privacy

On October 13, 2026, the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub released the second phase report of the Aurum project, themed "Exploring Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Digital Cash." This phase implements a privacy-protecting digital cash prototype based on the existing Aurum codebase, helping policymakers understand how relevant technologies can alleviate the dilemma between privacy and compliance in digital cash.The prototype adopts the principles of privacy by design and default privacy, demonstrating practices that lie between complete anonymity and complete transaction transparency, and achieving customizable features to meet business needs in compliance and operations. The project indicates that privacy can be embedded in the design of digital cash through technology, rather than solely relying on institutional guarantees, thereby reducing unnecessary exposure of personal and transaction data while maintaining compliance and system integrity.Privacy-protecting designs can assist central banks and policymakers in understanding the relevant considerations and trade-offs. The prototype's functionalities demonstrate policy flexibility between privacy, transparency, compliance, and other attributes, which can be calibrated according to different policy choices and risk preferences. In addition to digital cash, central banks can further explore privacy-enhancing technologies in more use cases, with the report listing several usage experiences.

The Finance Committee of the French National Assembly has passed an amendment that proposes requiring the declaration of self-custodied wallet crypto assets with a year-end value reaching or exceeding €100,000 (approximately $112,000). Those who fail to declare may face fines of up to €10,000 (approximately $11,000). This regulation has not yet become law and may still be adjusted in the future.Harry Halpin, CEO of privacy infrastructure company Nym, stated that personnel from the French tax authorities are suspected of selling taxpayer data to criminals, and the new declaration requirements could threaten the safety of holders. Rand Hindi, founder of the privacy protocol Zama, urged French crypto asset holders to leave France, and those who cannot should hire security for their families.As this proposal emerges, France has seen several incidents of crypto asset robberies, kidnappings, and "ransom attacks" in recent years. The committee had also previously passed measures such as considering the exchange of crypto assets for stablecoins as a taxable sale and expanding the scope of the crypto asset exit tax, but the budget revenue portion was subsequently rejected by a vote of 31 to 3, and the related amendments need to be resubmitted.

PLabs released a technical paper on October 9, proposing a privacy stablecoin protocol based on Ethereum. This protocol allows anyone to deploy a Reserve Vault and NotePool supported 1:1 by reserve ERC-20 tokens, generating pUSDC as an example. The user's first on-chain credit is a privacy note, without the need to hold public USDC beforehand.The protocol separates the payer from the payee, mintage from becoming currency, and pre-minted notes can only circulate after an equivalent reserve is deposited in the same transaction. The circulating supply and reserve's 1:1 relationship is enforced by the contract, with ownership and transfers hidden on-chain. Only compliant administrators can execute freezes, and frozen reserves cannot be moved. The protocol is based on the Zcash Orchard note model, adopts the pERC20 standard, supports selective disclosure, and the security model covers abnormal scenarios involving operators, entry parties, and relayers.

Privacy infrastructure Hinkal announced on October 9, 2026, its participation in the Mastercard Crypto Partner Program. This program connects crypto and blockchain teams, Mastercard teams, and its global payment network, with members including stablecoin issuers, infrastructure providers, fiat exchange service providers, crypto card supporters, and blockchain and blockchain service providers. Mastercard positions it as a way to transform technological capabilities into compliant use cases for global commerce; some members can also access financial institutions within the card issuing and acquiring networks and receive regulatory and compliance support aligned with global standards.Related use cases include cross-border payments and remittances, B2B transactions, fund and settlement flows, stablecoin payments, and card projects that allow users to spend digital assets at regular merchants. Hinkal can provide embeddable privacy capabilities for wallets, payment platforms, and chains, allowing stablecoins to settle in private balances and transfer using zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring that the amount, sender, or receiver is not disclosed during on-chain transfer verification. This capability is already live on Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, TRON, and other major EVM chains, accessible via SDK and API.Existing integrations include Private Send in Polygon Wallet, Hinkal Private Send in the Tether wallet development kit, Turnkey wallets that can enhance privacy features through Hinkal SDK, and Avvio running Hinkal private payments on its own interface.

Programmable privacy infrastructure Soda Labs has completed a $3 million seed round financing, led by NextBlock. Over the past two and a half years, Soda Labs has developed a cryptographic privacy solution that combines garbled circuits with multi-party computation (GC-MPC), relying on proven standard cryptography such as AES and SHA256. Its privacy engine runs on standard cloud CPUs without the need for dedicated hardware, enabling applications to achieve privacy computing while maintaining a connection to existing public blockchain infrastructure.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a certain address (t1hBootrMTnk9t2uYV3AWhMTswxphheEpEr) withdrew 1000 ZEC from Binance one hour ago, worth 1.33 million dollars.Shortly after, all 1000 ZEC were transferred into the Zcash privacy pool, making subsequent transfers private.

The founder of the Bitcoin smart contract layer Stacks, Muneeb Ali, announced five key focuses for the first 30 days after returning as CEO of Stacks Labs, including expanding institutional business development, simplifying the management structure, releasing a roadmap for the next two years, strengthening public communication with large STX holders, and clarifying the value capture mechanism of STX.Muneeb Ali also stated that institutional demand for Bitcoin Bonds is increasing, and the future roadmap will also cover institutional-level Bitcoin privacy and quantum-resistant technology. Stacks plans to assign all intellectual property rights to a non-shareholder foundation.

Bitcoin early contributor and cypherpunk Amir Taaki stated on X that he was deported after being questioned by Singapore police for 6 hours about "the work I am engaged in." The British-Iranian programmer claims that he has been in trouble with several countries since he went to Syria to fight alongside the Kurdish People's Protection Units years ago.Taaki mentioned that in the past year alone, he has been deported from Argentina and Mexico, and detained in Serbia and Japan. He stated that every time he encounters such situations, he asks for the reasons, but the authorities always claim it is just a random check, never providing specific reasons for his detention or questioning. "I am on a list, but I can't find any information about which country is sanctioning me."Taaki has long focused on Bitcoin privacy, being one of the first to implement CoinJoin and stealth addresses, creating libbitcoin, founding the UK's first Bitcoin exchange, and writing BIP 0001, which established the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process. He is currently developing the crypto privacy protocol DarkFi.

Vitalik.eth posted on Farcaster revealing that he is conducting a personal experiment to generate personalized diet and exercise recommendations using personal health and travel data by combining local models with remote cutting-edge models while protecting privacy.The system employs a three-layer privacy protection architecture:Identity Layer: A local model (Qwen 3.8B) replaces the user to construct query requests, avoiding the exposure of writing style that could reveal identity.Payment Layer: Uses zkAPI to hide payment information.Network Layer: Hides IP addresses through Tor.The system is currently operational, but Vitalik pointed out three major shortcomings: Tor is inefficient and has high latency in unlinking requests; the local model runs at only 20-30 TPS, and a smooth experience requires over 100 TPS; the stricter the data protection, the more limited the assistance that the remote model can provide. The relevant code has been submitted to the Ethereum zkAPI repository.

According to data from Delphi Digital, NEAR launched NEAR Intents, achieving the highest transaction fee revenue of the year in September.Previously, NEAR set the perpetual contracts of the high-performance decentralized derivatives trading platform Hyperliquid to privacy mode by default. Users can deposit funds from other chains and participate in trading through token swaps on NEAR Intents. After the privacy feature went live, users tended to retain their funds during trading intervals, with their confidential balance exceeding 70 million dollars on the first day of launch. Delphi Digital stated that this could be an early signal of market demand converting into actual usage rates.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, stated that recently the activity of developers within the ecosystem has increased and the development threshold has further lowered, focusing on what kind of applications to build and how to establish distribution channels.In this regard, he proposed a series of potential construction directions, covering AI electronic pets that combine NEAR AI on-chain verifiable reasoning with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a universal checkout component that supports full-chain intent payments, a decentralized encyclopedia that combines prediction markets with AI-generated content, a privacy off-chain trading (OTC) market based on NEAR Intents and management of anti-liquidation lending and perpetual contracts, a cross-chain activity registration custody tool in the form of a staking deposit, privacy code review agents, enterprise equity structure management tools, Delta neutral strategy management, privacy tracking single transactions based on view keys, end-to-end encrypted medical auxiliary diagnostic systems, privacy voice transcription desktop applications, and AI benchmarking based on private test sets.Regarding product distribution, he suggested combining NEARLegion with community channels like X, achieving multi-chain wallet compatibility through Aurora Intent Connect to lower cross-chain thresholds, and actively expanding across communities and platforms like Product Hunt.

According to GMGN data, the privacy narrative token MASK on the Solana chain has a market capitalization exceeding 35 million USD, setting a historical high, with a 24-hour increase of over 70%. The current market capitalization is 34.91 million USD, with a trading volume of 2.7 million USD during the same period.MASK uses ZEC as the base pair and provides liquidity through the ZEC/MASK trading pair, aiming to offer ZK privacy services for any cryptocurrency activities. The prices of related tokens are highly volatile, and investment should be approached with caution.

According to The Block, the Ethereum Foundation has launched zkAPI on the Ethereum mainnet, a solution co-authored by Vitalik Buterin.zkAPI allows users to pay for artificial intelligence and other APIs using pre-stored ETH or USDC through zero-knowledge proofs, making it impossible for service providers to associate specific requests with the payer.

Monad released a video, hinting at the launch of a privacy service on October 6. Its token rose over 17% today, currently priced at $0.032671.

Aztec Network developer Aztec Labs has relaunched the self-custody wallet zk.money, which can hide payment amounts, balances, and recipient information through the Aztec Network, and supports transfers via readable names or links. Users can deposit DAI, USDC, or USDT from Ethereum, where USDC and USDT will be converted to DAI.Deposit records can still be publicly tracked, while subsequent transaction activities remain private. The early Alpha version stipulates that single deposits, payments, and withdrawals are all below $2,500 and screens addresses according to sanction policies. The software has not yet completed a comprehensive audit and carries security risks.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost stated that a recent paper explored the possibility of implementing privacy transactions on Bitcoin, characterized by the ability to achieve this directly on Bitcoin L1 without the need for a soft fork, making privacy transactions a native feature.Darkfost mentioned that he is not a developer and lacks the relevant technical background, but this idea is quite appealing. He believes it could be an important direction for Bitcoin's evolution according to Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision, while potentially diminishing the appeal of privacy projects like Zcash and Monero.

Two ChatGPT users from California filed a proposed class action lawsuit against OpenAI in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California this month, accusing the company of failing to adequately inform users that their real conversations were being handed over to external contractors for processing. The lawsuit was served to OpenAI on September 2, focusing on its internal initiative Project Lily. According to the complaint, "AI data reviewers" and "chatbot evaluators" recruited through a third-party staffing company read real ChatGPT prompts and complete conversations, summarize user intent, and score and comment on responses from four models on a scale of 1 to 7.This process is known in the industry as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is a fundamental method for enhancing chatbot capabilities. The complaint states that users were never explicitly informed that a person, rather than a machine, might be reading their conversations. OpenAI filters conversations through an automated system before human review, but the complaint alleges that the filters cannot intercept all content, and personal details sometimes still reach contractors. 404 Media first reported on the project on September 14 and found that the reviewers' dashboard included "user memory summaries," which could expose users' approximate locations, occupations, or private life information, even though usernames had been removed.OpenAI stated that such reviews aim to reduce two behaviors: chatbots behaving too much like humans and overly catering to users, referred to by researchers as "flattery." The complaint raises eight legal claims, including violations of California's Unfair Competition Law, Consumer Privacy Act, and common law claims for intrusion into private affairs, with the plaintiffs seeking damages, restitution of unjust enrichment, and punitive damages.

NEAR Protocol posted on platform X that the NEAR platform has launched a privacy limit order feature, supporting assets from any blockchain.Users can set a target price, and when the market price reaches the target price, the order will be executed automatically. The order will not be publicly displayed while waiting to be executed.

According to Bitcoin.com, the market capitalization of the privacy coin sector has increased from $11.97 billion to $36.51 billion over the past five months, an increase of $24.54 billion, or approximately 205%. Among them, Zcash (ZEC) saw an increase of $20.27 billion, while Monero (XMR) increased by $4.33 billion.In January, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concluded its investigation into the Zcash Foundation without recommending any enforcement action. On August 25, digital asset management company Grayscale converted the Zcash Trust into the ZCSH spot ETF and listed it on NYSE Arca, becoming the first publicly listed privacy coin spot ETF in the United States. On September 8, Digital Currency Group (DCG) exchanged ZEC for approximately $100 million in ZCSH ETF shares. During the same period, the price of ZEC rose from $319 to $1,507, while XMR increased from $330 to $555.

According to Specter Investigation monitoring, the privacy stablecoin payment network Payy Network is suspected to have been attacked, with approximately 1.8 million USDC transferred away.The attacker previously obtained initial funds through the privacy protocol Railgun, then exchanged the stolen USDC for ETH and dispersed the funds to three addresses.