After the rise of this wave of Zec, many privacy coin related companies also followed suit. Dash, Zen, and these are always just simple links without any fundamental changes, but a few days ago, Starkware's pull made me confused. Is this product related to Arb or Zcash? After studying it, it is true that the fundamentals can really benefit from privacy. Together with Circle, we have developed a USDC privacy feature that allows us to shield/unshielde and make private transfers at any time But this is news from the end of June. The disk pulling in early October may just be a simple attempt to pull the disk (unlocked on October 15th), or it may be stimulated by the incentive plan of strkBTC+v0.14.4 mainnet upgrade However, it is possible to use Starkware to start dealing with privacy. Simply put, let's talk about the classification of this round of privacy competition. When Tornado Cash was popular in the past, we actually talked a lot about it. However, firstly, privacy was not the main track at that time. Secondly, it was still focused on pure privacy. This wave is clearly biased towards "auditable, optional" institutional privacy Category 1: Asset Layer - Zcash The main theme is that 'privacy is a monetary attribute', and in case BTC fails, Zcash can serve as BTC's insurance. It is interesting that gray scale Zcash ETFs are mostly transparent ZECs without privacy features enabled, which pursue privacy but cannot be enabled due to compliance and audit privacy requirements, which is a bit disjointed But in any case, the narrative is here, and privacy features must be optional. Monroe's round of mandatory privacy is that he cannot eat at the table Category 2: Privacy Transfer - Starkware&Aleo The privacy feature of Starknet USDC will be launched on Starknet at the end of June, allowing for shield/unshield at any time, private transfers, and secure swaps on Ready and Xverse. Viewing keys will be used to meet regulatory audits... In short, this round of optional privacy tuning is underway Aleo - The mining star of the past fell hundreds of times after going online, but recently he has been working on USDCx. Based on Circle xReserve, the Arc mainnet supports casting USDCx with USDC on Arc on the first day of its launch, and Kraken has also opened deposit and withdrawal services It can only be said that although this coin is almost zero, the project party's resources and relationships in Europe and America are truly iron Category 3: Privacy Computing - Zama, Phala, Nil The reason for choosing these three is because firstly, they have been causing trouble recently, and secondly, they are representatives of three types of privacy technologies Zama is the representative of FHE, and FHE fully homomorphic encryption belongs to the holy grail of privacy. Many FHE projects in the industry use Zama's technology as the underlying layer, which is a bit like the Feel of Intel OEM certification or ARM technology authorization back then Some people compare Zcash to privacy BTC and Zama to privacy ETH in this round Phala TEE stands for, and recently it seems to be focusing on encrypted inference. I mentioned in my previous tweet about Robin Good: 0xaa07a0e9209e16ac99708c3ec70159c6ef3128a3. Recently, I collaborated with Phala to create an encrypted inference gateway using their confidential GPU. Additionally, I remember running the popular VVV TEE/E2EE mode on Phala as well. Nillion - Former MPC representative, but failed. Now it seems like they have created something new called encrypted markets, which is a method of telling users' only perform this operation when x occurs and not let anyone see it before ' Nillion calls it a covenant: an encrypted instruction issued on the chain that automatically opens when specific conditions are met. No one holds the complete key. It seems that the technology has nothing to do with MPC, and the underlying layer is Boneh Franklin identity based encryption algorithm on Ethereum precompiled program (to be honest, this is the first time I've heard of this thing...) Category 4: Pure Institutional Privacy - Canton Canton is different from the previous ones, a bit leaning towards the feel of institutional consortium chains. The selling point is sub transaction level privacy - the transaction party only sees the parts that are relevant to themselves. It is not using zero knowledge proof, but using another set of "selective disclosure" technology, which should be the biggest real demand for privacy in traditional finance at present There are actually many privacy projects, such as Railgun, which V God often likes, and Midnight, which recently appeared on Binance. These two, along with Tornado Cash, should be considered representatives of ZK technology. Due to limited space, we will not introduce them in detail.