Please read this if you are looking to understand the state of privacy šŸ‘‡
If you think @Zcash solved privacy, you’ve misunderstood what privacy in crypto really means I’ve been working in privacy for the last two years, and honestly, it’s frustrating to see how many people still consider Zcash as the best privacy solution, even when projects like @RAILGUN_Project , @nocturne_xyz , and @0xprivacypools exist. It’s like saying you believe in Bitcoin as the ultimate crypto, but not Ethereum. Privacy is much more than just private money. With Zcash, you can’t do much beyond private transfers. Sure, you can add some slop on top of it, like posting or inscribing data, trees, or commitments but that’s a topic for another day. What I truly believe in is private money that can perform private actions on-chain - truly onchain. In that sense, teams like @aztecnetwork , @0xMiden , @zksync private validium have done incredible work, which makes me bullish on Ethereum. But and this is a big ā€œbutā€ ZK is still not there yet. When I say that, the real question to ask is: If you take any major chain with a strong user ( base, Solana, Arbitrum, Hyperliquid, Polygon, and others )can we layer ZK on top of all user actions and still maintain the same performance without privacy becoming a bottleneck? People will say we can launch a new chain that does that, then the question is - Can we allow any other private L2 or L1 to access these existing chains’ liquidity without compromising UX? Right now, the answer is no. ( again this comes from a guy who worked with best in class interop team to make this possible. I could share all my lore here, but that’s for another day.) That’s why I believe ZK-based on-chain privacy still needs time at least two more years, but it’s absolutely the endgame. ZK is literally the endgame for privacy. This perspective doesn’t come from theory, it comes from experience. I’ve installed the Railgun app and synced all Ethereum data from genesis just to check if I had received any encrypted notes. I’ve used Privacy Pools. I’ve gone through Nocturne’s codebase and many other small and large privacy projects. Another example: a true privacy solution should offer a UX as smooth as @fluidkey. Whenever someone asks me which private app they can use today, sadly, the only one I can recommend is Fluidkey. I haven’t yet seen a single ZK-based product that delivers end-to-end privacy with a UX anywhere close to that. Having written a lot of code in both confidentiality and anonymity systems and having used most of the major privacy apps out there, I’m confident to say again that ZK isn’t ready yet. But I’m equally confident that it’s where we’re headed. It’s the same with other approaches like FHE with MPC and maybe zkFHE, they’re all part of the long-term vision. I’m intentionally not mentioning what my organization does or how we solve this, because I want to keep this open-ended, to hear others’ opinions: Why do you think ZK is already ā€œthereā€? Or why do you believe Zcash is still the best privacy crypto ever built? But still, I love everyone who values privacy :) It’s privacy season, baby
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