privacy

According to The Block, Starknet has launched the zero-knowledge privacy framework STRK20, which provides balance shielding and private transfer capabilities for any ERC20 asset on the network, and has first been implemented on strkBTC.This framework allows developers to introduce privacy features for scenarios such as transfers, exchanges, lending, staking, payments, and donations without the need to build a separate privacy system.STRK20 embeds a "shielding" mode in the asset path, rather than using a traditional mixer structure, while introducing a viewing key mechanism that selectively discloses specific wallet information only upon receiving legally valid requests, balancing privacy protection and compliance requirements.StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson believes that such ZK privacy solutions are expected to make regulatory investigations more precise and reduce the collateral impact on a large number of wallets.

Core contributors of the Zcash ecosystem, ZODL, announced that they are collaborating with Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation, and Shielded Labs to propose a new network upgrade plan and privacy pool called Ironwood.Ironwood will be built on the existing Orchard protocol and will further enhance security through formal verification and additional independent audits.

According to CoinDesk, security engineer Taylor Hornby, who discovered a serious vulnerability in Zcash using the Anthropic Opus 4.8 AI model, stated that Monero (XMR) has been added to the audit queue, and more privacy coin projects will undergo security reviews in the future.Hornby previously discovered a critical vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard privacy pool on May 29, which had gone unnoticed since May 2022 and could theoretically allow attackers to create unlimited undetectable fake ZEC. The development team at Shielded Labs completed an emergency fix before June 1 and subsequently disclosed the details of the vulnerability. As a result of the incident, ZEC dropped by as much as 38% within 24 hours after the news broke, with the market concerned that attackers may have exploited the vulnerability to steal funds from the privacy pool without leaving on-chain traces.Hornby stated that he was commissioned by the nonprofit organization Shielded Labs in April of this year to identify protocol vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them. Although he had the means to profit from the vulnerability, he chose to report the issue to the development team, stating that "such betrayal is unacceptable." Additionally, Hornby plans to apply for funding from the Zcash community to support subsequent security research efforts.

Dragonfly partner Haseeb tweeted to clarify the recently fixed vulnerability in Zcash. He stated that if the vulnerability had been exploited before the fix (although the probability is extremely low), it would manifest as the privacy pool minting false ZEC. Attackers would need to sell quickly, but since the market primarily trades transparent ZEC, they cannot directly sell the unmasked privacy ZEC on mainstream exchanges. Therefore, the losses would mainly be borne by users holding privacy ZEC, with almost no impact on holders of transparent ZEC and price discovery.Haseeb emphasized that the Zcash team will introduce a new turnstile mechanism and a brand new privacy pool in the next upgrade to verify that the privacy pool has not been inflated. He also has high hopes for formal verification technology, believing it is an important path for enhancing software security across the industry in the future, especially crucial for privacy protocols.

On May 29, 2026, Taylor Hornby discovered a critical forgery vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard funding pool. Taylor Hornby reported the vulnerability to the Zcash Open Development Lab, and all parties collaborated to complete the fix on June 2. This vulnerability could be exploited to secretly create an unlimited number of forged ZEC within Zcash Orchard. Due to the privacy features of Orchard, it is impossible to cryptographically prove whether the vulnerability was exploited before the fix was deployed. The vulnerability had existed since the activation of Orchard in May 2022, until an emergency fix was deployed on June 1, 2026.With the assistance of AI tools, Taylor Hornby wrote a complete exploit and generated unlimited and undetectable forged ZEC in a local testing environment. Currently, Shielded Labs is collaborating with other Zcash developers to explore network upgrade proposals that would allow anyone to verify the integrity of Zcash's supply.

Aleo released the privacy stablecoin white paper "Stablecoin Privacy," stating that the privacy layer is the key infrastructure missing for blockchain payment rails to be adopted by mainstream institutions. Aleo indicated that as the GENIUS Act provides opportunities for the widespread adoption of stablecoins, the issue of permanently public transaction information on public blockchains may still hinder institutions from using stablecoins in scenarios such as payroll, fund management, and vendor payments.Aleo claims that existing solutions do not adequately meet the needs of institutions in terms of privacy protection and risk management. The white paper proposes a permissionless private stablecoin architecture based on Aleo, which introduces programmable risk mitigation mechanisms while protecting transaction privacy through zero-knowledge technology and programmable smart contracts, allowing institutions to conduct private transactions without sacrificing compliance and risk control.It is reported that the team members behind this white paper have long been dedicated to research at the intersection of cryptography, policy, and financial systems. Aleo's Global Policy Director Yaya J. Fanusie, member of the Crypto Innovation Council and former Global Financial Crimes Compliance Officer at Coinbase Valerie-Leila Jaber, and cryptographer and Johns Hopkins University Computer Science Professor Matthew Green possess rare practical experience in private payments, financial regulation, and zero-knowledge cryptography.

Zama protocol founder Rand posted on the X platform that, with the assistance of on-chain detective ZachXBT, the root cause of the cUSDC contract freeze has been identified. This freeze was caused by a court-issued injunction against addresses related to the Overnight Finance hacker, which had deposited approximately $12.5 million USDC into the cUSDC contract, accounting for over 99% of the funds within the contract, leading to the entire contract being frozen.Rand emphasized that this freeze is unrelated to the protocol itself or privacy technology, and it is not a sanction against Zama, but rather a typical DeFi judicial restriction scenario. The project adheres to compliance and privacy principles, not confusing the parties involved in transactions, only hiding balances and amounts. Currently, Zama is communicating with multiple parties to advance a resolution, has suspended the cUSDC, cUSDT, and cWETH contracts, and will restore them after completing the investigation and handling of the involved addresses, and will release a detailed review report as soon as possible.

According to Cointelegraph, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce defended cryptocurrency privacy tools, calling them legitimate financial infrastructure, and warned regulators not to be skeptical of privacy-enhancing technologies.

According to the official website of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce delivered a speech at the "Regulating the PETshop Series" seminar at Georgetown University Law Center, calling for the inclusion of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in the financial regulatory framework.She criticized the current regulatory approach for being overly inclined towards government surveillance, arguing that technology should serve to protect personal privacy rather than expand the scope of surveillance, and pointed out that blockchain public wallet addresses can reduce the risk of personal information leakage for investors while meeting compliance requirements.Peirce also invited technology teams that can minimize personal information collection while meeting KYC and anti-money laundering regulatory requirements to actively collaborate with the SEC's Crypto Task Force.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recommended the Interfold project, stating, "More people should learn about Interfold, which is a general implementation of the MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) concept that I have been advocating for nearly a decade. This project is essentially a privacy protocol optimized for scenarios such as voting and secret auctions, allowing more people to pay attention to and understand this technological advancement."Vitalik also mentioned that the core mechanisms of Interfold include generating threshold encryption keys, users submitting votes on-chain with ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) credentials, and threshold decryption after arbitrary computation in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which can achieve unconditional voter anonymity, Ethereum-level censorship resistance, and ZK over FHE ensuring result correctness, among other strong security guarantees. The current main limitation is the high cost of complex computations (such as multiplication), with only addition-based voting being mature, and optimizations like slashing-based approaches are being advanced, with a long-term goal of implementing obfuscation techniques to eliminate M-of-N committee dependency.

According to The Block, Aztec Labs has acquired Obsidion, the company behind the open-source privacy identity verification tool ZKPassport. Its co-founders Michael Elliot and Theo Madzou, along with their team, will join Aztec Labs to continue developing ZKPassport and related applications.Aztec Labs is building the Ethereum privacy layer two network Aztec Network, which raised approximately $60 million worth of ETH through the AZTEC token sale last year, and previously secured about $125 million in venture capital.ZKPassport allows users to read passports or government documents via mobile NFC, generating cryptographic signatures locally for verifying age, nationality, and "real identity" without exposing full privacy. It has been used for ticketing at the Devconnect conference and for compliance identity verification in the Aztec community token sale. Aztec stated that it will continue to keep the ZKPassport protocol and iOS application open source.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted that the internal team of the Ethereum Foundation has been working on a new project called Kohaku for nearly a year. The goal is to achieve both security (including decentralization) and read-write privacy at the Ethereum access layer, making security and privacy a "normal configuration" on Ethereum rather than an advanced option. Earlier today, it was reported that Kohaku, under the Ethereum Foundation, released an SDK for wallet-level privacy integration.

The privacy coin sector led the decline, giving back most of the recent gains in the crypto market. According to HTX data, ZEC once dropped 5.2% to $619, marking the largest decline among the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, but it still rose 8.2% over the past 7 days. Zcash has been one of the strongest performing assets in the crypto market over the past few weeks. Due to Multicoin Capital disclosing its holdings earlier this month and the overall narrative surrounding privacy coins heating up, ZEC has attracted institutional attention. Analysts believe that a 5% pullback after such a rally is more like profit-taking rather than new selling pressure, as structural buyers of privacy coins have been accumulating during the rise rather than distributing.Hyperliquid's HYPE token briefly surpassed Dogecoin in market capitalization during the Asian session before retreating. HYPE fell 4% to $59, while Dogecoin (DOGE) dropped 0.8% to $0.1009. Driven by the launch of perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid ahead of SpaceX's listing last week, HYPE still rose 23.6% over the past 7 days. The macro backdrop has driven a cautious tone in the market. The U.S. Central Command confirmed strikes on missile launch sites in Iran and vessels attempting to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz, describing them as defensive actions. Brent crude oil rose nearly 2% to $98 per barrel, rebounding from a 7% plunge on Monday (when the London and New York markets were closed for a holiday). The dollar strengthened against all G10 currencies, gold fell 0.6% to $4,545, and S&P 500 futures maintained a 0.6% gain after the U.S. market was closed on Monday.

Arthur Hayes stated that as large tech companies, governments, and AI continue to expand their surveillance capabilities, monetary privacy will "become very necessary" in the future.Arthur Hayes mentioned that this is also the reason he has chosen the privacy coin Zcash (ZEC) as his second-largest personal holding.

According to The Defiant, the Kohaku Initiative under the Ethereum Foundation has released a software development kit (SDK) that supports direct integration of privacy protocols such as Railgun, Tornado Cash, and Privacy Pools into wallet interfaces without intermediaries.This SDK allows all privacy protocol transactions to be routed through the 4337 mempool, enabling users to control their privacy independently without relying on centralized relayers.The team has implemented private transactions with 4337 mempool relaying functionality, and integration with Tornado Cash and Privacy Pools is under development. Kohaku aims to make end-to-end privacy the default option for Ethereum users by abstracting the complexity of interacting with privacy protocols.Developers have created a CLI-based wallet demo, and wallets like Ambire are integrating it, while a browser extension wallet is also in development. Kohaku is also developing post-quantum accounts, multi-signature, and hardware wallet support.

The privacy coin project Monero has released the graphical wallet software GUI 0.18.5 "Fluorine Fermi." This version is the officially recommended update, focusing on fixing multiple vulnerabilities.The core optimization content of this update includes: adjusting the P2Pool installation path on Windows systems to the local application data directory; improving the parsing logic for extreme scenarios of the uniform resource identifier; disabling the offline transaction creation feature under long payment ID mode; adding unsafe text escaping handling in the QR code scanning process; synchronously upgrading the P2Pool program to version 4.15 and correcting multiple minor program faults.Monero officials point out that this version has been open-sourced on GitHub, and users can download the upgrade through official channels to obtain the latest security fixes and stability improvements.