Zcash co-founder: ‘The world is demanding more privacy’

4 hours ago7 min read1 comments

In the sprawling digital agora of decentralized finance, a foundational tension persists between the sanctity of public verification and the fundamental human right to personal privacy. Zcash and Starknet co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson, a pivotal architect in the cryptography space, is spearheading the charge to resolve this paradox, arguing that the technological zeitgeist is shifting irrevocably toward solutions that protect individual sovereignty.Ben-Sasson’s work is not happening in a vacuum; it's a direct response to a global climate of increasing surveillance capitalism and state-level data harvesting, where every digital footprint is commodified. His focus on ensuring 'integrity' in privacy payments is the critical differentiator; it’s not about creating dark pools of untraceable capital, but about building systems where transactions can be cryptographically verified as legitimate without exposing the identities of the participants or the transaction amounts—a concept known as zero-knowledge proofs.Think of it as being able to prove you are over 21 without revealing your birthdate, or a blockchain validating that a transaction follows all rules without knowing who sent it or how much was sent. This is the promise of technologies like Zcash, which utilizes zk-SNARKs, and Starknet, which leverages zk-STARKs, a Ben-Sasson innovation that offers similar privacy guarantees with different trade-offs regarding computational intensity and quantum resistance.The challenge, as he articulates it, is monumental: how do you maintain the trustless, transparent nature of a public ledger like Ethereum while introducing a layer of selective opacity? The answer lies in sophisticated cryptographic math that allows the network to reach consensus on the validity of a hidden transaction. This isn't merely a technical nicety for crypto-anarchists; it's becoming a business imperative.From corporations protecting trade secrets and strategic financial moves to individuals simply wanting to shield their personal finances from public scrutiny, the demand for programmable privacy is exploding. Regulatory bodies, however, watch this evolution with deep skepticism, often conflating financial privacy with money laundering, a narrative that Ben-Sasson and other builders in the space actively work to dismantle by designing tools that can provide auditability for regulatory compliance without sacrificing core privacy features.The path forward is a delicate dance between innovation, adoption, and regulation, a dance that will define the next era of the internet. As Ben-Sasson rightly observes, the world is demanding more privacy, and the blockchain ecosystem, once a bastion of radical transparency, is now maturing to meet that demand with mathematical rigor and ethical consideration, ensuring that the future of digital value is both open and respectful of the individual.

#featured

#Zcash

#Starknet

#Eli Ben-Sasson

#privacy

#decentralized blockchains

#integrity

#payments

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