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The Privacy Era of DeFi
Recorded: Jan. 22, 2026 Duration: 0:56:00Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, industry leaders from various crypto projects highlighted significant advancements in privacy solutions, with new project launches and impressive growth metrics. Notable mentions include Maidan's programmable privacy network and Unitas's rapid fundraising success, reflecting a strong trend towards prioritizing privacy in the DeFi space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. All right, everyone, let's try it again.
I think we don't have music anymore, and we'll try to regroup and to make people rejoin.
At least we'll have a recording of something at some point, but I'm sorry about this.
It was clearly bugged from space.
All right, let's try to start from the beginning.
We lost some, like, 15 minutes.
It's okay, but we might have lost some people in the way,
some listener for sure.
Okay, I can see we have, like, already Lauren with us.
Sylv is here as well.
We are going to wait for, I don't know.
Is Declan you're going to speak with the Aurora account?
Or I can see the Aurora account is joining as well.
All right.
So people are joining.
Okay. Let's test the mic so we don't have any more technical issue. Lauren, can you say something?
Can you open your mic?
Hey, how's it going?
Oh, great. Declan is here as well.
Perfect.
Silva.
What's up? Perfect.
And I think Akshit should join us.
You can see he's joining.
We will put him as a speaker as well.
Akshit from Maidan.
All right. I think we got everyone.
Oh, so sorry for this guy.
The music was off.
It was so loud.
Couldn't hear anything.
Even when you were talking, like, so Declan tried to talk and I didn't.
It was impossible to hear something.
Yeah, I was trying to share how to fix it, but I couldn't even hear myself, so I don't
think you could either.
Yeah, no, it was crazy.
And we tried everything and it was
the first time that's happened but it's all right let's try to regroup and we will share later we
share the recording with people that missed the first uh wow because they are maybe they got the
wrong link the wrong link or something but anyway we try to get the best out of it um all right um
get the best out of it um all right um actually can you test your mic please so we are sure
perfect thank you everyone is set up uh all right um we'll try to i will introduce quickly the topic
then i will let you introduce yourself a bit more um and then i will uh speak about the plan for
today at the end we will have some startups giving
us some updates uh during the last 10 minutes with some alpha so stay with us until the end
but for the next 45 minutes or something like that we'll speak about privacy in defy um so we
are iplenist we are supporting DeFi everywhere.
And today, we are so happy because we got some amazing speakers
to speak about privacy.
Obviously, you all know it's a really trendy topic right now in the space.
It's really important for DeFi.
It's really important for everyone.
And I'm so happy to have you with us, guys.
So let's start with...
So yeah, Zorul, please make it short.
Let's try to introduce yourself in 30 seconds
so we can just have a quick round.
And then I will give you the mic to introduce the topic.
So let's start with Lauren from Phoenix.
Hi, hi. Thank you guys so much for having me I'm Lauren I do
Deverell at Phoenix we are running a confidential compute layer for Ethereum
with FHE super happy to be here and over to the conversation thank you
perfect then we have Declan from Aurora. Yes. Hello everyone. Thank you for having me today.
My name is Declan. I'm CEO of Aurora Labs.
And essentially we're just empowering builders to launch and scale, but multi-chain.
So we provide infra from virtual chains to a multi-chain launch pad by Calix.
And as of this week, a new near intense swap widget
that any project can use for multi-chain swaps.
Thank you, Declan. Perfect. Then we got Akshat from Maidan.
Hey guys, I'm Akshat. I run Ops at Maidan, do a bunch of product and on the BD side of things,
I'm pretty heavily involved as well. At Maidan, we are building a programmable privacy network for next
generation of, you could say, aviation resistance finance or compliant finance.
All right. Thank you. And then we got Cyr from Haile.
Hey everyone, I'm Cyr, CEO co-founder at Haile. We're building a layer one network
from the ground up that's
specifically optimized for zero knowledge based applications and specifically those that leverage
anything related to privacy.
All right.
Thank you guys.
So as you can see, we tried to invite like a variety of different projects because we
didn't want to have only copycat of project building the same stuff.
So it's really good to have you because you are all building in a way towards having more privacy on chain,
in a way, we'll speak about that, but in a really different manner.
So it would be really interesting to have all your point of view together.
And I think I want to start with Diklan because around the table,
maybe you're the one with maybe the less privacy-oriented project,
but still, I think when you speak about Aurora,
we can see how at the end your product can be like a great field
of experimentation for privacy projects.
In your opinion, why is privacy really trendy again?
We can see on the Aurora Twitter account,
you're speaking about it a lot.
Why is it trendy again for you in 2026?
Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
The other speakers here are obviously kind of solely privacy focus.
But to be honest, privacy is important for all projects at the moment.
And I think also it's probably key to highlight what I see privacy as, because a lot of the time when you talk about privacy, people automatically assume that you're talking about hiding something.
And it's not about that at all. It's more about control.
It's more about control.
But to answer your question as to why is it an important topic right now, obviously,
just transparency has become more important than ever.
We've seen a huge increase in regulation.
We've seen a lot of institutions that are looking to adopt.
And the lack of transparency has been a big blocker to real-world scale.
If you think about it from an institutional point of view,
if every one of your positions, routes, and strategies is public by default,
you don't get trust.
Instead, you get other people extracting.
So I think what we're starting to see now is institutions looking at ways to mitigate that.
And we're seeing it, obviously, with capital that's flowing into zk and into uh encrypted computations because privacy is now native to that infrastructure
and if of course if you add ai agents into that um and along with obviously some of the inherent
risks you know through data breaches um and of course longer-term risks like quantum um users
don't ensure that they have that control um you know so for me that's why
uh you know privacy is important right now because it ensures that you've got that control
yeah yeah i think i can't agree more with that actually i think we shifted from like the
uh privacy being related to criminality to privacy is not related to compliance and institution. And it's the way it should be actually.
For the other three,
like you guys are working at building privacy,
basically that's what you do.
So my question is a bit different.
Well, for SEAL, for instance,
why did you start this?
And did you see the change, the shift,
like during the coming, the next, well, the last
two months, few years, did you see a shift about privacy in the ecosystem?
Yeah, I can jump in here.
I think from where I've been sitting, it's been really interesting because Phoenix actually
started out as an Ethereum layer too.
And during that time, you know, we're talking to developers and we're going to the hackathons
and there's a lot of conversation about, you know, well, what is the actual benefit
for me as a developer to move over to this network that offers me privacy when, you know, I'm happy
on base, things are fine, things are moving well. And, you know, in the I mean, last year, the last
few cycles, seeing that now, privacy is not just something that is so much easier to integrate,
it's also being demanded by, like he had mentioned, institutions.
It's being demanded by users.
We're feeling the real pain points of not having it.
So, you know, seeing it move into a place where it's not just like a nice add-on,
it's actually a fundamental part of the stack has been really, really exciting.
All right, then.
Sylve, on your side, did you start highly to build something about privacy
or did it start differently?
What was the aim of the project at the beginning?
It started from a very Marie Kondo-compatible feeling
that we just took a look at anything happening in blockchain
and nothing sparked joy, in a way.
It's 2026.
We've had blockchain for 15 years and everyone is still struggling
with wallets, poor performance and decentralization. And we decided to take a bold bet and double down
on the latest innovations that you had around ZK. And we realized that it really mandated a
complete rethinking of how blockchain operates. It just turns out that one of these applications of ZK is for
anything related to privacy-preserving applications and, as you mentioned, also giving builders and
regulators the tools to uphold this privacy while maintaining compliance with existing laws without
having to reveal absolutely everything about the users. So I like to think of it as kind of a Coke Zero.
You get the full taste, but none of the sugar
of the issue that you have with privacy.
All right. I think actually it might agree with that
because we can have a similar vision, I think.
Both of you, you're building some different stuff
or a different tech, let's say, but with maybe a similar vision.
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Absolutely. I was just thinking, both of you, you're building some different stuff, or a different tech, let's say, but with maybe a similar vision.
100%, 100%, absolutely.
I was just thinking, I didn't build my tech,
but I think Bobbin will actually,
completely aligned with,
so he was also thinking how,
actually best make use of the ZK tech.
He came up with Winterfell,
one of the stock provers back in the day,
but wanted to build
this ZK virtual machine so we can actually get more adoption on the ZK side of things,
then into privacy and how to make privacy or I would say like practical privacy reasonable,
right?
So essentially privacy till this time have been used for, haven't been used for the right applications in some sense,
and we want to change it and bring the compliance side,
or revision resistance side as well to the forefront.
So very, very aligned with that, so for speaking here.
All right, thank you guys.
I want to ask the same question for the four of you.
And we speak a bit about the trade-offs of privacy.
According to you, which promise of DeFi we will break
if we have too much privacy on chain?
Because at the beginning, I mean, blockchain was not private.
Well, we can argue about it.
But if we have too much privacy on chain,
we will have to abandon something in a way. Lauren, what's your opinion on that?
Sorry, can you guys hear me? Okay. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think
we look at privacy trade-offs, you know know typically in the technical terms with latency and throughput and you know privacy
historically has uh a quite painful ux and now you know with the cryptographic readiness and seeing
the advances that we've made on that side in the recent past it's really you know it's coming to a
place now where those trade-offs don't feel as visible.
Yeah. And I mean, transparency being one of the core pillars of Ethereum, it's something that, you know, we are all very well rooted in. But as we start to feel the, I guess, the negative
effects and the pain points of that, there's more of an argument for making those trade-offs in the
first place. But yeah, I think it's just a longer term progression.
But yeah, I think it's just a longer term progression.
Yeah.
Maybe, Silvia, aren't you afraid with the trend about privacy and the emerging layer
one, layer two about privacy that at the end we will just replicate the old schemes of
traditional finance in some way,
or we will build something new, more like a new DeFi, a new finance on-chain, Cyril?
What I'm quite afraid in a way is that we currently have some options around privacy.
You see what Vitalik refers to as the corpus love chains
that do offer compliance and privacy.
But what you completely forfeit is the trustlessness and decentralization aspects.
It's you can use my chain and everything is private.
And it's basically like Nasdaq, because one of the things that we have had to forfeit when moving on chain was this anonymity of transactions.
That's one of the issues that you have in Polymarket.
You should not be able to see every single transaction that everyone does.
At some point, this is detrimental to the state of the market.
So what I'm quite afraid of is if we do not have good options to uphold privacy while at the same time guaranteeing
compatibility, trustlessness, and the ability for anyone to deploy anything without having
to ask questions to your local regional node manager, we've just basically rebuilt finance.
We've just basically built finance.
All right.
Can you guys maybe shut down your mic when you're not speaking?
All right.
Thank you, Sylv.
Maybe before we speak with Declan about some other stuff,
actually, what's your opinion on that?
At Myden, do you think you are breaking a bit DeFi
by adding too much privacy at some point?
Are you afraid of that?
Not really, to be very honest.
I think we are far away from that point.
In a way, on the overall grand scheme of things, I think at the current stage, we need more
current stage we need more privacy than transparency to be very honest and I do agree with
privacy than transparency, to be very honest.
myself on basically like if we actually lose the trustlessness part of blockchains, blockchains
are just servers essentially so but other than that I don't think I think everything should be as private as possible, except for where there is, you could
say, like let's say government spending and these kinds of things where we actually are
putting a lot of things, which should be verifiable and transparent to all the people, like where
is the money going and whatnot.
These things can be public and otherwise like people should
own their own self or sovereign money and keep it to themselves. And that is one of
the reasons, by the way, Maiden has like public and private transactions, right? So, there
will be some use cases where actually you would want to keep the money or the resources
that you have on chain public. But in most of the scenarios, especially with respect to individuals, I do feel like we are far away from a point
where actually we need less privacy.
Yeah, I agree obviously.
I was just trying to push it a little bit.
Declan, you are in a different position with Aurora
because you are not building
any privacy related product directly, but still you are helping a lot of people doing it uh what's your yeah tell
us more about this position yeah no um 100 i mean you know first of all i actually agree
um with what was just said then right i think um what we're actually seeing now is um users
aren't just looking at the best api ap you, APR, right? What they're looking for
is a simple way, the simplest way possible to be able to execute their intentions as
confidentially as possible, right? You know, I think really there's kind of two tricky areas.
I think, you know, the first one I would say is probably more of an issue for my colleagues here.
And the other one is actually what we're actively trying to solve.
So I think one of the hardest trade offs is going to be composability.
DeFi works because different protocols are able to plug into each other.
But the more data that you're hiding, the more careful the developers and projects are
going to need to be about how those integrations work.
And obviously, ZPay helped quite a bit with this. But it does also introduce complexities on its own
that needs to be managed somewhere.
And that's obviously where we're seeing
a lot of these privacy-based projects that are now coming up
because they're solving these problems.
But on our side, actually, we are tackling privacy
from a UX perspective because the user experience is actually,
or at least historically, has been where privacy products have failed.
Because by adding those extra steps, whether it's new wallets
or, you know, confusing flows or opt-outs,
it conflates the journey for the user.
It opens the door for mistakes.
So what we've been doing, for example, with Near Intents
is creating this intent-based system, right,
where we're
abstracting all of that users simply describe what they want to do and the infrastructure that
we've got in place will take care of the routing and the execution and we've integrate and we've
obviously integrated ccash so we're facilitating um you know the the ability for both projects and
retail users to be able to jump on that um and I think that's also going to be quite important for institutions as well, even from a regulatory perspective, right? It was interesting
you talk about the NASDAQ. I commented on the New York Stock Exchange announcement that they're
obviously filing with the SEC to be able to have 24-7 trading through tokenization. And we're
already seeing regulation, right? It's pushing our industry towards that kind of selective disclosure, right?
So projects, institutions are going to need to be able to prove those constraints without actually exposing the data itself.
You know, so I think what we're seeing is serious projects are ensuring that they've got systems that can allow for audibility, right?
systems that can allow for audibility, right?
Because without that, you're never going to be able
to tap into these kind of mainstream,
you know, to these mainstream routes.
All right, yeah, and actually that's very good
you started a bit answering my next question,
but Sylv, you wanted to jump in.
I can see your hand.
Absolutely.
I think one of the thing that we ended up having is
if you compare the history of transparent blockchains
versus what has been happening in the private state of blockchain,
we actually kind of leapfrogged at some point.
You take public blockchains.
We started from Bitcoin, single coin, single network.
Then we moved to Ethereum,
which for the first five years was just basically ICO mania.
So we were just using the EVM for a single use case, which was to create multiple tokens on the same network.
Then we realized that we could actually do things with these multiple tokens and we invented DeFi.
When it comes to the private version of the blockchain history, we started with Zcash, single network, single token.
And then it seems that we leapfrog directly to very complex obfuscated state management systems such as Penumbra and such,
without stopping for the middle solution, which is, can we help people create multiple private tokens on the same network?
And this is one of the things that we really want to help tackle over at Hyde.
We do believe that if we manage to overcome this first challenge,
there will be sufficient incentive to solve the rest of the issues
without over-complexifying everything and rushing to the finish line.
All right.
Thank you, Sil.
You both started to maybe answer a bit my next question.
When we started preparing the space,
we were like, OK, should we invite
all the competitors in the space, all the layer 1,
layer 2, building some privacy stuff.
There is a bunch of it right now.
And we were like, maybe that's not what we want to do.
But also, it's kind of interesting.
What I want to ask you guys, the direct question is like,
okay, where do you see guys compete?
And where do you see guys complement each other
with your own project?
I mean, maybe it would be a bit more tricky for C than actually,
but for the other ones, maybe we start with Lauren.
How do you position yourself in the ecosystem of privacy
versus like layer one, layer two in privacy versus Hailey,
Maiden, Canton, Aztec and other ones?
How do you see Phoenix in this ecosystem, Lauren?
Yeah, so Phoenix operates with a coprocessor model,
which means you can take the FHE operations
and take the functionality there and plug it
into wherever you're already at.
So a base developer, for example,
can integrate homomorphic operations immediately
into the contract that they've already
written deployed on base.
And so when we look at the composability there,
it's huge because we're not telling developers and founders
to migrate to a new chain.
We're not telling them to learn a new language.
It's like, hey, here it is,
everything you've already built, add privacy.
And there's kind of not a good enough argument not to, right?
You know, it's like, if it's right there,
it's there for the taking.
So I think there's that piece of, you know,
just like general readiness.
And then, you know, often you mentioned the competition angle.
And I think in the privacy space, that mostly boils down to the FHE versus ZK versus TE.
And we've kind of set it up to be a bit of a war zone when, in fact, they think all of the texts were designed to play nicely together, right?
Like our stack does use ZK and we use, you know what I mean?
We use MPC for threshold decryption network.
And, you know, there are a lot of these components
that end up playing together nicely.
And it's not exactly like there's one privacy tech
that's gonna beat them all
or one that serves every single purpose.
There's, you know, definitely different use cases
for different technologies and understanding, you know,
when and where to slot them in
and which one serves which purpose is better is really important.
All right.
Yeah, I think you got the right points.
All the privacy techs are kind of friends
and we are kind of all in Animal Crossing
and having a nice life.
But is that the same for you guys,
for SILV and for Akshirt?
Maybe it's a bit more difficult.
How do you position yourself
compared to other layer
working on privacy?
Maybe we start with Axsheet and Maiden.
Yeah, Yan, you're right.
I think FHE and ZK can go together fairly easily in future.
Somehow we'll figure out some use cases that require
composable use cases with FHE doing competition with and GK providing
verifiability and whatnot. But to be very honest, I was still too young to think like
how actually some of the competitors like you have can work together. It would be a
little hard and to be honest, I haven't, I was thinking very deeply on how Aztec and
Madden can work together and haven't really found a solid use case. So we'll compete,
we'll compete.
All right.
But in some way, in some way, I do feel like a lot of, and I'm here to learn with the other projects as well, but in some way actually, the market
is big enough where different, even privacy projects are working towards on different,
you could say, markets.
If you think about Canton, Canton is working very heavily on a US institutional market and like where we actually, for example, Aztec
is working in a complete cypherpunk privacy kind of primitive.
So there is, the market is big enough and different people are focusing on different
market segments as well.
We, for example, are working on more, you could say, a little on the Asian institutional side of things,
but also on some crypto-native use cases and whatnot.
So the market is big enough for all of us
to actually grow the pie for privacy right now as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would say I agree.
Sil, give us something.
So is there some place for competition
for like complementarity in
the privacy space? What's your opinion?
I think there's
two main aspects where
there can be
meetings. One of them is on the
tech side. Most of the other
networks tend
to have a single piece of tech
that is solely usable on this network.
This is Noir on Aztec.
This is the Myden DM on Myden.
We much rather take a very Swiss approach of you can just use whichever tech you want.
Heidi just makes sure that we manage any type of ZO proving system directly at the base
layer, which is really good if you want to use a ZKVM such as SP1 or RIS0
for very heavy-duty, non-privacy-preserving aspects,
you're free to do it.
And if you really want to be more on the tinfoil-wearing side,
you can actually use Aztec or Myden.
On the other front, and this is coming back
to what you were saying, the regulatory aspects
for privacy will be more commingled
than we initially thought.
I think everyone really looked at it
from a very idealistic angle.
But the more you research this ecosystem,
the more you realize that you really cannot do away
with compliance.
The moment you allow obfuscation, you enter tornado cache territory,
and therefore you need to make sure that there is some sort of regulation
or some sort of geographical area that you comply with.
For us, it's mainly Europe because we do believe that Europe has a really good legal framework and be really
good, let's say, technological infrastructure that can already be leveraged through ZK in order to
get something such as like a ZKKYC directly up and running. So this will be, I think, one of the main
areas of difference between what is available, for example, between Asia or Europe on this front.
between what is available, for example,
between Asia or Europe on this front.
All right, thank you.
All right, we will jump in the next part of the privacy topic
before we hear from some startups, not only about privacy,
but about some update and alpha from our ecosystem.
Declan, I just want to ask you the last question,
one of the last questions.
According to you, what do we need to go a bit further
and not have privacy like a new trend
that will disappear in the coming months?
But I strongly believe that is something that will stay.
What are we missing today?
You spoke a bit about UX experience.
You spoke about different stuff.
What's your opinion?
What do you think we are missing to have privacy,
not only a trend, but like really adopted?
Yeah, yeah, great question.
I mean, you know, one of the things we have to do at Aurora
is ask ourselves this very question all the time,
because we have over 250 projects
with their own chains or with their own requirements and that's why it's great listening
to the other speakers because actually every single point they gave is something an individual
project has said they want and you know our job is to try and facilitate that um but to be honest
i i still think the biggest blocker here um is product it's product issues. It's not cryptography. It's not even regulation.
Right. That's actually quite clear now. You know, I think that there's still a user experience
issue around how complex many products make privacy. Right. There's still pretty unclear
failure modes. There's still fragmented liquidity. We've still got very slow integrations um you know and
a lot of the tools that you that are available on the market today they work in isolation but they
break or fall over as soon as they hit serious flow right um you know and that's a problem because
a lot of the projects that are building privacy first they don't have the unlimited funds to
keep swapping and keep changing.
But on top of that, to kind of compound this issue, there's a coordination problem because
every network, every chain, even Aurora, we do privacy differently.
We enable things pretty differently.
In our case, for example, we're partnering with projects.
So we're working with Billions, for example, to provide ZK proofs of virtual chains. We're also exploring ZK EVM. But another L1 outside of the near ecosystem will do
it one way and another one will do it another way. And as a result of that, because you've got every
network, every chain, every app kind of taking their own approach or using kind of fragmented
partners, users end up getting stuck because they get used to the way something works.
You know, liquidity gets stuck. And I think that has been a big barrier to adoption.
You know, so I think if we can solve those product problems, you'll find that privacy is just going to be the norm.
At the moment, privacy is still kind of sold as an adult as a feature which I think is completely
wrong because I think privacy isn't a feature it's literally just a requirement it should be
something that users don't even notice that is there right it's just there by default and we're
seeing that already we're seeing it from projects on this call we're seeing it in talks that are
happening all over Twitter or conferences.
So we are tackling it.
I just think there's still some way to go to ensure that there's kind of a unified approach there.
All right. Thank you.
So basically what you're saying is that... Approach. If I can add something.
I think if we have something that happened in personal computer space. It's like touch screens.
Everyone knew touch screens were the future,
but they were usually seen as an add-on, such as, oh,
I have a Pan Pilot, and it turns out it has a touch screen.
And then came around the iPhone, which
made the touch screen table stakes.
And we're not there yet for privacy.
It has to be just like a touch screen.
You shouldn't even think about it.
But it really requires rethinking a lot of things
from the ground up in order to make it completely invisible.
Yeah, I 100% agree.
Yeah, I agree with you.
So what you guys were saying is maybe we didn't find
the perfect product market fit for DeFi yet.
And when we do that, we might might not having privacy as a trend but as a
like final feature for it uh lauren what's your opinion on that do you think we're missing
something right now in the privacy because then we got some layer ones we got a lot of privacy
texts you already talk a bit about um do we miss something right now? Yeah, I super agree with everything that they were saying.
Like, you know, I get asked the question a lot.
What are the killer apps and the key use cases for privacy?
And I always chuckle a little bit because I think that privacy should be integrated into every application we're already using.
There's not a one use case that needs privacy over others.
So that piece. And then, then you know in the general scope
of things that we're missing i think you know we're looking toward a bigger mental model shift
both from the developers and the end users because you know defy and transparency that we've already
had it has a very clear mental model but when you start to think about working with data you can't
see there's a lot of things that change under the hood. And so I guess that's,
first of all, on the job of us as info providers to explain not only the value prop, but also
how do you work with this data? What are the correct patterns to make sure it's not leaking?
How are you set to explain to your end users how to, you know, work with it on their end? So,
yeah, there's like almost an education piece there that needs to happen before we're going to see
users jumping into encrypted applications and just like, yeah, I totally trust this because
the cryptographer said I should.
Yeah, I agree.
We have to change a lot of mental models for that.
But yeah, maybe we can have some example.
Does anyone want to share a concrete use case he's working on or something really concrete that we can face right now?
So maybe you can try to change a bit the mental models of everyone in DeFi
and try to educate people about it.
Anyone?
I want to give, Lauren, you can start if you have an example of something
you want to work on, you're seeing right now in the space that is really interesting, a concrete use case.
Yeah, I think, you know, privacy adoption is clearly going to start with DeFi.
That's something that's been very apparent to us from the start and starting to see, you know, encrypted payment applications come to fruition. We're seeing, you know, private swaps, you know,
fundamental DeFi primitives that are actually taking form in privacy now
that are starting to reach a maturity level where we can test it,
we can interact with it, like we see how it's working.
I think that's honestly a really excellent place to start.
But, you know, over time, obviously analytics,
I think we'll see it touch gaming.
It's going to spread a very broad range of applications.
All right, interesting.
Yeah, similar to Lauren,
as we see more and more, actually,
companies coming and building on top of blockchains,
I think a lot of treasuries will go private as well.
Right now, we see a lot of treasuries just lying on a safe multi-sec doing nothing.
And we chat with a bunch of people who have treasuries just lying there.
And these people don't want to do high risk activities as well on blockchain, like doing
some DeFi hoops and whatnot.
But they want safer yields and they want to keep their
treasury private because they are running the whole company on chain now. So as we become
more mature, like I generally say like till this time, blockchain was for kids in some
sense, like we didn't care if somebody can see our money and whatnot. But now we are
entering the world of coronavirus and TradFi in some sense and if companies are to come and handle treasuries on chain, that needs to become
private and they need some very simple and some sophisticated financial tools that they
can actually get access to privately and just manage their treasuries over there.
And on top of that, as Lothman mentioned,
like encrypted payments or private payments
would also be, I think, one of the first use cases
that would actually get the most amount of usage
with privacy.
Please go ahead, Sil.
I think the thing that we're really focusing on right now,
if we really have to drill down
on a single use case, it's payments suck on blockchains and it's completely hampering
everything else.
If you're able to build a system that allows people to spin up private, compliant stable
points, it's game over.
You enter the cloud, the iPhone age of blockchains,
because you actually make these things usable to the hoi polloi
and not only to the handful of whales that are fighting on hyperliquid.
All right.
I can't agree more with that.
I was thinking about it a few weeks ago.
This and, yeah, clearly it's a game changer.
All right, before we give the mic to some of the startups
in our ecosystem, so I can see Leva is here.
So you guys can start asking for speaker slots.
We will give you some speaker slots at the end,
but we will close the session about privacy.
Maybe with last word from each one of you, do you have something to share about you,
some interesting news about your ecosystem, what you're doing right now?
So give you some more details in terms of your stuff.
Yeah, I'll have to go.
I mean, I guess just to sum up, as everything's
kind of being discussed, right?
You know, I think pretty much all the other speakers
would agree here, right?
I reckon 2026 would be the year where privacy is almost
like HTCPS on the internet, right?
It'll just be the default expectation.
It won't matter whether it's ZK-based privacy,
encryption computation.
It won't matter if it's privacy,
the protocol application.
It will just be there.
And the teams that are going to win
will be the teams that essentially treat privacy
as part of that transaction lifecycle.
It'll be invisible, you know,
and nothing will feel different for the user.
From my perspective, it touches us already in a couple of areas. So our multi-chain launchpad,
Kallax, is probably one of the good examples here. Because I think I touched upon this earlier,
but we look at where privacy breaks down, which is typically
all the transaction settles, it's in the wallets, in the routing, it's in the approvals.
Alcalix users will express their intent to participate, and that will happen across 11
different networks. The settlements will stay transparent, but the participation strategy
won't. It won't be broadcast in advance.
And we're doing a lot of work around that, but also for payments, actually.
I smiled when that was brought up because payments do suck in this space.
And the SWOT widget and some of the uppaying payment stuff we're working on
really kind of tackles the core of that.
So, yeah, I think 20, I think 26 is gonna be really interesting here
because I think a lot of the problems
we've discussed on today's call just won't exist anymore.
And those that are solving that problem will be the front.
Thank you Declan for being here with us.
Last word from Sylv, let's go.
I don't have anything to add.
You guys killed it.
You're amazing because we are a bit tight,
but you were amazing during the space.
Thank you, Sylv.
Last word from Lauren.
Maybe where can we meet the Phoenix team in the coming weeks?
Do you have any news to share right now?
Yeah, absolutely. The Phoenix team will be coming weeks? Do you have any news to share right now? Yeah, absolutely.
The Phoenix team will be on the ground in Hong Kong for ConsenSys
and at East Denver and Boulder, so you can find us there.
Yeah, I always joke that our primary product export
is actually our research, not the co-processor.
So we have recently published the white paper for our new FHE scheme.
It's called DBFV, and it's designed for more arithmetic heavy workloads.
So we're expecting to see definitely lower noise growth, more predictable costs, definitely
improved performance.
We are really very excited about this.
So any cryptography nerds listening in, definitely go check out that white paper.
All right, perfect.
And then Akshay, something to add?
As Declan mentioned, privacy in 2026, I think, will have a Eureka moment and will, in some
use cases, become table 6.
A lot of people are building towards that.
Shout out to Paul Henry, who's in this space as well. Everybody's trying to make privacy default.
For Maiden, we will be hosting Privacy Salon at eTenver.
It's one of the best privacy events out there.
Please go and meet Maiden team, meet a lot of other teams.
Elio will be there, Astek will be there.
A lot of other teams will also be there for all the privacy side
of things. Please, whoever is there, please go. I think you'll all have a great time.
All right, thank you. I can vouch. Perfect, thank you guys. Thank you, everyone. Let's give the
mic to some startups. I can also see that Udinis Swap is in the audience. I didn't invite them,
but I like them. We are friends as well, so next time,
we can do a space together if you want.
But let's go with Leva.
I think Leva is with us.
Leva is one of our startup portfolios.
Share some updates, some alpha with us.
Maybe not about privacy, but anything.
And we also have Toby, Toby from Stocks,
who is also really interested in the topic, I guess.
All right, I want to start.
Toby, maybe you are in.
Hi, guys, thank you for having me.
Thank you for the conversation on privacy.
It's been super interesting to give an introduction
on stocks and what we do we tokenize publicly traded assets so equities commodities bonds
etfs um the team the ceo is a two times unicorn founder in web3 we've also got the head of capital
markets from nansdak as an advisor last month month, we did a space with Aerodrome,
where we did a live stream with Jay from Nasdaq,
set up a coin pool on Aerodrome.
I think it's got 35,000 listeners, which was great.
We've got a bunch of trades on the pool.
And it has allowed us, because integration,
such as like LeFi, OpenOcean,
they all pick up on Aerodrome pools. So that has allowed us to integration such as like LeFi, OpenOcean, they all pick up on aerodrome pools.
So that has allowed us to lower some of the barriers to already working with partners.
But also this month we'll have an API completed which will allow users to plug into our order book
and bridge to trade all of those different assets. We've also got an upgrade of our bridge coming out.
So currently at the moment you can trade around 12 different assets. It've also got an upgrade of our bridge coming out. So currently at
the moment you can trade around 12 different assets. It's a little bit of a manual process
on setting them up. There's on-chain order book liquidity, which is what you trade against. And
we rebalance that liquidity over time. But at the end of this month, we will be opening up a new
version of our bridge, which will allow us to trade 2,000 plus different assets
there can be on-chain atomic liquidity which will be tiered across you know the different
demand for assets if we've got leverage pools going on there's the requirement for
atomic liquidity but then also you'll be able to trade directly against the bridge
for all these different assets so if there is no on-chain liquidity, you can still
access the liquidity off-chain. And this should put us at the head of the pack in terms of breadth.
Xstocks has got 74 assets, Onda got around 200, Coinbase have got 1,960 or something.
So we're looking to be the leader in breadth across the different assets that we can provide.
So we've got a lot changing in the next couple of months, which is great.
All right. Thank you, Toby. If anyone wants to know more about stocks, where do they want to join you?
Yeah, so we've got, you can follow me follow the stocks page we've also got our small community
it's a community of a lot of d5 figureheads a lot of builders a lot of contributors
we try to keep it as spam free as possible so hopefully you can you know engage in some
high quality conversation and just market updates within there. We also have an incentive program on at the moment.
So any users that hold assets of ours,
they will accrue points as they hold the assets
and then they are paid out at the end of the month
in monetary rewards.
So yeah, it's a good time to get involved
and just see what's going on.
All right, perfect, thank you.
So I'm planting a bit the rule
because some of the startups got some issues to join.
So if anyone wants to share something about their own project,
so if Udiniswap intern want to join as a speaker, he can right now.
Here is your shot.
But if not, we will close here. I was really happy to host this with everyone here.
I hope we'll have another session this year in 2026
about privacy.
It will be a bit different.
We will tackle some other topics,
but still under the privacy umbrella.
So keep in touch with us.
Stay tuned.
We will announce that really soon.
We have also some really good projects ongoing at IPNS.
We're working on some privacy-oriented topics.
And I think I got Chloe from Unitas.
Chloe, can you apply for a speaker slot if you are listening to me
me so we can hear some news from you. I can see also some people like raising hands.
so we can hear some news from you?
Okay, we'll wait a bit if some people... I will stay there to other people to get some speakers.
Maybe they want to share some insight insight about the project but right now
it seems it's not working let me check
hey gmgm hi houdini swap is there with us and ch is there with us. So we got some last minute speaker.
Okay, let's start with Chloe from Unitas and we will finish this space with a friend from Unitaswap.
Thanks guys for being here like last minute.
It wasn't planned, but thank you.
Chloe, so you are from Unitas.
Can you tell us some updates about you?
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
And then yeah, that's for GMT.
All.
And we're like, the United Sun is doing the on-chance
on the new services for providing the yield
to different clients.
Right now, because our project's launched back
into last year, July, and they're running different in-house multiple digital strategies.
And then under our stablecoin USDU.
And then for last year, 2025, our yearly APY is 16.7.
And it was just 0.16 massive and draw down.
So that's always like we're providing the stable yields
to all of the holders and the clients.
And since we launched on July right now,
we are already approaching 100 mils TVLs.
And then we first launched on Sonana Magnet
and then back to last year.
And then last week, we launched on our first EVM version on BSE.
And then right now, we're also on the Binance Wallet campaigns for more like the pre-TGEs on the programs.
So, yeah, and then we launched our phase two
on TVL-driven campaigns yesterday.
And it's the 40 mils just running in three minutes.
So it went really fast.
And then, yeah, thanks for all the support.
And, yeah, we're going to be keeping building
for this year, onboarding more institutional clients and deploying new strategies with the traditional assets like gold and also on-chain stock.
So that's going to be more new strategies coming through on our platforms.
And yeah, that's all the things we're having right now.
And yeah, just let me know if you have any questions
and then also where you can check it out,
our protocols like on Binance Wallet
or just on unitus.so.
So that's our website, can check everything's on it.
And then also our data and proof of reserve.
And we're also using the ZKTLS
and then for checking data on our reserve
and then cloud rules
and to seeing whether we are in healthy positions.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you, Chloe.
So yeah, it was not financial advice for everyone,
but if you want some alpha, go follow United Labs
on Twitter and go check the website and everything.
It's really amazing project where we're really geared.
So it's really good for everyone.
So let's have some shout out for Audinus Swap.
So do you want to share something?
We did a full space on privacy and defi
so you are obviously first one concerned here so do you want to share something else before we close
gm guys yeah no i like i i saw the space privacy era of defy you know we've we've been shouting
2026 the year of defy for a while see a lot of other communities privacy focused
projects doing the same and and i think we're all uh we win this privacy fight together so i saw the
space i just jumped on i was a little late though so i didn't know what the question was or what the
theme was if we're uh but uh i'm here to support we're here to support the the narrative and and
privacy in general we know we know guys you you've been here for a long time
and you're going to be here to support privacy along the way so it's really cool to have you
with that and like i said uh we will have another session about privacy in a couple of months
with some other friends and partners uh so i will maybe send you a message to invite you to the next
one 100 100%.
I can give a quick TLDR on HoudiniSwap for anyone who hasn't heard of us before.
If anyone didn't, yeah, let's go.
Let's do that and let's conclude on this.
Yeah, yeah.
I know some card tricks.
So yeah, follow HoudiniSwap for some card tricks
later on in the week.
But no, no, for the TLDR and HoudiniSwap,
we've been in the space, we launched our beta mid 2022
as a privacy solution for Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB.
We provide a dual exchange hub with Monero in between
to break the chain between sender and receiver.
And it was just a solution that at the time,
you know, there weren't a lot of privacy solutions
that felt safe for a lot of users.
They were, you know, they were the mixers of the world,
the tornado caches, there were all these different options.
And we're all four people building in the privacy space.
But we also wanted to put a little bit of a different focus on 100% compliancy all throughout.
So that is one of our biggest differentiators is the way we've created a network of compliant partners and route through non-KYC compliant partner exchanges.
Set us apart at the time.
And the traction started gathering. We're now coming up on four years building privacy
tools. We have 120 different chains listed now. We've done $2.5 billion in cumulative
private transactions, nearing a million private transactions as well. We'll be crossing that in the next few weeks. And yeah, the goal is just provide these compliant rails or private compliant
rails for all networks, for all apps, for all wallets. We've always said this from the beginning,
crypto wins when privacy wins, right? Mass adoption will come when people don't have to
get naked at the front door
and completely dox themselves and dox their financial data. And when that happens and it
becomes the norm, then crypto really scales to the masses, right? That's where we're going to see the
real mass adoption. And our big focus over the next few months, we have a lot of really cool
tools we're releasing towards the end of the year, but we've had a lot of demand for our API and the privacy tools that we've gotten. So you'll be
seeing Houdini swap up here in a lot of your favorite wallets and apps and dApps providing
these privacy rails for everyone so that privacy for all, privacy the era of DeFi. We'll be doing
our contribution, but this is a team effort. We're here to help all
projects. So DM us. We're very open for collaborations and to help anyone building in the
privacy space. Thank you, guys. Yeah, I encourage you to get in touch with each other if you don't
know each other. Like, obviously, we know the DeSwap. We know Maiden, we know Ailey, but sometimes we just don't know each other really well.
So just interact with each other in a private way.
Let's get privacy win in the coming month.
I'm pretty sure we will get back on it on the next occasion
and talk about privacy as a new normal in the coming month.
I'm pretty sure about it.
And yeah, thank you.
Thank you to everyone.
Have a great day.
Goodbye.
See you.
Cheers.
Speaker
Aurora
from
Aurora Plus
Houdini Swap
from
Houdini Swap
