The big privacy story this week is the Zcash Orchard counterfeiting vulnerability – discovered by a security researcher using Claude's Opus 4.8.
It's a reminder of how disruptive AI can be in both directions and why privacy technologies need guardrails to prevent unforeseeable circumstances.
On other privacy news, we have launches across private stablecoins and private agentic payments.
A great recap for privacy enthusiasts. Thx @zkGaylord
(After all, we all know that reading long-form content isn't always the easiest thing to do. But you should still read 😝)
I've read @BrianSeong article on Tempo vs Canton vs Miden so you dont have to ⬇️
(but pls read anyway 😝)
TLDR: privacy vs transparency is the wrong frame. Selective visibility for institutions = Hide the right data from wrong people + Keep compliance/recovery possible
🪡🧵
gMiden ☀️
We wish all Mideners a fantastic week ahead. We all know the best way to start a new week.
Grab your morning coffee and check out this great thread to catch up on everything that happened in the privacy space last week.
Last week, the story was projects wiring privacy into the financial products people already use.
This week, identity joined the conversation as @AztecLabs_ acquired a privacy-preserving passport verification protocol and @PrivacyEthereum shipped ZK proof of personhood on mobile.
The pattern keeps compounding.
Privacy is reaching every corner of onchain finance – from the original digital asset, Bitcoin, to the newest frontier in agentic payments, to institutional rails being built for serious capital.
This week delivered concrete evidence across all three.
Today we're experimenting with an AI Protocol Day at @0xMiden
Goal: 95% of all new PRs should be 1-shotted, and not require ANY back-n-forth on the review, speeding up the engineering work.
To achieve this, we make our repo @claudeai-native and codify our internal knowledge.
This week in privacy, confidential payments went live on @0xPolygon and @Multicoin Capital disclosed a significant Zcash position at Consensus Miami, calling private store of value a market-structure necessity as finance moves onchain.
Two signals from opposite ends of the industry – a major ecosystem and a top-tier crypto fund – arriving at the same conclusion: privacy is no longer optional infrastructure.
Guardian lets you manage one account from your laptop, phone, or hardware wallet – all coordinated, all private.
Scale that to a company, and employees operate from their own devices without exposing shared account state.
Scale it further to institutions – banks coordinating across entities, enforcing policies onchain, without leaking information.
Account coordination with policy-based approvals: Guardian enables what enterprises already do offchain, now enforced onchain with privacy baked in.