We've passed the point where privacy is a question. For any serious business or institution building finance onchain, it's a baseline. Look no further than what happened last week.
Digital Asset closed a $355 million round led by a16z crypto to scale Canton Network, its institutional-grade privacy blockchain now processing $4 trillion in monthly volume across more than 700 ecosystem participants.
The same week, Circle's Arc published its Privacy Sector whitepaper. It calls for a private EVM running in lockstep with the public chain, inside the same consensus rounds, no bridge required. And Helius, Solana's leading infrastructure firm, acquired Light Protocol, the team behind Solana's original ZK syscalls, to build programmable privacy directly into the chain.
Architecture is destiny
Beneath the hood, the privacy solutions on offer point in very different directions in terms of user control, risk, and possible applications. Architecture is destiny, and the market is still working out what type of privacy design it wants.
As a sharp comparison piece from Aztec made clear, privacy designs achieve very different outcomes depending on one central question: who controls the off-switch? Some networks keep data private through permissioned operator nodes that still read transactions in plaintext: privacy from the outside world, but not from the operator.
Others encrypt at the network level, with keys held in hardware enclaves. That’s absolutely legitimate for many institutional use cases, but the switch ultimately sits with the network, not the user.
Others still attach a standing viewing key that a designated auditor can reach for at any time: cryptographic privacy with a policy promise on top.
Then there's a different approach entirely. Private state encrypted on your own device. Proofs generated client-side. Disclosure entirely your choice, one fact at a time. No operator sees your plaintext. No standing key exists. The off-switch never leaves your hands.
Aztec is building this way (that’s what it really wanted to communicate with its paper). And so… and here’s my point… is Miden.
The Privacy Finance Stack
Miden's STARK-based architecture means privacy isn't bolted on; it's a property of execution itself. That foundation is what makes a new category of financial application possible: not just private versions of existing products, but products that couldn't exist without cryptographic privacy guarantees at the execution layer.
We're calling this the privacy finance stack.
Private stablecoins, where corporate treasury and payroll move on-chain without exposing counterparties and amounts.
Private wallets, where self-custody doesn't mean broadcasting your financial life to anyone with a block explorer.
Tokenized RWAs with selective disclosure, where compliance is proven without positions being revealed.
Private B2B payments, built for businesses that need confidentiality as a baseline, not a premium.
In the coming weeks, we'll be announcing the partners building on this stack with us. More soon. The era of privacy finance doesn't have a distant horizon. It has a starting line. Last week looked a lot like it.
Privacy Roundup
Digital Asset closed a $355M round led by a16z crypto to scale Canton Network, its institutional-grade privacy L1.
Helius acquired Light Protocol, the team behind Solana's original ZK syscalls and ZK Compression, to build a fully onchain, programmable privacy layer for Solana.
Circle's Arc unveiled its Privacy Sector whitepaper, a private EVM running in lockstep with the public chain inside the same consensus rounds, letting users move between private and public execution in a single transaction with no bridge or separate wallet.
Polygon's Aishwary Gupta argued that public transaction visibility, not speed or cost, is now the ceiling on institutional stablecoin adoption. TradFi already shields counterparties, amounts, and timing, and stablecoins need the same: private from the market, auditable for regulators.
Latest on Miden
Our co-founder Azeem Khan took the stage at ETH Conf in New York to talk institutional adoption of digital assets.
This comes a week after his fireside with Kathleen Wrynn, Global Head of Digital Assets at Invesco, on the same theme.
"Institutional capital brings scale and credibility, and that is what carries digital assets from a niche into the mainstream. The inflow does not just grow the market, it gives the whole space legitimacy," he writes.
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Till next time.