A manifesto on privacy

by Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Defuse Labs & GM of NEAR Intents

Privacy was always implied in crypto. Remember where this all started: “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age” (A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993).For a while, a pseudonymous public key with no name looked like privacy. The Bitcoin whitepaper even recommended using a new key pair for each transaction. But transaction clustering and years of accumulated onchain history have made it much easier to identify who controls which addresses. Major asset managers like Grayscale have recognized financial privacy as essential in an era of AI-powered surveillance. Today, almost every move you've made onchain is sitting in the open. Your balances, your trades, your liquidation level, and your whole history is readable by anyone who cares to look. This is a much worse state of privacy than what traditional systems are offering.Public ledgers have been the default because it was the only way early blockchains could operate, and current privacy approaches built on top of TEEs and ZK weren’t yet possible.Over the past year, in light of these innovations, privacy has made a profound comeback, at both the asset and execution level:

Our industry is reaching consensus that it’s time for the default to change.Privacy is not a standard though. Projects are taking different approaches to deliver it. Each of these approaches has implications for our industry that will determine whether or not crypto as a whole has sustainable privacy infrastructure to run global financial markets.NEAR’s architectural approach to confidentiality keeps the experience simple for users, easy to integrate for protocols, friendly for compliance and merciless to hackers, launderers and scammers. Our goals are straightforward:

With Confidential Intents, NEAR has effectively created shared infrastructure for onchain privacy: any application can integrate it directly instead of building a privacy solution from scratch. With more assets and markets coming onchain, we see this infrastructure as the onramp for institutional capital to flow into the blockchain economy and finally merge DeFi and TradFi.Confidentiality is the new default for onchain finance (and also becoming the standard for AI). It doesn’t mean you have something to hide. It means you have the power to selectively reveal yourself to the world.Users: you should expect confidentiality from the products you use. The era of surveillance is over.Builders: you should build confidentiality into your products, knowing your users will expect it.Confidentiality will keep compounding at every level. It is the original ethos of our industry. The infrastructure for it is finally here, and it’s yours to build on.