privacy

Zama protocol founder Rand posted on the X platform that, with the assistance of on-chain detective ZachXBT, the root cause of the cUSDC contract freeze has been identified. This freeze was caused by a court-issued injunction against addresses related to the Overnight Finance hacker, which had deposited approximately $12.5 million USDC into the cUSDC contract, accounting for over 99% of the funds within the contract, leading to the entire contract being frozen.Rand emphasized that this freeze is unrelated to the protocol itself or privacy technology, and it is not a sanction against Zama, but rather a typical DeFi judicial restriction scenario. The project adheres to compliance and privacy principles, not confusing the parties involved in transactions, only hiding balances and amounts. Currently, Zama is communicating with multiple parties to advance a resolution, has suspended the cUSDC, cUSDT, and cWETH contracts, and will restore them after completing the investigation and handling of the involved addresses, and will release a detailed review report as soon as possible.

According to Cointelegraph, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce defended cryptocurrency privacy tools, calling them legitimate financial infrastructure, and warned regulators not to be skeptical of privacy-enhancing technologies.

According to the official website of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce delivered a speech at the "Regulating the PETshop Series" seminar at Georgetown University Law Center, calling for the inclusion of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in the financial regulatory framework.She criticized the current regulatory approach for being overly inclined towards government surveillance, arguing that technology should serve to protect personal privacy rather than expand the scope of surveillance, and pointed out that blockchain public wallet addresses can reduce the risk of personal information leakage for investors while meeting compliance requirements.Peirce also invited technology teams that can minimize personal information collection while meeting KYC and anti-money laundering regulatory requirements to actively collaborate with the SEC's Crypto Task Force.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recommended the Interfold project, stating, "More people should learn about Interfold, which is a general implementation of the MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) concept that I have been advocating for nearly a decade. This project is essentially a privacy protocol optimized for scenarios such as voting and secret auctions, allowing more people to pay attention to and understand this technological advancement."Vitalik also mentioned that the core mechanisms of Interfold include generating threshold encryption keys, users submitting votes on-chain with ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) credentials, and threshold decryption after arbitrary computation in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which can achieve unconditional voter anonymity, Ethereum-level censorship resistance, and ZK over FHE ensuring result correctness, among other strong security guarantees. The current main limitation is the high cost of complex computations (such as multiplication), with only addition-based voting being mature, and optimizations like slashing-based approaches are being advanced, with a long-term goal of implementing obfuscation techniques to eliminate M-of-N committee dependency.

According to The Block, Aztec Labs has acquired Obsidion, the company behind the open-source privacy identity verification tool ZKPassport. Its co-founders Michael Elliot and Theo Madzou, along with their team, will join Aztec Labs to continue developing ZKPassport and related applications.Aztec Labs is building the Ethereum privacy layer two network Aztec Network, which raised approximately $60 million worth of ETH through the AZTEC token sale last year, and previously secured about $125 million in venture capital.ZKPassport allows users to read passports or government documents via mobile NFC, generating cryptographic signatures locally for verifying age, nationality, and "real identity" without exposing full privacy. It has been used for ticketing at the Devconnect conference and for compliance identity verification in the Aztec community token sale. Aztec stated that it will continue to keep the ZKPassport protocol and iOS application open source.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted that the internal team of the Ethereum Foundation has been working on a new project called Kohaku for nearly a year. The goal is to achieve both security (including decentralization) and read-write privacy at the Ethereum access layer, making security and privacy a "normal configuration" on Ethereum rather than an advanced option. Earlier today, it was reported that Kohaku, under the Ethereum Foundation, released an SDK for wallet-level privacy integration.

The privacy coin sector led the decline, giving back most of the recent gains in the crypto market. According to HTX data, ZEC once dropped 5.2% to $619, marking the largest decline among the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, but it still rose 8.2% over the past 7 days. Zcash has been one of the strongest performing assets in the crypto market over the past few weeks. Due to Multicoin Capital disclosing its holdings earlier this month and the overall narrative surrounding privacy coins heating up, ZEC has attracted institutional attention. Analysts believe that a 5% pullback after such a rally is more like profit-taking rather than new selling pressure, as structural buyers of privacy coins have been accumulating during the rise rather than distributing.Hyperliquid's HYPE token briefly surpassed Dogecoin in market capitalization during the Asian session before retreating. HYPE fell 4% to $59, while Dogecoin (DOGE) dropped 0.8% to $0.1009. Driven by the launch of perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid ahead of SpaceX's listing last week, HYPE still rose 23.6% over the past 7 days. The macro backdrop has driven a cautious tone in the market. The U.S. Central Command confirmed strikes on missile launch sites in Iran and vessels attempting to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz, describing them as defensive actions. Brent crude oil rose nearly 2% to $98 per barrel, rebounding from a 7% plunge on Monday (when the London and New York markets were closed for a holiday). The dollar strengthened against all G10 currencies, gold fell 0.6% to $4,545, and S&P 500 futures maintained a 0.6% gain after the U.S. market was closed on Monday.

Arthur Hayes stated that as large tech companies, governments, and AI continue to expand their surveillance capabilities, monetary privacy will "become very necessary" in the future.Arthur Hayes mentioned that this is also the reason he has chosen the privacy coin Zcash (ZEC) as his second-largest personal holding.

According to The Defiant, the Kohaku Initiative under the Ethereum Foundation has released a software development kit (SDK) that supports direct integration of privacy protocols such as Railgun, Tornado Cash, and Privacy Pools into wallet interfaces without intermediaries.This SDK allows all privacy protocol transactions to be routed through the 4337 mempool, enabling users to control their privacy independently without relying on centralized relayers.The team has implemented private transactions with 4337 mempool relaying functionality, and integration with Tornado Cash and Privacy Pools is under development. Kohaku aims to make end-to-end privacy the default option for Ethereum users by abstracting the complexity of interacting with privacy protocols.Developers have created a CLI-based wallet demo, and wallets like Ambire are integrating it, while a browser extension wallet is also in development. Kohaku is also developing post-quantum accounts, multi-signature, and hardware wallet support.

The privacy coin project Monero has released the graphical wallet software GUI 0.18.5 "Fluorine Fermi." This version is the officially recommended update, focusing on fixing multiple vulnerabilities.The core optimization content of this update includes: adjusting the P2Pool installation path on Windows systems to the local application data directory; improving the parsing logic for extreme scenarios of the uniform resource identifier; disabling the offline transaction creation feature under long payment ID mode; adding unsafe text escaping handling in the QR code scanning process; synchronously upgrading the P2Pool program to version 4.15 and correcting multiple minor program faults.Monero officials point out that this version has been open-sourced on GitHub, and users can download the upgrade through official channels to obtain the latest security fixes and stability improvements.

Vitalik Buterin posted on social media, listing several native privacy initiatives that Ethereum is currently promoting, including the combination of AA and FOCIL (providing top-notch support and strong packaging guarantees for privacy protocol transactions), the Keyed Nonces scheme, and access layer-related work (covering features such as Kohaku and private reads).

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin transferred 50.25 ETH ($113,000) through Privacy Pools.

The encrypted messaging app Signal stated that if Canada's Bill C-22 is officially passed and requires platforms to establish "lawful access" monitoring capabilities, the company may choose to exit the Canadian market rather than weaken end-to-end encryption. Signal's Vice President of Strategy and Global Affairs, Udbhav Tiwari, indicated that the bill could force communication services to create technical backdoors, thereby undermining encryption security and making private communications more susceptible to exploitation by hackers and foreign attackers.Bill C-22 was introduced in March 2026 as part of a new round of regulatory measures in Canada, requiring electronic service providers to establish law enforcement monitoring capabilities and retain certain user metadata for up to a year to assist in investigations of crimes such as terrorism and child exploitation. Critics argue that the bill is similar to the EU's previously controversial "chat monitoring" proposal, which could threaten end-to-end encryption and user privacy. Canadian Conservative MP Jacob Mantle stated that nearly all Canadian MPs use Signal precisely because of its privacy and security features, yet the bill could grant the government the ability to read private messages.Tiwari stated, "Signal would rather exit Canada than violate the privacy commitments made to users." In addition to Signal, the VPN provider Windscribe also indicated that if the bill passes in its current form, the company may follow Signal in withdrawing from the Canadian market. Windscribe claimed that the bill could force VPN services to log data that could identify users, violating its core privacy principles.

YZi Labs announced the 25 graduation projects of its flagship incubation project EASY Residency for the third season, focusing on areas such as on-chain financial market structure reconstruction, AI agents, tokenization of real-world assets, prediction markets, and privacy compliance. The 25 projects include:Identity and payment infrastructure for AI agents on the BNB chain Bank of AI, litigation workflow legal evidence indexing tool Brief Tech, AI probability output verifiable reasoning platform Cournot, financialized social network and trading platform Dapital, programmable token issuance infrastructure Flap;On-chain marketplace for collectibles and intellectual property assets GEMINT, on-chain options and structured products platform LayerV, CEX-level on-chain liquidity platform LunarBase, multi-market agent capital acquisition platform L7, DeFi unified margin layer Möbius, permissionless margin trading protocol Nemesis;AI agent-driven automated financial decision execution layer Newsliquid, tokenized private market exposure DeFi platform Openstocks, on-chain poker skill game options market PokerFi, prediction market automation and intelligence infrastructure Polysights, physical collectibles RWA liquidity infrastructure Renaiss;Fixed-rate decentralized lending platform TermMax, compliance-oriented digital asset privacy infrastructure 0xBow, AI agent workflow self-custody authorization layer Functor, interest-free stablecoin new bank for the Muslim market Isaac, on-chain prime brokerage platform for the BNB chain MARGIN X;Frictionless stablecoin exchange N-dimensional AMM Orbswap, compliance-oriented cross-chain privacy exchange protocol SilentSwap, crypto market AI agent trading and automation infrastructure Taco AI, on-chain event-driven derivatives platform Vibe.fun.

According to CoinDesk, the three blockchains focused on stablecoins and tokenization, Arc, Canton, and Tempo, have collectively raised over $1 billion, reflecting an increasing demand from institutions for privacy-focused crypto infrastructure. Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan stated that as cryptocurrencies further enter mainstream finance, privacy features may become a key application scenario for the industry.Specifically, Circle recently raised $222 million for Arc, with a valuation of $3 billion; Digital Asset is reportedly raising $300 million for Canton, with a valuation of $2 billion; and Tempo, supported by Stripe and Paradigm, previously raised $500 million, with a valuation of $5 billion. Hougan also mentioned that the advancement of stablecoin legislation in the U.S. is providing a clearer regulatory environment for institutional investment in related infrastructure.