privacy

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.

According to the official website of SOL Strategies, SOL Strategies Inc. has signed a final agreement to acquire the assets of Darklake Labs, a native zero-knowledge technology company on Solana, for $1.2 million. The transaction price consists of $200,000 in cash and $1 million in equivalent common stock.Darklake's core product, Zyga, is a dynamic zero-knowledge proof system native to Solana that provides privacy protection at the transaction execution level and eliminates front-running and sandwich attacks.After the completion of the transaction, the core team of Darklake will join SOL Strategies, including CEO Vitor Py Braga (formerly with Meta and IBM), COO Amber Hales (formerly with Coinbase, with nearly a decade of compliance experience), and zero-knowledge research lead Tiago Alves.

SOL Strategies Inc. has signed a final agreement to acquire the assets of Solana native zero-knowledge technology company Darklake Labs for $1.2 million, with the transaction price consisting of $200,000 in cash and $1 million in equivalent common stock of the company.Darklake's core product Zyga is a dynamic zero-knowledge proof system native to Solana, which can achieve privacy protection at the transaction execution level and eliminate front-running and sandwich attacks. After the closing, Darklake's core team will join SOL Strategies, including CEO Vitor Py Braga (formerly of Meta and IBM), COO Amber Hales (formerly of Coinbase, with nearly a decade of compliance experience), and zero-knowledge research lead Tiago Alves.

Recently, the State Taxation Administration and the National Financial Regulatory Administration of China jointly issued a notice on "Further Deepening and Standardizing 'Bank-Tax Interaction' Work," which pointed out the need to deepen the application of bank-tax data.Standardize the content and methods of providing bank-tax data to further resolve the information asymmetry issue between banks, taxes, and enterprises. Encourage both banks and tax authorities in various regions to utilize technologies such as blockchain and privacy computing to legally and compliantly innovate the "bank-tax interaction" model. Banks will continue to optimize credit services, increase financing service supply for honest tax-paying enterprises, and continuously monitor the effectiveness of the "bank-tax interaction" loan model to improve risk management levels.

Vitalik Buterin shared a post outlining his localization and privatization LLM deployment plan as of April 2026. The core goal is to prioritize privacy, security, and autonomy, minimizing the opportunities for remote models and external services to access personal data. This is achieved through local inference, local file storage, and sandbox isolation to reduce the risks of data leakage, model jailbreaks, and malicious content exploitation.In terms of hardware, he tested solutions including a laptop equipped with an NVIDIA 5090 GPU, an AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro 128 GB unified memory device, and DGX Spark, using the Qwen3.5 35B and 122B models for local inference.Among these, the 5090 laptop achieved approximately 90 tokens/s with the 35B model, the AMD solution around 51 tokens/s, and DGX Spark about 60 tokens/s. Vitalik indicated that he prefers to build a local AI environment based on high-performance laptops while using tools like llama-server, llama-swap, and NixOS to establish the overall workflow.

The privacy chain Aztec Network, supported by a16z, officially launched Alpha Network, becoming the first Ethereum Layer 2 with a complete private smart contract execution environment, which was previously approved by a unanimous community governance vote.Aztec integrates privacy at three levels: private data supports confidential transactions and RWA transfers; private identity allows for selective disclosure to meet compliance requirements; private computation hides on-chain behavior, opening up space for privacy DeFi and gaming applications. Contracts are written in the Rust-style language Noir, with privacy logic executed on the user side to generate zero-knowledge proofs, settling on Ethereum approximately every 12 seconds.However, this launch comes with a significant warning, as Aztec disclosed known serious security vulnerabilities, with auditing still ongoing. The team advises users to only deposit funds they can afford to lose.

According to The Block, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson announced the launch of the privacy-focused blockchain Midnight, which generated its genesis block on Monday.Midnight utilizes zero-knowledge proof technology (ZK), allowing users to selectively disclose or hide data while supporting compliance requirements. Its hybrid ledger can mix public and private data in a single transaction and supports shielded assets that hide balance and counterparty information. Midnight employs a dual-token model: the governance token NIGHT serves as a store of value for the ecosystem, and holders can earn a renewable Gas token DUST, which is generated proportionally to holdings and can be transferred to others for transaction fee payments. The network opened a one-year NIGHT airdrop to 37 million eligible wallets last December. Early node operators include Worldpay, Bullish, MoneyGram, Google Cloud, and others. Midnight achieves bidirectional asset interoperability with Cardano, and Cardano's staking pool operators can also run Midnight validation nodes.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson announced the launch of the privacy-oriented sidechain Midnight, which has generated its genesis block, marking the official entry of the project into the operational phase.Midnight is developed by Input Output Global and is positioned as a "fourth-generation blockchain," aimed at driving real-world assets on-chain through end-to-end privacy capabilities. The network employs zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology to achieve selective disclosure of data, meeting compliance requirements while protecting user privacy. Architecturally, Midnight has its own ledger, consensus mechanism, and smart contract environment, and connects with the Cardano ecosystem through interoperable design. Its hybrid ledger supports the simultaneous processing of public and private data within the same transaction and provides the ability to conceal balance and counterparty information. Additionally, Midnight introduces a programming language called Compact, lowering the barrier for developers to build privacy applications, and adopts a dual-token model to optimize network usage costs and incentive mechanisms.

According to CoinDesk, the Cardano ecosystem privacy public chain Midnight officially launched on Monday. The project is supported by approximately $200 million in funding from Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, aiming to address what it sees as core design flaws in the cryptocurrency industry.Midnight is built on the Cardano ecosystem, positioning itself not to compete with Bitcoin or Ethereum, but to operate as a complementary network in parallel, allowing users and businesses to use blockchain more securely and conveniently by hiding sensitive data and reducing operational complexity.Hoskinson summarized the three core issues of the cryptocurrency industry as: insufficient privacy, operational complexity, and lack of compliance. In Midnight's design, users do not need to manage private keys themselves, transactions do not automatically expose balances or on-chain behavior, and in some scenarios, users may not even need to be aware of the underlying blockchain's existence.

EY announced the launch of the Blockchain Privacy Sandbox, a web-based development environment designed to help businesses and developers experiment with privacy-preserving smart contracts on public chains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is reported that this sandbox environment is based on the open-source technology Starlight, allowing developers to convert standard Solidity smart contracts into applications with privacy protection features while retaining the original contract logic, and providing exploratory, replicable, and modifiable sample projects to accelerate proof of concept development.Currently, the Blockchain Privacy Sandbox is mainly used for experimentation and validation, supporting businesses in assessing the feasibility of privacy smart contracts, testing functionalities, and validating application scenarios before officially integrating Starlight. EY stated that this tool lowers the technical barrier for conducting privacy experiments on public chains by providing an easy-to-use web environment. Starlight, as the underlying ZKP compiler, has been open-sourced, allowing developers to integrate privacy features through its GitHub repository. As businesses' demand for data privacy protection on public chains increases, the attention on zero-knowledge proof technology continues to rise. Relevant reports indicate that the global ZKP market is expected to reach approximately $7.6 billion by 2033.

According to Decrypt, Coin Center Executive Director Peter Van Valkenburgh stated that the Trump administration has not fulfilled its promise not to prosecute developers of cryptocurrency privacy software, and there is a clear contradiction between actual law enforcement and policy statements, putting developers at risk of uncertain legal consequences.Currently, the U.S. Department of Justice is still suing several developers of privacy tools and even sentencing them, including cases involving tools related to Bitcoin and Ethereum, among which Ethereum developer Roman Storm has been partially convicted, and prosecutors are attempting to revive the remaining charges.Coin Center warns that in the absence of "binding legal clarity," the act of developing privacy tools may still be held accountable due to user purposes (such as money laundering), exacerbating compliance uncertainty in the industry.

According to CoinDesk, the Solana Foundation released a report titled "Privacy on Solana: A Comprehensive Approach for Modern Enterprises," which suggests that enterprise-level adoption requires flexible privacy controls and positions privacy as a customizable feature rather than a trade-off.The report argues that the next phase of crypto adoption will depend more on allowing enterprises to control the subjects and content of information disclosure, rather than solely relying on transparency. The Solana Foundation proposes that privacy encompasses four different modes: pseudonymity, confidentiality, anonymity, and complete privacy systems. Pseudonymity hides identity while transaction data is visible; confidentiality allows participants to be known but encrypts sensitive information; anonymity hides participant identities while transaction data is visible; and complete privacy systems obscure both identity and transaction data through technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation.The report emphasizes that there is no single privacy model suitable for all scenarios, and enterprises can mix different tools according to their needs. The report notes that Solana's high throughput and low latency enable advanced privacy technologies to operate at near-network speeds, making applications such as encrypted order books or private credit risk calculations possible. The Solana Foundation also proposed mechanisms such as "audit keys," allowing designated parties to decrypt transactions when necessary, thus achieving coexistence between privacy and regulation.