may actually be seen by outsourced personnel. Some people within Meta also questioned that providing privacy training to contractors does not equate to a real safety mechanism. A Meta official later admitted that failing to inform testers in advance about human intervention was a mistake, and this feature has been rolled back. Meta stated that the phone function is still in testing and will only be officially launched after ensuring safety, privacy, and clear communication.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, delivered a keynote speech at the 12th Global Blockchain Summit, stating that the blockchain was initially a primary tool. Although it has characteristics such as openness, neutrality, and security, it is not scalable and is completely transparent, lacking privacy protection mechanisms.Subsequently, privacy transactions and scalable verification brought by zero-knowledge proofs have changed this situation and have been transformed from planning into actual EIPs, included in the Ethereum roadmap. Technologies such as fully homomorphic encryption are also beginning to be applied, and indistinguishable obfuscation may also be applied on-chain in the future. Beyond privacy, the parallel construction and proof of blocks can make extreme scalability possible, and industry thinking has shifted from digital assets to digital assets plus information, from purely on-chain to user-end, transaction memory pools, a complete pipeline on-chain, and from who can send what to who can see what.Currently, blockchain has gradually evolved from a simple ledger to a cryptography-based secure computing network. With the development of AI, providing cryptographic rules to AI for automated formal verification can significantly enhance verification efficiency, allowing the chain to carry more possibilities.

The report believes that if the privacy sector can capture 5% of the offshore wealth market (valued at approximately 11 to 16 trillion dollars), the market capitalization of this sector will reach 550 billion to 800 billion dollars, representing a growth potential of 18 to 27 times compared to the current approximately 30 billion dollars.Ethereum and Solana have both incorporated privacy features into their roadmaps, and a16z has also listed privacy as the most important competitive advantage for 2026.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to Paradigm Chief Technology Officer Georgios Konstantopoulos's question, "What room is there for the development of privacy from now on?" by stating that only by giving up can privacy truly be considered to be on the path to extinction. I will not give up on privacy; instead, I will further strengthen it.Earlier reports indicated that Vitalik updated the Ethereum roadmap in August, with quantum security, privacy protection, and native Rollups becoming future focuses.

Aptos Labs announced that Confidential APT has been launched on the Aptos mainnet. Balances and transfer amounts are encrypted on-chain, and validators check zero-knowledge proofs to confirm the validity of transfers without viewing the specific amounts.Addresses remain public, and this feature is completely optional, allowing for public verification without public disclosure.

Zcash holders voted overwhelmingly to support speeding up transaction times while retaining the Bitcoin-like halving mechanism. This governance vote was for Zcash's next major network upgrade, NU7, with nearly 2.4 million ZEC participating in the vote, accounting for about two-thirds of the approximately 3.6 million eligible ZEC at the time of the snapshot. The results were calculated based on ZEC weight, with each eligible ZEC representing one vote.Among them, 99.9% of participating ZEC supported reducing the block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, 98.9% supported retaining the Bitcoin-like halving mechanism, 96.6% supported postponing the fee reissuance of the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) until February 20231, and 99.3% supported launching NU7 as soon as possible, giving up any unrealized features before the deadline of September 30.This vote was limited to holders of ZEC in Zcash's latest privacy transaction pool, Ironwood. The ballots were encrypted and split into 16 parts for counting, making it impossible for validators to reconstruct the specific holders' votes and balances. Previously, a sentiment survey in February for NU7 only attracted 7.25% of circulating ZEC to participate. The voting results themselves will not directly change the network; the relevant features still need to be implemented, tested, and included in the final upgrade.

Tether posted on platform X that USDT has been launched on the privacy protocol Zama.

Miden launched the privacy self-custody wallet Bread, supporting iOS, Android, and Chrome, currently running on the Miden testnet. Users can gain mainnet access through the early access list. Miden Wallet is no longer in service.

According to The Block, the on-chain confidentiality protocol Zama will open deposits for 16 confidential vaults on Morpho, covering assets such as USDC, USDT, AUSD, and TGBP. Its first vault went live in June in collaboration with Morpho and Steakhouse Financial, using Steakhouse's USDC Prime strategy, with total locked assets increasing from zero to $40 million within seven weeks. Steakhouse will manage part of the vaults, while Armitage by Wintermute, Flowdesk, RockawayX, and Bitwise will also serve as managers.Users can confidentially access 12 existing non-confidential versions of Morpho vaults on Ethereum, with an additional 4 created specifically for confidential deposits. Zama also launched the Zama Swap Protocol, allowing depositors to confidentially exchange cUSDC, cUSDT, cAUSD, and cTGBP as well as confidential vault shares on Ethereum, without disclosing transaction size or intent. Zama stated that positions, balances, and strategies on public blockchains are visible to competitors and frontrunners, posing a structural barrier to large-scale deployment by institutions. The vaults will first go live through Zama's own application, with Utila, Zerion Wallet, and Yield.xyz set to integrate in the coming weeks.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing the hope to include the recursive STARK memory pool proposal EIP-8288 in the Ethereum I-star upgrade, stating that it can be seen as the next step after Frames.This proposal allows quantum-safe signature data to be placed off-chain, reducing the cost of signatures; the fuel cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is also expected to drop from about 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal relies on frames and recursive STARK aggregated transaction dependencies, with nodes sending a STARK of about 100 to 300KB each time period; the on-chain overhead is one STARK and 96 bytes for each statement to be proven.