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DEV🕶️TIME: Privacy Architecture Debate
Recorded: March 19, 2026 Duration: 0:44:03Space Recording
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to go to the next video. Music Okay, hello, hello. Can you hear me, guys? Yes, Dima. Hi.
Yeah, yeah. Hi, how are you doing?
I'm good. How are you?
I'm good. How are you?
A bit injured, you know, but not dead.
A bit sick, so I'm going to be slightly passive today.
So I hope Vadim is going to handle it.
Yeah, I was waiting for Vadim to join us.
And now I'm trying to send him.
Okay, here he is. Hello, Vadim.
Claire, hey, Dima.
What's up?
Alright, so all of us are here.
I hope, Dima, you're feeling every day better and better.
And hopefully, Vadim can step in if you will not how to answer or whatever and Vadim how are
you by the way all good working a lot playing with AI okay it seems like
everyone is playing with AI so welcome everyone on today's Dev Time, which is a session with the core devs from Vara.
Every month we go through some topic and today's topic is privacy architecture.
It's going to be amazing if all of you who are now listening can write some message under the Twitter space, share the Twitter space,
so we get more engagement and more people to join in.
And yeah, we will talk about privacy today.
So if anyone would have any questions, feel free to raise your hand and you can ask the
question uh i think we can start uh it's actually been two months we've met all here so very
exciting and i think we can start with the first question if you guys are ready
so are you yes vadadi yes i'm ready
we're just on the lower start you know you only give our like you know
both in the air and we're gonna go answering all the stuff okay
Okay.
All right.
So, guys, when you think about privacy in the blockchain,
what's the first thing actually which comes to your mind?
It could be a feature or something that should be woven into the protocol
from the day one or anything relevant to web-free blockchain technology,
what is the first thing you think about?
Okay, Dima, start, please.
Hey, I was about to start with some joking about
when we start talking about privacy in crypto.
There is a lot of guys that
are like right now in jail due to this fact due to due to the fact that they are trying to bring
more privacy first thing that comes to my mind is the all the tornado cache developer or the
related guys who just end up in jail and this is just the first thing that you can think of
about privacy but this is the cost of privacy actually yeah because actually it's not the
original meaning of blockchain it's not the original aim to be achieved, the privacy, because we had privacy like before.
And right now we have a new market like access on privacy.
We have new market willing to have privacy.
And it's something that you need to build on top of that already exists.
And we need to think how it should be integrated because the pipto is already
integrated in the world so we have some you know regulations uh we have some common protocols we
have some adoption maybe it's like it's not that early as it was like 10 years ago but anyway
we have some adoption and we are moving forward with everything we already have. We are trying to improve the tech. We are trying to
like bring some new solutions like bridge-less solutions, more performance solutions,
more maybe even AI-oriented and stuff. And the privacy here is some add-on feature for me
that should be in the market, but it's not necessary like because i do
enjoy having everything transparent because i can check whatever i want everybody could check
whatever they want about me if they know my address but it's like your responsibility to hide your Yeah, for example, privacy at the protocol level.
So if you talk about Ethereum, Bitcoin or any kind of general purpose smart contracts
chain, they don't have privacy at the core and protocol level, but other projects like
we have privacy built in and that's their main purpose
to be private blockchains and use them as private
transactions or whatever
and for general purpose blockchains that
do kind of compute and a lot of people
use it, Usually privacy is just
that someone builds and who needs privacy that people use it.
So in my mind the general purpose blockchains should find some kind of balance that you can
opt-in feature for privacy but anyone who starts to use privacy will like will get suspicious
so you can always distinct like people who just use blockchains and people who use privacy
tools and you can just find them by different ways, by metadata, by other connections.
So privacy is just very hard topic.
Yeah, to be honest, I think we are a couple of
steps ahead
in this topic because we didn't
yet figure out
what's privacy.
We can discuss some questions,
we can answer them, yeah.
But if you want
having some good debates
about some topic, we need to
realize fully what's the topic.
So basically, we can share some thoughts about it.
For example, Claire, what do you think is privacy on chain?
Oh, you asked me a question. This is not okay.
Why is it not okay? It's our AMA, it's not your AMA, you know?
So for me like generally
privacy is like a rabbit hole honestly i think like it's very complex topic and i met a lot of
people who were like super hard on privacy and stuff uh i found myself and one time when I was trying to like use, I don't know, some apps instead of the people are using and be part of the majority, it's very hard to think about privacy all the time.
So obviously, I'm not a technical person, so I don't know if this answer is accurate for this topic.
I'm just responding as mostly as a user who can care about privacy in apps,
which I would use.
And I still don't know what's the right direction
and if what I'm doing is the right direction.
Yeah, but I'm more like about the fact what what is privacy not how to achieve it not how to support
it for stuff so for example why isn't the privacy the fact that everything is represented by by some
addresses like 20 or 32 bytes addresses in hex uh without any knowledge about who am I, where am I from, how old I am, am I a girl or a boy or stuff like this.
Why isn't this...
...this whole process, we have been trying to create some more transparent solutions.
So, for example, you could find Bouterin's address with just like two clicks.
You just go to the other scan and you type like vitalik.eth and there is like,
there is his name associated with his account because we have been achieving it.
So why isn't't the original privacy?
I think there is a difference between privacy and anonymity.
If you want to stay anonymous, you always tend,
but if someone just tracks you or you have some connections,
that break your an anonymous state so you will be like a public
you will be in a public space so and your address for example will be connected to
your real name for example and there will be no anonymous state but privacy is more about like
what do you do maybe what's inside your address what's inside your profile so if we talk about
privacy i think it's more about about data actually the information behind some
kind of public address for example so basically the ability to keep to keep
anonymous something like this yeah for example if we know the Vitaly Buterin
address and we can track all of his transfers for example what is he doing
but privacy enables the thing that if you know his address with privacy option
we shouldn't see any of his like movements any of his uh data insights
but that would be up to him no yeah so basically it reduces like it removes like uh the original
idea of transparency of um being able to verify uh everything and find all the connections
um being able to verify uh everything and find all the connections it was about this
the blockchain world just evolves and you can always add privacy or disable privacy
doesn't matter so the initial thing for blockchains it was not possible to make something private
and now we have some zk technology for example example, that can enable privacy, for example, Monero, Zcash.
And of course, there is always a debate between who
uses private tools.
They always like suspicious persons,
or they just care about their data leakage.
So for example, if Claire uses Instagram,
Instagram knows everything about Claire.
And if Claire decides to just cut off this track,
she will be like suspicious
why she want to keep
something in private
but I don't know
we can go to the next question
because we just said what privacy
is and the first thing
that comes to my mind is just
yeah it's already said
private data.
I mean, we never need to follow questions, guys.
So if the discussion gets into something else, it's okay.
That's what we do here.
So don't worry about the questions.
Don't worry about the questions.
But, I mean, I probably agree with Vladim's perspective or the opinion.
I feel like crypto wasn't ready when it started.
I think the main point of crypto at the beginning or Web3 was to mostly get decentralized
and it was focused on like the ownership but the privacy
got a little bit later after that but it's just like very i would say it's a big rabbit hole
on how you decide how you behave yeah that's an able privacy like in any application any protocol you just need to build it from
the ground to like to have some kind of overview and architecture before
implementing something that's why we have a lot of privacy tools and
technologies and in this modern world, the demand for privacy is just getting bigger.
Yeah, I mean, from my point of view, it's like obvious that from the very first steps,
they haven't been able to reach privacy because there was like a lot of other tasks or questions
to be solved.
For example, how to build consensus, how to like adopt it, how to interact with it, how
to make it secure.
Hey guys, what about some executions in here?
Oh, contracts and stuff.
So it was about this initially.
And now we have all of this like you know uh already um beaten in the stones
because it's like some basis everybody knows how it works everybody knows how to build it so there
is a lot of player ones a lot of player twos and stuff but um and of course we could move forward
we could move to some security uh like more economical, interesting security concerns.
We can move to some privacy considerations.
But I think the privacy, if we're going to achieve the full privacy in crypto,
we will not be able to adopt it in the world just because everybody will be not just against it
because it's uncontrollable stuff, because it's like uncontrollable stuff,
but it's like totally uncontrollable stuff.
And we're going to come to the just dark market of crypto in the world,
despite the fact that we are like already super close to be like fully understood
and represented on some classic markets like in the same way as the stocks do.
So let me actually follow with another question.
You just said we don't need to follow questions.
But it's in a connection. It's in a connection with what we are discussing. So we discussed that the privacy of like blockchain and crypto projects was added a little bit later.
And maybe it's added as an option layer, maybe something which is used toggle in wallet or via mixer, etc.
So we discussed this wasn't like before really focused on.
So the question is like, what are actually the risks of when it's not like being added as default as part of the layer, but it's just used like optional layer?
Can you like share more about the risk of this approach? Or do you disagree?
I think it's totally okay to build something on top of already existing system instead of of like trying to invent the system from the very beginning with the new approach because
it's like to solve to solve to the people.
And I think it's all about the questions about trying to expand the ecosystem or how to scale
something.
So, for example, you cannot just build Ethereum
because there is a lot of liquidity on Ethereum
and nobody will use Ethereum for your new form of Ethereum.
But if you just move forward,
from one day to another, from one month to another,
you try to build something already integrated
in the solution everybody used to i don't see any
particular risks here except like common uh common stuff from building any products or if you
or if you just didn't pay attention on some security concern, but not from the architecture perspective.
What do you think?
I missed the initial question.
What's the point?
Oh my God, Vadim, that's perfect.
I mean, so the point is, basically, did you even listen to what Dima said or didn't as well?
Yeah, yeah, I was listening to that.
So it's just like, if you think it's actually risky to implement privacy as an optional layer something which is
like inside maybe wallet or via mixer but it's not added there as the default
so I think it is the same as I said before if you add privacy as an optional
layer some people will use it, some people not.
And it will be much easier to track people that use privacy.
And there is some kind of risk, I think.
Because if you build your application like Monero coin with the privacy as default option, everyone who uses it
they are all some kind of like anonymous so they use privacy by default and you
cannot just track everyone and that's the main point. Like if you enable privacy as an option and like an optional layer,
there will be some risks.
So can you share like more information about what does it exactly mean in practice
when you are building something or when you're saying you're adding layer or you're adding
feature what does it actually could do this privacy feature
why people would turn on this or turn off
for some from some new projects to me yeah i mean I mean, if you put a privacy feature
I don't know,
maybe in transactions or
protocol or whatever,
what exactly
this means in practice when you are
building this?
What it could do or
how you build this?
Yeah, I think there is a lot of approaches for it.
Most simple and obvious is some ZK-based ones
because you can do a lot of things within a circuit
and do not reveal anything except input and output.
You don't need to reveal any state like at all for example how how that
catch works they they work in the same way and I think yeah it depends on this on the exact
protocols but I would like to say that if you're building something uh the privacy option i think the privacy isn't like some killer
feature for most of them but you need you need to build some like good and interesting and usable
protocol and if you will be compared to other usable protocols your privacy feature like is
is like is the key decision maker for choosing between you and somebody else but
by default private features for some protocols that nobody uses and nobody wants it's like
some usual stuff from my point of view
okay so let's move on I actually I'm just wondering so I've seen that now you can
actually create our like wallet by your face ID in a phone and stuff like that
have you guys have a look so compare so it's 100% for
adoption right it's much easier you can use just your phone you get a random
random address public key or whatever you don't even have have it you just use
it sign with your face ID and you have an address and you can use it. How would you compare this with safety, privacy, stuff,
compare when you have or own Ledger or you actually use Wallet?
Vadim, it's your turn now.
Sorry, you can start.
I'm just thinking about what Face ID enables and how it helps.
And I don't think there is anything about privacy.
I also think it's some unrelated stuff, but still interesting one.
Because as far as we guys know and uh maybe not everybody else
know uh we had like a retreat for for our company and we have been seeing each other and we had like
internal hackathon for us so we just for fun trying to we're trying to implement something
and it's our like competition you say uh and the point is, my team was building the approach of some account abstraction
inside the smart contracts on VARA and VARA ATH.
And the point is, we have been building the passkey verification system inside
this contract account abstraction.
And this one, which thing is exactly the same
because Face ID only enables your access
to some passkey mechanism.
For example, 1Password, for example, Apple Keychain,
for example, Google Keychain and stuff.
So it's all the same.
It's all about the adoption.
It's all about the usability and ease
to come to the ecosystem. But it's nothing about the adoption it's all about the usability and ease to to come to the ecosystem
but it's nothing about privacy and moreover you cannot even like try to um to track the initial
like face uh or something like this because the bus key is just it's just something uh that like is stored somewhere from from your side and it's just some
some cryptography key player keychain that you will be very fine on chain to be able to interact
with with other uh blockchain entities i would say that yeah passkey and face ID is more comparable to passwords. Like if you use
some kind of password on your phone for example, face ID just can replace it and
it's the same. Like if you put your password it will unlock your phone or
unlock your data and the same thing with just an ID is some kind of input or
just password replacement and yeah it can be used to secure your data
but there is I think no connection to like privacy itself. It is private as far as you just have your face, for example, your fingerprints as a password.
Do you have some recipes how to lose your fingerprints or something?
Have you ever been in jail, Vadim, for example?
Well, Vadim, you don't have to answer this question from Dima.
I will step in.
Because we all know.
Okay, thanks guys for answering.
So I will continue with the questions which we have prepared.
prepared and since we also mentioned CKA proofs we discussed that they are very like common and
And since we also mentioned CKA proofs,
favorite use case in privacy or their use for privacy it's their main purpose VARA actually
supports CKA capabilities from anonymous voting to private defy so can you give us
some real examples of how a developer would actually
use ZK on Vara?
It's not a big deal, to be honest, because what is ZK? Basically, it's some set of mathematical
functions and there is a lot of libraries written in rust for example for the key so it's narcs
it's plonky it's starts it's like a lot of algorithms a lot of things uh for example
even dls uh and the point of war in this model uh in this like topic uh that one allows like
huge computationals it allows like a lot of mathematics to be solved.
It allows like everything to be computed on chain because it's by design like this.
And it's the same for VAR ATH.
And we have some built-in actors.
It's some entities that allow you to speed up the process of
verification of something, but basically you can avoid it. You can just calculate everything,
use common like, libraries for the industry, not for blockchains, not for some smart contracts,
but like for common ZK ones. And you just start using it and realize that it's like,
ones, and you just start using it and realize that it's great to be on VAR, it's great to
have such computer power, it's great to have such transparent and native to common programming
language experience building something on Web3 while you're still thinking like in Web2.
tool.
Okay, if Vadim you don't want to add anything?
Just the same as Dimas said, but if I get all the ZK technicalities right,
so you can build an app that acts on chain and do some kind of private stuff and you can verify
also or pay payloads so the
computation done for this payload right demo
this payload right demo yeah there is a lot of cases like private actor that talks to on chain
talks to on chain messages like in by encryption and you can verify that these encrypted messages means mean something like yeah so so basically using zk you could build
like still transparent actor with its state by this state will be some uh some edge for example
you can cipher inputs you can cipher outputs and it all will work but only for those who realize and know what they
should like be doing yeah so yeah this is a very cool technology and i just thought about
we have on our network uh isolated state like no no other actor can access your state but is observable of chain you can load
you can load like any program of chain and see what's inside its memory for example
and is there a thing to encrypt your state and be private on chain by zk maybe yeah yeah but it depends on what you want
to build because zk is still uh limited with its power because there is not like a lot of things
that you could fit in uh but for example if someday we're gonna move to some hybrid model of execution,
for example, enable X0 or something like this, it will be much more powerful, but it's still
on very early stage from my point of view. And it's like non-production ready because
on VAR you can calculate anything you could calculate in like real life using the case like super limited it will like assume a huge
gravitational powers and stuff yeah and also related to this I just researched
a topic about drastic execution environments so for example why why we cannot enable
privacy on consensus layer for example is because validators can see everything
was going on inside consensus layer and inside transactions, actor states, etc.
And these trusted execution environments
are just a hardware thing, like computational device,
for example, that programs, contracts
can use to manipulate private data.
And validators are not able to see what's inside what's
what's happened they just can prove something happened this is just private
transaction for example private and I see this is a trend recently to enable trusted execution environments in different blockchains or layers of layer one blockchains.
And I think I will research this topic after this same way.
Yeah, I do love TE just because it's not that high P as like AIs, it's not that high P as ZK,
but it's also about the future.
It's also about visionary how we're going to like be calculating something, for example, in clouds and future.
So it's all about this, but i disagree with the approach of some
blockchains or some protocols to be starting like doing it right now uh because they are trying to
build something decentralized but they require uh for validator hardware something that costs like Это как 100 000 долларов. Да, это очень ограничено для людей, ты знаешь?
Это как вы проводите модель AI на вашем устройстве.
Вы не можете это ниже.
Вы просто нужны много денег, space, энергии.
И это же самое происходит в ТЕ.
Потому что вы должны получить это, эти валидатели. И это не об этом интервала. You need to get this thing and you need to get these validators and it's not about this interrelation right now.
So the question I gave you guys was actually regarding like examples of zk so as you know as we know uh we recently or you recently uh launched uh zk poker
on varamaynet and the cards stay private while the game proves fairness without revealing the deck
can you maybe explain those who are not very technical and maybe explain how this works?
It's some kind of magic, you know, and it will be kept the same
because two magicians never reveal their secrets, you know.
But yeah, to be honest, it's not that hard.
It's kind of a limited approach, but there is like a lot of algorithms.
It's a super old like concept based on Vilead's algorithm.
And the point is that everybody who is like joining and playing the same game,
they all shuffle the deck and they are shuffling, shuffling, shuffling some way.
And by the end, they all reveal it and submit proofs how they shuffled.
And it somehow results in some end position of the deck.
And then you like separate cards between users, between players and stuff.
separate cards between like users between players and stuff so it's all about submitting in time
your proof of uh shuffling the deck like in real life so i shuffle you shuffle and you cannot
like know how exactly did i shuffle or if they all like malicious there is one non-malicious user,
which should be, at least because if everyone is malicious,
it doesn't make any sense to play anything because you all know everything.
So yeah, I think it's kind of a simple explanation.
All right, so I think we've been here for 40 minutes, guys. So I want to give you some last chance.
If you think there is something we should mention regarding privacy architecture,
so if you can, each of you, maybe share something we didn't mention yet,
or if you have some other additional comment you think we should say before we will end.
I heard the news recently about US government can allow private transactions.
And the next day they again challenged the TornadoCache developer with some charges.
This was very funny.
But maybe this is how the privacy will go in the future.
Like government can allow private things in certain ways for businesses, for users maybe.
So this is not, this is just started to be more clear maybe.
So the privacy is the way to go.
yeah my side i would say uh that if you're building something related to privacy tooling
privacy and don'ts for existing ecosystem or something like new i think um from the developer
perspective you need to focus on the like your primary ideas what and why are you building and not try to make your ux like as
smooth as it could be in future because otherwise you could face some challenges or you could face
some bugs uh as as we also um maybe maybe it was three months ago or something like this with monero uh on solana
uh because there was like some guy on twitter on x i'm so sorry uh and uh this guy was like
uh investigating uh how do how to crack them uh how to reveal the transfer and uh the primary key to solving who has performed some transfer was in some gas refunds
or something like this which is like maybe less than one cent USD but anyway it's something you
don't need to think of when you build something like for a future something for private future, something for privacy. You don't need to build it from scratch perfectly.
And I think it's related to all of the topics
when you build something.
Do you guys want to comment on, Vadim,
do you have some comments?
I don't have any comments I can say that come build
in water network and enable privacy if you wish and you can build anything not about
not just about privacy just come and build we can enable privacy for you.
All right. So if no one from the audience has any other questions,
I feel like today's session was very different than usual sessions.
usual sessions. But I think we still share, you guys still share quite a lot of interesting
information. This session is recorded, so for anyone who couldn't join, there will be recording
and also there will be a recap thread posted in a few days. thank you guys so much for joining and thanks everyone who joined
as well today yeah thank you guys thanks claire thank you dima it was really interesting to talk
about it because i don't think about privacy like in my day-to-day life but it is really a topic that
about privacy like in my day-to-day life but it is really a topic that anyone should care
i think and decide for yourself what's what is privacy for you
keep moving on stories that needs to be told yeah thank you guys see you next time thank you guys
bye Yeah, thank you guys. See you next time. Thank you guys. Bye. Bye.
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