The Show Me Era, and Miden's Proof Stack

Paul Cafiero, comms lead at a16z crypto (which backs Miden) just published one of the sharper pieces I've read on where crypto communications stands right now. 

His argument is simple and correct. Crypto has entered what he calls the "Show Me Era." The old promissory logic — launch a whitepaper, paint a vision, let the market meet you there — no longer works. TradFi is in the room. BlackRock is tokenizing treasuries. JP Morgan settled transactions on a blockchain it built itself. The GENIUS Act passed. The bar for what "credible" looks like has risen permanently, and it's risen for everyone.

Paul's framing for what's changed is useful: the pitch that used to work — "we're building X for Y, and here's why it matters" — now needs a second act. He calls it the proof stack: the layer of evidence that transforms an abstract narrative into a credible, concrete one. Partnerships with teeth. Hard data. Real signals of product-market fit. Third-party validation you didn't manufacture yourself.

I buy all of that. So what's our proof stack at Miden?

We wrote last week about the Privacy Finance Stack — the set of use cases that define what private finance looks like in practice. That's our answer to Paul's question. That's our second act.

Here's what it looks like concretely:

Private wallets. a wallet, with privacy baked in, that lets users hold and transact without broadcasting balances or history to the world. The proof isn't the transaction. It's that someone chose privacy over transparency when given the option.

Compliant identity. Know your customer without publishing your customer. ZK proofs let institutions satisfy AML requirements without building a surveillance ledger. Regulators get what they need. Users keep what's theirs.

Private treasury. Institutions moving assets onchain don't want competitors reading their positions in real time. Private execution means institutional-grade discretion without leaving the chain.

Confidential stablecoins. More to say on this soon — but the direction of travel is clear. The unit of account itself will carry privacy guarantees.

The proof stack for privacy looks different than for everything else in crypto. You can't point to a Dune dashboard. The whole point is that the activity is shielded. The evidence is the caliber of partners who chose you, the compliance frameworks you enable, and the institutions who trust you with what they can't afford to make public.

Paul's Show Me Era rewards builders who have something real. Private finance is exactly that.

In this episode of the Privacy Podcast, Ben sits down with Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO and cofounder of StarkWare and one of the original cofounders of Zcash, to discuss the deeper purpose of zero-knowledge technology and its implications in our everyday lives.

The conversation also touched on what it takes to move from academia into entrepreneurship. Ben-Sasson’s view is that academics bring real advantages: vision, deep understanding of the space, and grit — the kind that comes from running intellectual marathons.

The transition, though, requires rewiring some deeply held habits. In academia, you guard your ideas until you publish. In business, it's the opposite. You talk to as many people as possible to discover what works. And where academics chase the most outrageous, barely-possible problem, business demands the reverse: find something almost trivial to execute, identify your small moat, and focus there.

Last week, we met with the SEC's Crypto Task Force to present what we're building at Miden. Builders engaging directly with regulators matters just as much as lobbyists and VCs doing the same. The people shaping the technology should be part of the conversation, and we intend to keep showing up.

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Till next time.