Why crypto's privacy problem is a total dealbreaker for mainstream users

Without privacy, the industry is fundamentally mismatched with its audience and stalling mass adoption, argues Gruell.

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We all know the problem with a public ledger. Most of us living inside the crypto ecosystem can’t actually bring ourselves to say it.

But find a normie on the street, one with some knowledge of blockchain (good luck with that), and they’ll tell you straight. It’s public. A public ledger is public.

We’ve spent almost two decades trying to sell pork pies to vegans, trumpeting “public” as a virtue, when people actually crave privacy.

Out there in the real world, normies don’t see radical transparency. Many perceive insanity. They see data breaches. They are in no doubt that sharing a permanent and immutable record of every transaction they’ve ever made is utterly absurd.

You wouldn't use a credit card if your neighbor could see every transaction you made. You wouldn't run a business if your competitors could see exactly who your suppliers are and what you're paying them.

To put it simply, on-chain is too public, off-chain is too private. There has to be a balance. Some information needs to be made public for audit and regulatory purposes. Some information needs to remain private to enable businesses to function effectively.

Businesses need to shield their proprietary moves from competitors while providing a "viewing key" to regulators or auditors. It’s a balance between complying with the law and functioning effectively in the market.

There are some good reasons why institutional finance hasn't fully embraced blockchain–why the hedge funds, asset managers and corporate treasuries with billions to invest haven’t been red-pilled. One of those reasons is that they understandably don’t want to hand their proprietary strategy to the entire world, and simply cannot do so. It would be like broadcasting their alpha for free.

The corporate reality check

Stablecoins promise speed and efficiency for B2B transactions. The cost is low, but the price is high. Privacy. A transparent ledger means everyone–friend or foe, ally or rival–can see a company’s business. Which vendor they’re using, the volume of the orders and the price per unit. There are no secrets; everything's on display, and they’re effectively leaking their entire supply chain. Businesses have to find ways around the problem by enhancing privacy while remaining compliant.

What we need is the blockchain equivalent of the internet’s SSL moment. We didn't get a functional web until encryption became a standard layer, allowing us to send credit card info without the whole world watching.

From theory to practice

We are finally seeing this infrastructure move from whitepapers to the real world. For example, the Canton Network has had some success in bringing privacy to enterprise finance, albeit in a permissioned form. I’ve been involved in one of the latest privacy advances. It’s the newly announced plan to launch strkBTC on Starknet. We have spent years treating Bitcoin as digital gold—a great store of value, but one that is largely static and totally exposed if you try to use it in DeFi.

For the first time, you can have the security of Bitcoin with a "confidentiality layer" that protects your balances and counterparties from public view. It is the first proof that we can have an "active" Bitcoin that respects the commercial need for privacy, all with selective disclosure for reasonable risk management.

The path forward

One of the values of early crypto adopters was privacy, but that ambition will remain unfulfilled if we don't build for the systemically important capital flows that move the world. Public blockchains will only scale if they can support private finance.

Through selective disclosure and protocol-level confidentiality, we aren't just adding a feature. We are finally building a system that the world can actually use. The technology is here—the remaining question is which networks will set the standard for the next era of global finance.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

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