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Privacy Use Cases on BNB Chain
Recorded: Dec. 23, 2025 Duration: 1:10:24Space Recording
Short Summary
The recent discussion among leading figures in the crypto space emphasized the growing importance of privacy in Web3, with a notable trend towards privacy-focused projects and solutions. Key insights included the launch of innovative platforms like Brevis and the increasing demand for transaction and payment privacy as essential for mainstream adoption.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi guys. Thanks everyone for tuning in. This is John from BNB Chain. I think before we
start I wanted to say a couple days ago we conducted a poll on social media on what topic should be our next AMA. Out of privacy, stablecoin, RWA, actually
privacy came in first with 53.4%. I think I did expect privacy to win the poll, but
definitely not by this much. So I think everyone's quite excited about privacy
and to learn more about privacy.
So BNB Chain's goal has always been onboarding
next billion users.
I think not just BNB Chain, but most blockchains
are transparent by default and thus powerful for verification.
But same time as Web3 becomes or comes closer to mass adoption
that is happening right now, privacy is actually indeed needed.
And today we brought in leading protocols in privacy sector
to discuss everything privacy.
I think we can maybe introduce our guest right now, starting from like Brevis, Railgun, and then ZRC.
Awesome. Well, you know, I can start. Hello, everyone. This is Michael. I'm the founder and CEO of Brevis.
Great to be here. Thanks. You know, thank you, John, for inviting us here.
And, you know, at Brevis, what we are building is what we call the infinite compute layer for Web3.
You know, what it actually is, is a smart, verifiable computing platform powered by zero knowledge proof.
So, you know, what it does is that it allows you to offload some very, very complex computation that it cannot run on blockchain to an off-chain
environment and generate a zero-knowledge proof that is easily verifiable, you know,
with extremely low latency and a low cost on-chain.
So you can essentially tap into infinite amount of computation power for your application
with this augmentation of, like, a verifiable computing engine.
of like a verifiable computing engine.
So, you know, because it is actually powered by ZK
and you know, as we all know,
scalability and the privacy are the two sides
of the ZK coin.
And you know, although that we have a lot of use cases
that are live in production for things like
Intelligent DeFi with PancakeSwap, you know,
Uniswap, Metkernel, many other kind of BNB ecosystem project
with like 35 different partners.
But we also are powering many interesting privacy-focused applications,
such as they recently launched the Kaido kind of a mindshare thing,
and also the work that we did with PartyMarket as well.
So happy to be here and talk a bit more about privacy.
Sounds good.
Do you want to introduce yourself, Alan?
Yeah, sure, GM.
Before I go on a tirade, can you guys hear me okay?
Yeah, I can hear you fine.
Hi, what's up? Twitter doing good today. I'm Alan, aka
RailLUU Churchgoer to some people who know me in the Railgun Discord
Telegram. I am a contributor to the Railgun Privacy
Project. I've been contributing to Railgun now for
gosh, almost five years. It's just crazy to think about, which Railgun is
a suite of smart contracts
that's deployed on BNB chain
along with some other EVM compatible chains
to provide privacy to the DeFi ecosystem.
Primarily what it does is it allows users
to generate a private address.
And then from that private address,
they can do cool private DeFi stuff
to quite a bit of success on BNB Chain.
It's actually one of the more popular deployments.
So yeah, super stoked to be here
and chat privacy with you guys.
Sounds good, sounds good.
Leonor, do you want to go next?
Hi, can you hear me?
Loud and clear.
Oh, cool.
Maybe it's fine, alright?
Okay, thanks. I'm Leonar from Indomax.
Sorry, no, there's a twin.
Basically, we're doing a privacy protocol, which is maximize the UX.
So the biggest problem of privacy right now is the UX.
And basically URState 20 is solving their quite a key problem regarding this point.
Basically you can make a private transaction from your usual wallet like Binance wallet or Metamask or whatever you can come up with.
And yeah, that's the things we're working on.
And ERC20 is a private version of ERC20.
Meaning that most of the coins on this world are ERC20 or token on Solana.
And most of their chains are EVM type of chain right now.
And yeah, most of the coins are ERC20.
So USDT is ERC20, USDC is ERC20 for example.
And the ERC20 is adding the privacy functionality to these kind of
ZRC20 standards, meaning that we can make almost all coins
private and you can attach this privacy to your DeFi use cases
to make it a possibility of privacy.
Yeah, so basically ZRC20 is very convenient light tool for many users.
Yeah, that's what we are working on.
I'm our co-founder, Andy.
Also Nuno coming here, joining here as a speaker.
He's also co-founder.
So thanks for the invitation to join this wonderful privacy meetup.
Nice, nice. Thanks for the invitation to join this wonderful privacy meetup.
Nice, nice. Thanks everyone for the introduction.
I think like, I also want to say that like,
you know, like privacy as a topic or sector
is getting highlight right now,
but all the builders here have been building for a while.
And I'm glad that this narrative is happening to really emerge and I hope it becomes adopted
to normal day users as well.
I know privacy gets thrown around a lot recently.
Could you guys maybe define what privacy means to you
and why you think it's so important to,
I guess, like a crypto industry that we're all in?
Actually, whoever wants to answer can go.
Yeah, well, I can start.
And, you know, privacy is very important, like from a social value perspective, but we feel that privacy is a basic human right, that we should be entitled with privacy for financial life or personal life as well.
And, you know, so this is a very large degree of privacy in our daily life today uh even though that we have like a lot of kind of a centralized uh you know social media or financial institutions
but if you really look at the the status pool that we still get a quite a bit of privacy in terms of
like you know how we're transacting how we're interacting with each other you know how we're
storing data with kind of a you know a lot of real world rules. But on blockchain fundamentally, you know, many of the blockchains except a few, you know,
like things like Zcash were not actually built with privacy as the first, you know, kind of a,
you know, first principle. So, you know, therefore, like, if you look at the on-chain traces and transactions, they're all kind of open, fully in the open.
So, you know, I would say like, you know, when we're talking about privacy and especially privacy on the blockchain,
you know, it's very natural for people to kind of first think about privacy as, you know, the way to protect your transaction counterparties
and transfer value.
Right, so that's kind of like the first generation
of privacy protocols and privacy chains,
such as cash, and .
So we have Rilgong,
I will let the folks talk more about that.
So, you know, these are the financial
by essentially hiding centers,
receiving and transfer model. And, you know, these are the high incentives, resale and transfer model.
And, you know, very useful,
but what I'm trying to talk about is that, you know,
with really the recent advances in zero-none proof technology
and the modern proof of cryptography,
so we can now do much more complex zero-none proof
circuits that were not possible before.
And either it was because it was too slow before, or it was too complicated to maintain before.
Now we have technologies such as a zero-knowledge virtual machine, VM, that allows you to be
essentially with zero-knowledge proof and privacy-preserving applications with high-level languages, and you can express
very diverse and flexible application logics using these kind of new tools.
Therefore, now we have a much better kind of a design space. We have a three-dimensional
design space here that you can decide what kind of, you know, exactly what we call the privacy target, what protocol like what is that basically this defines in the
application how and under what condition can these protected information be revealed right so this
also kind of gave you a very different design choices for different kind of applications
and you know finally we need to define what is the target user, right? Is this privacy protocol kind of a gated privacy protocol
only open to specific users
or it is fully permissionless to accept all users,
you know, with different kind of compliance,
you know, and security considerations.
So, you know, I would say that right now,
if we look at the entire privacy design space,
it has expanded so much on the things you can protect
and the ways you can protect them
and how you want to protect them
and who you want to kind of offer
these privacy products to.
So, you know, that's why we're super excited
about, you know, a privacy application,
especially in the coming year.
All super great points. I guess to, of add on that, there's a lot of interesting why in crypto, right?
And I think that if we sort of distill it down, like the reason why we need privacy is because it's sort of expected in finance.
And people who use crypto a lot in a peer-to-peer sort of way
kind of do this really weird thing, right? But we'll take and we'll send tokens to and fro, right?
So, you know, maybe I'll take and send,
let's see who's here in this audience here.
Mr. Victor, you're listening, what up dude?
So if I send some tokens to Victor here,
he would then have access to my balance
immutably until the end of time.
That's just mechanically how account-based systems work, right?
And we sort of take that for granted and we treat it as like really cute in crypto, right?
We'll go and we look at each other's, you know, Ether scan or BNB scan, whatever it might be.
And we look and we say, oh, man, this guy has this token and that token.
And he's transacting this way.
And all he uses is this centralized exchange instead of that one.
And this sort of voyeurism is cute and everything,
but really the reality of the situation is really quite dire
whenever it expounds out to more, I guess, like traditional rails, right?
People don't expect that to be part of the equation,
that people can then monitor their transactions until
the end of time. And so just from like a mechanical, boring perspective, the reason why
privacy needs to come to the space is just from like peer to peer wallet blinding. A lot of
economic primitives simply erode away and become completely unviable whenever you don't have actor
blinding. For example, we had this really cool idea that
came along a couple of years ago, Constitution DAO. If you guys remember Constitution DAO,
I'd love to see some reacts in the audience if you guys know what I'm talking about.
The Constitution DAO raised up a ton of money and they said that they're going to buy the
Constitution, buy the people for the people, raise them in crypto. And it was really sick,
raised a ton of money real quickly,
and it happened on chain.
Everybody was really excited.
There was this huge Constitution DAO.
They went and started bidding on the Constitution at Sotheby's.
What ended up happening?
A Price is Right event happened.
They bid $1 over, basically,
and Ken Griffith stole the Constitution from Constitution DAO.
These basic auction mechanics completely don't work.
It's like playing poker with your hand facing your opponent.
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
It doesn't actually work. And so, you know, if you extrapolate out to, like, more complex markets, you know, when we talk about things like leverage and people buying and selling icebergs
and this sort of thing, right?
Those sort of more complex auction mechanics
completely fall on their face
when there's no actor blinding.
So you have this sort of false price discovery
and on-chain warfare.
And we see it happening here on Twitter,
or X, or whatever the hell you want to call this app now.
We can see it happening here on Twitter or X or whatever the hell you want to call this app now. You know, we could see it all. Well, the max pain point for ETH is 3,100 and $3.8 billion
notion of value is going to get liquidated at this price. It's a total farce of price discovery
and it's completely untenable for anyone to really come in of consequence. And so I think if the space
is really going to grow up, if it's going to get some sort of adoption, if we expect it to be like the traditional rails takeover, like there has to
be privacy from like a simple payments architecture, from a finance architecture. And then, you know,
just from like, you know, we can talk about human rights and all this stuff. But I think that it's
a lot easier and a lot more boring than that, right?
It's just a mechanical necessity for the space, right?
HTTP doesn't work without the S
and online carmas were never happened without SSL certs.
And the same is going to be applicable for on-chain.
So I think it's just a matter of time
for this stuff to take over.
And I think, you know, our previous speakers were right.
You know, the tech is mature.
There's a lot of really cool ways to do it.
And we're starting to see, I mean,
Railgun was deployed here on BNB almost five years ago.
So Railgun researchers and contributors
were doing it before it was really cool.
But it's really exciting to see that it's getting
like a fresh set of eyes here in the space today.
Cool. Yeah, basically privacy, when we talk about privacy,
we need to remember that we are in crypto
and why don't we encrypt our assets?
This is a standpoint in my opinion.
The cryptocurrency doesn't encrypt their assets for users.
It doesn't kind of make a lot of sense.
And it's our duty and mission to complete this.
I think privacy is one of the missing pieces in crypto space right now.
And if we have privacy in crypto space functionality wise,
we fully kind of have all the demands
from the users and holders.
These are the things we need to deal with.
At the same time,
when we talk about the history of the property rights, it's the first moment that all the people's assets and the property rights can be kind of watched over by the strong government or strong kind of powers.
And it's quite a dangerous moment.
So it's another reason why I'm super enthusiastic to make it private, basically.
And, yeah, of course, we need to have this with a really kind of sound way.
And that's the reason why we are doing many, many efforts to make it sound.
At the same time, the privacy of asset is, you know, kind of human, right?
the privacy of asset is, you know, kind of human, right?
I mean, when I listened to the Alan's, you know, talk before, you know, you talk about kind of
most of the users don't care about, you know, authoritarian regime,
kind of taking on the users, you know, at the time, maybe in Tokyo.
I remember that I was really fascinated by the talk and
yeah i think that it's kind of naturally spreading like that way and most of the
users they care about themselves i mean they care about you know their privacy uh other asset of their own, acquiring that by their maybe selfishness or their own interest.
And I think this industry should help this kind of way to spread the virtue of their
property, right, to have the privacy.
Basically, ZRC 20 is helping that part quite a step-by-step way. We cannot
gain their things at the same time. It's really difficult. The cryptography is very, no, of course,
it's creepy all the time. At the same time, when it comes to the privacy, it gets more creepy, meaning that it's more not understandable by people, I guess.
So first step for the privacy we should take is introducing the minimum level of privacy or the usual level of privacy for their daily lives.
And this is our way. And I respect many kind of projects doing more ambitious way of achieving privacy.
And anyway, yeah, a lot of people are working on this and this is, you know, I think that,
you know, the goal is same when we have our different paths or no means. This is, that's it.
Basically, yeah, giving our kind of one aspect of property right to users on the, yeah, finding their
last piece, last missing piece in blocking space. And that's my definition of privacy.
Thank you guys.
Thank you guys for the answers.
Definitely, as Michael said, tech and infra-wise,
it seems very ripe for the privacy protocols
and builders building this, you know, like for a while, Railgun has been
around.
And then I think like I met Rayona two years ago and he was talking the same stuff that
he's building now.
So I also think like, but how users adopt it depends on like a leading protocols like
Railgun, Brevis, Intexis, GRC20. So it
really depends on how you guys shape the ways or user journey for the users. I wanted to
ask in your opinion, which area needs the privacy the most, like trading, payments, or DeFi?
I think all can be applied, but what's the next adoption?
Which area the next adoption is going to happen for privacy?
Yeah, you know, happy to jump in to talk about some very concrete use cases
that we recently built and launched
and also will be launching very soon.
And first of all, I think like a transaction privacy
is extremely important.
And I'm sure like Alan,
teams from ZRC 20 is gonna talk a lot more about that.
So I want to kind of basically focus on expanding
the current use cases for privacy-based applications.
So one of these very interesting examples that we recently launched was a collaboration between
Kaido and Polymarket. So Kaido wanted to launch a prediction market based on Mindshare
launch a prediction market based on mindshare for a certain project so basically the idea is that
you can now predict what is going to be this particular project's mindshare at a given date
or at a given date range so you can imagine this is very challenging for party market to risk this
kind of a you know market because you know who is now generating the oracle output of this
is just a kaido a centralized entity right so you know there is going to be a natural suspicion from
the community and the users to say okay look you know since kaido is basically just naming their
mind share for a certain project uh this guy these guys are going to basically just manipulate the
market if the market is big enough so how do we kind of try to solve this? Well, you know, we can solve this
by the naive way to solve this is
to enforce Kaido to open source their entire mindshare algorithm.
Well, that's not possible. So we want to have
some privacy for Kaido to maintain their kind of
secrecy of their
mindshare computation, but we
also want to give a certain
level of reassurance to say that
look, Kaido has been running
the same set of mindshare
algorithm without changing them
on the fly.
Without actually changing them to say,
I'm going to run a different version, I'm going to change
some parameters for this algorithm
and so on and so forth.
So this is where, you know,
kind of what we call computational privacy
comes into play with ZKVM.
Now what Kaido does is that Kaido will first
do a commitment of the program that they run
to say, okay, this is a program that I'm going to use
to generate a Mindshare, you know, number. And I'm not going to say, okay, this is a program that I'm going to use to generate a Mindshare number,
and I'm not going to change this during the time of this kind of a prediction market, for example.
And with all these kind of input that is being inputted into this kind of Mindshare algorithm,
they can now generate a ZK proof to show that, look, this number that you're getting now is actually coming from my pre-committed algorithm.
So this is how Kaido right now is powering prediction market on party market for mindshare numbers.
So we started a few pilots, but then this kind of thing is going to expand in the future.
but then this kind of thing is going to expand in the future.
So on the topic of kind of a trading,
very important thing that I noticed
that there is a lot of discussion recently
about the level of decentralization
for things like perpetual swap markets
and perpetual swap taxes.
So right now, if you look at a perpetual dex design there is this kind of
inherent trade-off between scalability you know trustlessness and privacy right so you know if
you want to get scalability you uh and privacy you basically are giving up trustlessness
and decentralization but with with ZK-based
perpetual swap matching
engine, you can actually get all
three at the same time. You get a high
scalability with
essentially centralized matching,
but at the same time, you're
running this entire matching
process in a ZKVM.
So you're also getting a
commitment basically saying that okay this
matching algorithm is executed correctly and this is a result of your balance and you can withdraw
the balance however you want and at the same time some of these kind of transactions orders can be
protected and can be kind of hidden in the sense that they don't need to be revealed to everyone
on the chain but everyone knows that there is an order that is valid and is actually executed correctly.
So, you know, this is also a very, very important category
that we are kind of working with
some kind of leading protocols in the market on.
And, you know, also very importantly,
informational privacy, right?
So again, a use case with Kaido
that we allow user to essentially generate a ZK proof to show that they are an owner of a very powerful on-chain wallet.
Let's say I'm kind of a big DeFi user, but I don't want to associate my wallet address with my Yapper account, with my kind of a Twitter account, X account.
So how do I do that? Well, I can generate a ZK test station showing that I do
have an account that has traded $5 million on a daily basis on Uniswap or PancakeSwap,
but you don't know what exactly is the wallet. But this way, we help these users to boost their
mindshare value because they're not just talkers.
They're actual practitioners
that have been using relevant protocols day in and day out.
And after we launched this with Kydo,
we did see a lot of users actually do this kind of a test station
because they want to show that they are actually
that they are actually kind of a solid DeFi users
kind of a solid DeFi users
that can add value for different projects.
that can add value for different projects.
So, you know, I think these are the kind of cases we see.
They're really expanding the design space
and design dimensions of privacy-focused applications.
And, you know, I feel that, you know,
either it's trading privacy, you know,
kind of a computational privacy or informational privacy, they're all going to play very, very big roles, you know, or informational privacy,
they're all going to play very, very big roles in the coming 2006.
By the way, Kyro Ren is a fantastic name. I love it.
And my co-founder, Nuno Hazard, strong opinion about this point.
I want you to let him speak.
Hi, I'm Nuno from ZRC20.
My opinion is that payment is the most important case
of private transfers.
So if my credit card and budget history were public,
I simply won't use that credit card.
In the same way, if blockchain is going to be a platform that people can use safely in
daily life, privacy is not optional, it's essential.
So one time, my friend covered my cost of my coffee.
I wanted to pay him back using crypto,
but I didn't want to review my wallet addresses
and my balances,
so I ended up paying their bank transfer instead.
So that experience made me realize
that privacy is absolutely essential for crypto
consolutely essential for crypto to reach mainstream adoption.
to reach mainstream adoption.
ERC-20 supports use case in both payments because it's ERC-20 compatible, so it works
seamlessly with everyday wallets like normal ERC-20.
Yeah, from, yes.
Yeah, maybe that's the reason why we focused
on the payment side.
And of course we can suppose De DeFi privacy because if you specify our privacy address as a recipient of Uniswap,
swapping or the lending protocols recipient, you can make it private as well somehow. But yeah, basically what we are focusing on privacy is payment privacy right now.
Yeah, I think it's, yeah, basically we started right this way.
It has a huge demand.
And yeah, I cannot expose the history of my payment to almost anybody, I guess. And most people do not have any reason
to expose their payment history to public space.
At the same time, it's the easiest way to detect people
because their daily expense has a really informative
has a really informative for tracers all the time.
for tracers all the time.
Yeah, most of the cases are, you know,
one of their most informative proof
or kind of way to trace people,
it's tracing daily activities,
basically money related or payment related.
So I think that hiding payment source or destiny
is critically important for many reasons.
That's my dig.
I'll keep it kind of brief here.
I think that like,
and actually with something like Railgun, you know, there's the ability to take and do cross contract calls.
So swaps from private address by way of Railgun is really quite, BNB chain, etc., a lot of what happens in the crypto market is just transfers, people sending money to and fro.
And getting that right really well is still a really quite important task. A lot of brain damage throughout the Railgun SDK and wallets to support Railgun trying to get this kind of stuff right and doing the research and sort of, you know, hitting the users where they need, right?
Not in the white paper.
And so those things are really cool.
But there's also, like, ancill, this stuff's all solved and like there's people building stuff. I think that there's things that are outside of transactional privacy that
could be considered. One of the things that I think is going to be really important is going
to be in voting, right? So governance, privacy and governance is one of the things that people
talk about a lot, right? People can't vote like themselves if they are doxed. And this is a really
big challenge when it comes to launching voting mechanisms.
There's some cool teams working on this kind of stuff.
So like Enclave, you can check them out.
It's Enclave.gg.
They're doing some really cool stuff.
They set up a voting system built on FHE and Crisp.
It's pretty SWCC.
It's got some really great use cases for setting up polls and doing just raw dog voting and that sort of stuff.
Really, really cool.
I think that we really should also be really sort of steering some of the conversation
towards the networking layer, right?
When I look at EtherScan or BNB Scan or something like this, you can't tell what's in my
Relgan balance.
However, one of the biggest challenges is taking and getting data from the chain, right?
So ultimately, most users will take and use something called from the chain, right? So ultimately, most users will take
and use something called an RPC, right? They'll talk to Alchemy or something like this, right?
And there's not a lot of privacy from them, right? And so there's some really cool research that I'd
love to point to, one of which is a Tor PC, like Tor, like the Onion Routing System PC.
Tor PC, like Tor, like the Onion Routing System PC.
It's pretty sick.
Basically, what they do is they set up an RPC as an Onion service,
which is pretty damn rad if you are a cool nerd like me.
There's also another cool protocol called Node Core,
and they also have a way for you to take in,
sort of set up Tor hidden services for JSON RPC calls
and WebSocket connectors.
And that shit's really sick.
And so I think if we sort of think of privacy like a stack,
there's a lot being done on the transaction side.
But if you're looking to get in the space and do some research,
there's a lot of different stuff, especially at the networking side
that's sort
of starting to come to the marketplace. And it's not trivial stuff. If you look at, there was Blast
API back in the day, real famous RPC. They got bought up by Alchemy, and it was an eye-watering
amount of money. And so if you built a really cool privacy-preserving RPC protocol, who knows,
you could probably raise money from some, I don't know, dragonfly types and build up something
really sick there. And so I think that if I were telling people like, where are the use cases and
where's the need, it's definitely somewhere outside of the on-chain space as well, probably
more so if I had to dare say.
Thanks, everyone, for the answers.
I feel like I need to do more research.
Yeah, I wanted to also ask, like, you know, privacy obviously is, I think, like, normal day users are being introduced to privacy, and I do think they're
still adopting to it.
Do you guys see, like, user behaviors changed over the past couple months?
Or, like, how do you—or if not, like, how do you see, like, web three native users behaviors change over time as privacy gets more into?
Yeah, I think that's a good question, right?
So if we look at like, I could speak like from like a Railgun context, because I pretty obsessively look at that kind of data.
And if we look at it, basically like average transaction volume, like average transaction size
for Railgun started back in, call it late 2020, early 21, were very large transactions.
And that's because transactions were super expensive, like on Ethereum, God bless that
chain, in 21, gas markets were really crazy. And a Railgun transaction was something like $175,
and irrelevant transaction was something like $175,
which is huge.
And so for that to be like of value for someone
that had to be like a really, you know,
reasonably large transaction, right?
But over time, we're starting to see that sort of like
dwindle down as the gas markets sort of erode.
I mean, even like today, like I think it's been averaging
sub one GUE for Ethereum and, you know,
Binance Smart Chain, you know, BNB chain, excuse me,
is super cheap, right? And so if we look at the average volumes, we're starting to see those really get down to average everyday
people sizes, in the hundreds of dollars of being the average. And I think that's indicative of
sort of starting to maybe catch the elbow of that hockey stick before we get to like real adoption, right? But I think that it's still very much so like an esoteric kind of thing, right? I think that most
people who are interested in privacy are like pretty deep down the rabbit hole, you know,
the vitalics and this sort of thing, right? People who have like a reason to really care,
they're being tracked or something like this, or they're like consistently stalked on Twitter this sort of thing. And so I still think that that's the majority use case,
but we're also starting to see a lot more people who are conscious of paying payrolls and this sort
of thing. And so the normalcy of it is really starting to grow. And so with Relga, and I've
seen use cases and heard of use cases, I should say, user stories, if you will, where people will be like white hat bug bounty folks, right?
And they don't want to dox a wallet, but they want to get a bounty, right?
And so they'll have their bounty be paid into a private balance.
And we're starting to hear just a lot more interesting and boring use cases, actually,
which I think is really quite exciting because the second that it gets boring,
we know that it's actually adopted, right?
You know, ultimately, again, you know,
to harken back to an earlier moment where I was talking,
you know, the S at the end of HTTP is really quite boring.
And most people don't give a shit about SSL search.
They don't know what they are, right?
Only thing that they know is that it's like secure and cool.
And like, they don't know about the details.
And I think that like the sooner that we get to that,
like inevitability, the the better but i think it's in terms of like adoption um i'm probably like i'm quite bullish uh obviously i've dedicated my career to this and quit my day job
uh half a decade ago to work on this kind of stuff full-time and research it but uh i tend to think
of like the adoption cycle to be much much longer longer than most people. Like I think of it in like the five to 10 year timeframe,
if not longer. Right. And I sort of, you know, consider things like,
oh geez, like credit cards, right. First credit card was in 1950. And even in the nineties,
people thought it was crazy, crazy 40 years later to be using a credit card to buy a cheeseburger at Burger King, right? And so it was a huge, long adoption cycle. And here in Asia, where I am,
there's still places that say cash only, right? So it still doesn't have like full-on 100%
adoption, air quotes there. But suffice it to say, the adoption cycles for things take long
times. In fact, even like to the point of, you know, basically people die as morose as it sounds, right?
It basically takes generations for things to shift, right?
And so I think we're starting to see like the early signs of it.
Like the thing that I fear in the space when it comes to adoption and seeing things get picked up is some things that happen that aren't actually architecturally sound that are sort of cryptography cop outs. You know, they're, they're like, sparkling encryption,
and not really actually good, as they say, they say they are on the box. And, and that sort of
stuff is a sort of a big fear for me. And so I'm reticent to say that, like, I feel like people can tell the difference.
But I think we have to be really diligent in this space, especially people like us on
stage to quickly call out bullshit when we see it. But that's sort of an ongoing effort,
if you will. But yeah, that's just my take.
You know, I cannot agree with you more on Alan, on the point of, you know, some adoption
behavior unfortunately will just take time and, you know, sometimes it even means that
a generation has to die out before people get used to a certain kind of a news type
of things.
So but yeah, I mean, you know, on user behavior, right?
So like, you know, I also just want to add
that it's like, you know, privacy is important.
There's a great need for privacy,
but at this moment right now,
you know, it is still not frictionless.
So if you look at all the kind of, you know,
crypto privacy related protocols and applications, there are always some user friction involved.
And sometimes it's a, you know, a pretty big user friction comparing to just like a vanilla transaction, for example.
Right. So and, you know, kind of a vanilla computation if you're using ZK for the computation privacy protection.
if you're using ZK for the computation privacy protection.
So, you know, but the good thing, however,
is that, you know, we are seeing a lot of progress
on that front, you know, for ZK proving technology
like using general purpose ZK virtual machines has really progressed
like over three orders of magnitude in performance in the last year.
This is something that we didn't, you know that I myself didn't expect just one year ago,
that if you want to kind of improve some computation in ZK versus just doing it natively,
one year ago, the inflation of computation overhead is like one million times more.
But now we're sitting around three to four orders of magnitude, which is very much manageable. But we're like sitting around like three to four orders magnitude which is like very
much manageable but we're still not there yet like you know especially when dealing with privacy
focused application there are going to be a lot of client side proving means that you know the
user themselves need to do some work to actually protect their privacy in their browser so you know
on the kind of infrastructure and underlying kind of a compilation layer,
which is what we work on,
there are still a lot of things we can do there.
And, you know, hopefully with these kind of changes
and improvements, we can actually kind of, you know,
achieve a really frictionless, you know,
user experiences for some of the privacy applications.
Otherwise, like if you make a transaction and we can wait for like 15 the privacy applications. Otherwise, if you make a transaction,
we're going to wait for 15 minutes to confirm that transaction,
that's going to be a pretty huge overhead,
even though this is the best we can do right now.
So that's kind of one point that I want to mention.
mentioned. The other thing is that
The other thing is that for many of the privacy applications,
for many of the
privacy applications,
I think there's also
going to be a
gradual transition from
either totally
non-private to totally
private, but at the same time,
we cannot prevent terrorists
to use this protocol, to something
in the middle. So I think
we're seeing a lot of
effort that is working towards that. use this protocol to something in the middle. So I think we're seeing a lot of effort
that is working towards that,
whether to
bridge certain off-chain
information to the
on-chain world, or
using advanced analytics
to prevent
malicious
intent,
ill-intended use of privacy protocols.
You know, I think none of these are actually perfect yet,
but, you know, there are still a lot of low-hanging fruits
there that, you know, for example,
you can combine things like informational privacy
with transaction privacy to basically say,
okay, I'm, you know, entering this privacy preserving
protocol because I belong to a certain category of user and that categories for
example I'm like a very long term and have the user and the enhanced KYC user
on certain centralized exchanges and you know but without actually revealing who
exactly you know is this particular is but you can actually generate proof that this is in the case.
So these kind of user experience improvement,
both in terms of friction and in terms of compliance and security
and the user perspective of interacting with these privacy protocols is going to actually
change and improve, hopefully, soon as well.
Yeah, I can agree with you more, dude.
I think that, like, it's really, if you guys
want to go and do some boring research, go look at, like,
the timeline adoption
of, like, HTTPS.
There's some
probably young people here in the crowd, but, like,
pre, like, 2010, like, there was not a lot of adoption of SSL certs.
Now, today, if we look at like the Internet, right, it's something like 96, 97 percent of people's browsing is SSL.
Right. So it's HTTPS. And in fact, like most browsers, if it doesn't have the little
S at the end, right, it warns them and says, this isn't encrypted or whatever, right? Bad
cert or something like this, right? And I think we're going to see something very, very similar
with privacy adoption. And it's just a matter, and it was sort of a similar story with SSL,
right? It was computational overhead, but, you know, with time, that
computational overhead was sort of like whittled and whittled away and performance got better and
better and better and it got easier and easier and easier to install to, you know, rather run
on a website that it sort of just made sense to do it over time, right? But that took a pretty
reasonable amount of time, you know, arguably, you know, that research for SSL started in 1994 with Netscape.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. Feel free to comment on that and drag me if I'm incorrect.
But, you know, that started in 94 and here we are, you know, fast forward, call it 30 years later.
Now we have like really great adoption.
And so like that's that like three decades of grinding by people building and
figuring it out and like trying to to make it better day in and day out uh to to sort of get
to where we are today with like the the security of the internet and we sort of take that for granted
um because it's just assumed in the space today for just the internet but uh i think the same
thing if we look at like 2035 it'll, it'll probably be very similar in the crypto space.
Hopefully sooner.
Yeah, it's maybe possible that wallet adopts a privacy transaction or a privacy standard.
It would be like a browser adopted SSL or HTTPS no widely and it's yeah made the adoption of no HTTPS
and maybe I remember that
2010 period
the hackers were targeting the online banking all the time
and it was almost all about the kind of ssl problems
and so the security issue may be kind of one of the reason uh no maybe yeah must be one of the
reason to make that kind of adoption you know the privacy is a part of security sometimes uh when
especially when it comes to the protocol level on on the online banking, no, adapted, no,
and those are mass adoption, no, of,
no, that's it.
Yes.
Dude, that's exactly, that's exactly right.
It's such a good point, right?
It wasn't, I think we very commonly misinterpret
that it's the end user that dictates what ends up
getting into a product
a lot of the times. And really, most people don't know what SSL is, right? And they actually don't
give a shit, right? They don't know what it means, right? The reason why it got so well adopted
is for exactly what you're saying. People who run these services got tired of getting beat over the
head by active, persistent threats in the space. And ultimately,
it was a bad look for their users to continue to get wrecked by using their services. And so
by necessity, it was actually driven by builders, right? It was Google taking and adopting it and
this sort of thing. And over time, I, like, a really big player early on in this,
in, like, 2010 or some shit like that.
Anyway, go look at the history.
You guys can read it yourselves.
Or ask ChatGPT if you guys don't read me more.
But suffice it to say, like, it wasn't actually end users that cared.
And they still arguably don't care, air quotes.
They now like it, right?
But they don't really know why or like how it works.
It's just there.
And it's just a necessitated thing.
And it's because of threats on the internet.
Totally agree.
Yeah, maybe it's another possibility is like, you know,
the physical crime against crypto holders can be the reason to make adoption privacy in that sense.
And, you know, so many people are...
Yeah, I would like to avoid getting beat over the head for the very sparse amount of money I have on chain.
That'd be great.
Yeah, sorry to our host here for like hijacking. I would like to avoid getting beat over the head for the very sparse amount of money I have on chain. That'd be great.
But yeah, sorry to our host here for like hijacking. It's such a valid point, right?
I mean like users, like where does it go?
Like how do users get this stuff?
Like where does the adoption come from?
And I think it's not just regular people downloading
MetaMask and like demanding there's privacy in it.
It's such a like, I don't know, it's total bullshit whenever you see it in people's decks and they're like,
our total addressable market is all the downloaders of these applications. And it's like,
I think your addressable market is probably the people building those applications. But
you know, you could probably have a longer debate on that on a different chat.
I agree. I agree. But also, I also think like vitalik you know emphasizing you know privacy is
a hygiene tz oftentimes emphasize importance of privacy um i think like people like end users
um at crypto at least um i think should be interested uh because i i think what yeah shout
out cz too right i mean he's been making a lot of comment on privacy and this sort of stuff too.
I think we're starting to see it from the leaders in the space, right?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I think that's also how I start really looking into it.
And there's so much to learn.
And I was just taking notes while you guys are talking.
It's really interesting.
But actually, just before we end, like, I also wanted to ask, like, just quite curious myself, like, compliance does seem to be a king, like, when it comes to privacy these days.
And, you know, like a pure anonymity tools are somewhat fading away.
Like, how do you guys approach compliance?
You know what the Railgun is doing and Privacy Pool is doing,
and yeah, it's really kind of realistic way to prove, kind of,
not solve the problem, I guess.
And of course, compliance is kind of
the biggest duty for
many builders. They deal
with something.
99% of
people, they just
want privacy. Lighter privacy
or heavier privacy, it doesn't matter.
They just want their privacy
for themselves. They don't have any
kind of political statement like the government should not intervene or, you know, the privacy should be super neutral or such kind of stuff.
They do not have that.
So they are not libertarians.
Ninety percent, 99 percent of people are not libertarians.
At the same time, they are not authoritarians.
At the same time, they do not think that privacy or finance is criminal activity or helping
criminal activity.
They do not think like that way.
So 99% of users are in the middle way.
They just want privacy.
They do not want to mix their money with kind of
criminal funds basically and so proof of innocence stuff or what people are doing how in this space
is one of the biggest innovate kind of innovation happening in privacy space mapping you know i i
think it's can be the most kind of the biggest reason reason to make privacy sector bigger or totally different than before.
So basically, privacy pool, railgun, and yeah, you know, the proof of innocence is like proving that your money is not mixed with criminals with ZKP, right? And this is, you know, quite neutral.
At the same time, it's working somehow to make a kind of,
I don't define the kind of compliant, but it's very moral, right?
It has a really good moral standard that each person can prove that they are not mixing their fun with criminals.
This kind of hygiene style of privacy is one of the innovations.
Maybe the people, you guys are doing this currently, so I don't take time but you know I think it's a really beautiful idea
and yeah
I think that this kind of
compliance problem is
going to be solved to that kind of
entirely
of this kind of
movement simply because
if we make a proof that we are innocent, somebody
need to accept that.
And so the exchanges and also the change led by exchanges, they can lead their industry of privacy, actually, because this proof needs
to be their recipient or acceptance.
I think that's the way.
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Oh, okay, yeah yeah thank you um i think that like so i i saw the the so the tornado cache got hit by
an of extension um in uh i guess it was 2022 23 whatever the hell it was uh it's since been taken
off the scm list shout out to uh that win but anyway suffice it to say there was this thing
that came out right and it was a proof of innocence mechanism it was made by these guys called chainway
right uh out of turkey shout out to those dudes. Really cool tech. And basically,
what it allowed you to do is say that my withdrawals from the Tornado Cash system are
not associated with a preset defined list of bad actors as defined by the OFX sanctions list. And
I thought that that was like a really neat thing because it was a privacy preserving mechanism that allowed you to make
a statement about your transactions and still maintain privacy. You know, most protocols,
Relgon included, have these things called view keys, right? So you, whenever you use Relgon,
you basically do two keys, a viewing key and a spending key, and that viewing key would allow
you to decrypt transactions for someone.
The problem is that happens in perpetuity, till the end of time.
And that's not really, really great.
It's sort of like a Hail Mary last ditch effort if you're trying to prove compliance
or maybe you have like a great relationship with your accountant or something like this, right?
Anyway, suffice it to say, right, this proof of innocence mechanism was really kind of novel at the time.
And so, you know, Chainway got to work on sort of building this out for Railgun.
And, you know, now it's really kind of interesting.
It sort of incorporates a very large network of on-chain analytics providers.
I think there's TRM, Elliptic, Scam Sniffer, Mistrack, AML Bot, Purify.
You know, the list goes on.
It's a pretty large community of people who've sort of gotten around this mechanism to sort of disallow bad actors or however that might be defined.
You know, shithead stealing money, pig butchering and hackers and exploiters of large protocols and that sort of stuff to keep them out of the privacy set.
I would be very hesitant to call this a compliance mechanism.
Compliance is a very jurisdictionally specific thing.
It's a big globe out there.
I personally live in Asia, but over the Americas and in Europe, things are different.
I personally live in Asia, but, you know, over the Americas and in Europe, things are different.
And I think that one of the things that we really need to make sure that we appreciate is that in traditional finance, the payment rails do not do the compliance.
by way of, say, ACH or SEPA or Faster Payments or SWIFT or something like this,
or maybe you have direct transfers or something like this,
the counterparties themselves are responsible for doing the compliance,
and the pipes are dumb.
In other words, SWIFT doesn't do your compliance checks when you happen to be using SWIFT.
It's up to you and your counterparty.
And I think the same thing is going to be echoed in crypto.
When we talk about actual privacy, like establishing good counterparty risk and stuff like that,
it's going to happen more at the user level and things like Proof of Innocence are, you know, wallet care about this space can ourselves thwart bad actors and keep them out of privacy sets. call it compliance because the United States, Japan, Singapore, wherever it might be, doesn't
have any sort of compliance framework around zero-knowledge proofs or attestations of non-interaction
with bad actors in spite of all of my trips to DC talking about it. Maybe soon, but certainly
not now.
You know, I think all great points, and especially on the fact that there is like
actually no rule about like, you know,
any of the stuff that we're talking about,
especially involving transaction privacy.
So again, like echoing back to your previous point of like,
maybe this is a generational issue that is going to solve itself with time and hopefully soon.
You know, what I want to add here is that, you know, for Brevis, we don't directly work on transaction privacy.
So, but therefore, you know, we just want to highlight that a privacy preserving application is actually a pretty big design space.
want to highlight that a privacy
preserving application is actually a pretty
big design space. So
there are a lot of applications
that is privacy preserving
that does not involve any
kind of issue or
consideration
involving kind of compliance. For example,
few examples that we
mentioned, like trading privacy
within a certain control domain
like you know perpetual swap exchanges you know placing you know dark pool orders and you know
things like you know computational privacy to build novel oracles for prediction market and
information privacy to protect user information while
generating certain attestation to make this particular user qualify for a certain kind of
reward, you know, a token sale or, you know, airdrop and distribution. So these things are
very valid privacy related applications, but they are not, you know, kind of, they don't have any kind of compliance concerns in any way.
And one thing that I also want to mention, the second thing I want to mention is that
for Brevis, we can also do a lot of know, essentially make the, you know,
improve the design space for transactional privacy compliance as well,
you know, basically by, you know,
helping kind of users to generate informational privacy,
preserving a test station about their, you know, status,
either related to their Web2 identity directly,
or with like some Web some web3 information and
attestation to say, okay, look, I am a real user, I am a user of a traditional financial institution
and or I'm a long-term and well-trusted user in certain centralized exchanges and therefore I
should be included in this privacy pool or privacy pool or privacy transaction, you know, group.
So these are the things that we think
can, you know, merge the current gap
that we have to at least,
even though there's no kind of
a clear compliance rules in law,
but, you know, we can, you know,
together as a community
build like better protection for ourselves.
In fact, with these kind of additional plugins,
additional guardrails, using a new generation
of generalized ZK computational protocols and toolchains.
So this is something that we feel
that is very excited to work on.
Sounds good, Sounds good.
Sounds good.
Actually, that's all the questions for today.
I just want to thank everyone for tuning in.
And also, if anyone is interested to learn more about privacy,
I think we should all follow our guest socials because today
I think I learned a lot. I hope our guest and the audience did as well. Do you guys
have any last thing you want to say to the community or up to you guys? If not, I'll just
quickly say right if you guys are interested
you've been hanging out here shout out to everybody who's been
hanging out especially to the end here
if you have it's probably because you're interested
in privacy
quick shameless shill of
a project that I'm not actually related with
to there's a project called web3 privacy
they're pretty sick they have a website it's called Web3 Privacy Now. They're pretty sick.
They have a website.
It's called web3privacy.info.
And they do a ton of research on privacy stuff in the space.
They have a really cool explorer.
They do some pretty sick research, like I said.
They even have like an academy.
They got like docs and this sort of thing.
And so if you're really looking for like a dive off space it's like you're new
to privacy and you're like dang this stuff's crazy
and like I'm kind of interested
but I want to learn more like that's
a really great like open
sort of like third
party knowledge
base that you can access
to get a lot of information
really quickly they have like a YouTube channel
if you're not into reading
where there's been talks from all sorts of people
from all walks of life, including crypto,
but even outside of crypto,
people who used to work
for the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
the founders of Tor, Vitalik, the list goes on.
There's a lot of really great content there.
So if you're into privacy, check that stuff out.
And I'm glad you guys listened to us battle.
Yeah, thanks for coming.
Well, you know, I think, you know, I just want to add on that, you know,
privacy is going to be a very differentiating factor for chinks.
differentiating factor for chinks.
So whichever chink that is now taking a note on privacy
is gonna like take lead, I think in 2026, 2027,
in the next two years, really.
Like this is gonna be a very significant differentiator here.
And I think there's a real good argument that I saw the other day that the reason privacy has a motive is that once you get into a certain privacy collection, let's say a chain, that it's very hard for you to get off.
you're actually using privacy tools on some chain,
and then that chain itself got enough traction
in terms of privacy-preserving application ecosystem,
then you have a very, very high retaining user.
And I think this is a great thing
that a BNB chain's interested in privacy in general
and kind of moving towards that direction
and leading the space forward.
And it's something that we really appreciate.
From my side, I want to talk about what we will publish very soon.
I don't make any announcement here, but we will surprise you by our UX improvement or privacy.
Basically, ZRC 20, it's all about improvement of user experience or privacy.
And yeah, I think that you will be surprised that you can send a stable coin from, for
example, from base to BSD cross chain or yeah,
cross all up cross chain with privacy.
And yeah, it will be a really good stuff
and I want you to use that.
Yeah, anyway, I think that, yeah,
what we can bring in the privacy space will be very big.
And I hope that, you know, the privacy space,
how will be kind of one of the leading sectors of crypto, making
people's lives better somehow in a quite concrete way. I'm really excited to make that happen
in a couple of months.
Thanks so much.
Thanks everyone.
Thank you, great to be here and thank you for hosting us.
Yeah, thanks for your invitation. Thanks so much. Thank you.
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