Privacy Dispatch offers you analysis of the week's privacy news, and I wouldn't normally lead with Miden. But when we sat down to compile “This Week in Privacy” last week, Miden had the biggest news of the previous few days.
On Tuesday we announced USDCx on Miden, one of the first private, compliant stablecoins, deployed via Circle's xReserve infrastructure.
Later in the week came the PriFi Stack announcement, a series of partnerships with leading firms across DeFi, fintech and beyond.
[Yes, we coined a new term for finance that combines stablecoins with programmable privacy infrastructure.]
Why am I leading a newsletter with my own employer? Because a private, compliant stablecoin inside a production-ready ZK system changes what can be built. And the PriFi Stack is not just a post about our partners, impressive as they are, but a statement of thesis about how we see the on-chain economy developing.
It starts with stablecoins, regulated for the first time last year under the GENIUS Act, which grow from there into both the fuel and the plumbing of new financial applications. Then programmability comes to the fore.
Miden's privacy-focused infrastructure lets companies build applications with stablecoins while keeping transaction data confidential and meeting compliance standards in the world's most important jurisdictions.
The bigger point sits behind the announcements. Stablecoin regulation arrived in 2025 and the market has spent a year absorbing it. Circulation is around $300 billion now, and Citi projects trillions by 2030. Privacy is what lets the serious money take the next step, because no corporate treasurer wants payment flows readable by competitors, and no consumer wants their salary visible to anyone with a block explorer.
We think the firms in the PriFi Stack are early to that realization. The rest of the industry will get there at its own speed.
(Next week: someone else's news. Probably.)
Privacy Roundup
Zcash Labs launched as an independent organization supporting Zcash integrations, infrastructure and grants for business and institutional adoption.
Miden announced USDCx, a private stablecoin backed by USDC through Circle’s xReserve, followed a day later by PriFi, a financial stack combining private stablecoins with privacy-preserving infrastructure for identity, banking, RWAs and vaults.
Octant dedicated Epoch 13 to privacy with 100 ETH in a matching pool for projects spanning private transfers, shielded pools, zero-knowledge tooling, secure messaging and private computation. Applications are now open.
StarkWare opened the STRK20 Private Sprint, an 18-day program supporting teams shipping privacy applications on Starknet mainnet with a privacy SDK, starter kit, documentation and technical and ecosystem support.
Nillion published a roadmap for Covenants, encrypted instructions tied to onchain conditions that keep trades, payments or agent actions sealed until their conditions are met without giving a single operator the decryption key.
Igor Mandrigin on Privacy Podcast
Ben Schiller speaks with Igor Mandrigin, co-founder and CTPO of Gateway, about privacy, interoperability, and what institutions need as more financial activity moves onchain.
Igor explains why enterprises are beginning to move beyond older permissioned blockchain models toward architectures that can protect sensitive information without giving up the benefits of shared, verifiable infrastructure. He also argues that interoperability will be just as important. If banks, fintechs, and stablecoin issuers build on disconnected networks, blockchain risks recreating the same financial silos with newer technology.
Thanks for reading this edition of Privacy Dispatch. Please subscribe to receive this newsletter every Tuesday.
Till next time.