The Rise of One-Sided Privacy

Sui has launched a public beta of confidential transfers on Devnet. The SuiNetwork account on X frames this as a step away from the paradigm where every transaction we make is announced through a megaphone.

For over a year now, "semi-private transactions" have been gaining traction across the crypto industry, with many major players pushing in that direction:

• Aptos, with its Confidential Asset Standard;
• Solana, with Confidential Balances Token Extensions;
• Zama, which has built a confidentiality layer - a special type of wrapped token for Ethereum;
• AvaCloud, for the Avalanche protocol.

As confidential transaction technology spreads across mainstream blockchains, a pointed question is starting to surface: do purpose-built privacy blockchains - Monero, Zcash, DASH, Pirate Chain, and the rest - still have a reason to exist? Some of them may not survive the competition.

But in solutions like Sui's, the megaphone is not replaced by silence. It is replaced by a quiet informant - one that can tell privileged parties everything about every transaction, but not you. And it will not tell you anything about the transactions of those same privileged parties, either.

That removes your ability to oversee the financial system - the kind of oversight you would have if that system ran on fully transparent blockchains.

Is "one-sided privacy" really what people want? Would it not be better to use fully private assets when something needs to be hidden, and fully transparent assets when accountability matters?

To me, that seems like a much cleaner approach.

And when you need to swap private cryptocurrencies for transparent ones, or the other way around, you can use rabbit.io.