If ZCash is the private Bitcoin Miden is the private Ethereum Study that! @0xMiden

Predicate has responded to @USTreasury's request for comment on methods to mitigate illicit activity in digital assets. The key takeaway: Compliance today is reactive. It must become proactive to stop bad activity before it happens. Summary thread + full letter below.

6/ b) is the most subtle and hardest to understand. This is where ZK fails To understand why, let's consider the simplest privacy app: zcash (no defi). When you submit a shielded zcash transaction, you produce a proof that says, roughly "I am sending coins such that my balance remains >0 after this transaction." Well, if you aggregate 1000 of those transactions and then look at the state of the chain as an outsider, what do you know about the state? Nothing Now imagine trying to do DeFi on top of that. How do you do DeFi if your transaction literally cannot see or interact with anyone else's assets A bunch of teams have been trying to address this over the last decade, including Aztec, Aleo, and probably quite a few more that I cannot recall atm. The fundamental challenge each of these teams has to contend with is the challenge described above. Basically, how do you design ZKPs to allow for selective information to be seen by the outside world (eg how much collateral is backing a loan) Now consider being a DeFi developer. You have to not only design your DeFi protocol, you have to do so 1) in a partially hamstrung way, and 2) you have to understand how ZKPs work. Who wants to be the developer building a DeFi system that has 9 or 10-figures in it with all of these additional risks. This is scary stuff Many of the zk DeFi teams have been working to try to make this stuff more understandable, but the underlying reality is just extremely difficult to contend with. Moreover, this requires rebuilding every DeFi primitive from the ground up. The fundamental challenge here is that DeFi as we currently know it *requires the ability to reason about globally shared state.* Perhaps there is a way to rebuild DeFi from the ground up with selective reasoning, but I am extremely skeptical of that claim. And demonstrating that claim to the world at large in a way that everyone else will believe it will be a decade long endeavor given how much technical risk is there with dozens of bespoke zk circuits. So what is FHE? FHE allows you compute over encrypted data. This has been considered the holy grail of cryptography for decades. Thinking about private DeFi using FHE as the primary cryptographic construction is actually quite simple. You think about it the same as if it was transparent! It's just that magically, everything is not transparent, but you can still compute over it anyways Yes, this is magic

That evening feeling — in a month we will do an i credible event. Made with love, sweat, and magic. Almost 100 people will end up working to make it a reality. People will fly from all over the world. Incredible minds will contribute to free internet. Driven by nevessity of juatice, knowledge and positive energy. Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress #2

ZK Arcade Ticket NFT: Partner Raffles MEGATHREAD ZK Arcade is launching (very‼️) soon and we're working with many of our partners to distribute more exclusive early access WL spots. Find out how to enter below ⬇️

🔸 𝐌𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧 × 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐙𝐞𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧 🔹 Security, standards, privacy To bring privacy and safety to real-world finance, Miden is partnering with the industry standard for smart contract security: @OpenZeppelin

Miden 🤝 Ligero 🤝 Privacy @0xMiden is partnering with @ligero_inc to strengthen the privacy stack for real-world finance 👇

Got questions or thinking of building on Miden? Drop a reply 👇

Privacy is normal. Privacy is for common people and for institutions. Builders shouldn’t be prosecuted for pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Banks are going to use ZK and we should cherish that the industry is maturing. I hope decision makers can catch up and realize this is good for society.

Big news! We just dropped the Miden Compiler v0.4—a major milestone in our journey Now you can write a full Miden account (basic wallet) or P2ID note script in Rust, and compile it all the way down to Miden Assembly! 🧵 1/6

Sneak peek of the new Qash design (still in the works) 👀 We're making Qash the best private crypto payroll platform. What do you think of the new look? Feedback always welcome!

1 million transactions on this testnet version 🎉 which the upcoming release will reset 🎉

The year is 2031. Marcus lives in a rich country in the northern hemisphere – you know, one of these where wealth has been passed down for generations. His family office is tucked behind stone walls in the quiet streets of a small city called Cobtini, but most of his activity flows through markets half the world away. Tonight he sends a few instructions into Zoro, the automatic market-maker app he uses most of the time for trading. And boom – within a second, the asset swap is executed against other traders and companies he will never meet. His only certainty: they have all been cleared by regulators, each passed through the new fast-track KYB and AML checks. It is now powered by state-of-the-art cryptographic techniques, and takes less than an hour. As he thinks about whoever the counterparties of the trade could be, his mind drifts back to 2025, when the co-founder of Ledger was abducted in France. A finger cut off, a ransom demanded... Gruesome story. Marcus remembers the fear that washed over him then, the sense that visibility itself could cost him his safety. Six years later, the world is only beginning to accept what he had believed ever since. Institutions and regulators have been slow, but privacy is finally treated as a public good. Some old exchanges still leak data, some legacy networks still clog under stress, but the technological and philosophical evolution is well underway now. Marcus leans back as the order clears. Neither his name nor any other personal information appears anywhere. After all, what he values most is not the execution speed, or even the bid/ask spread – but the freedom of mind. And he cannot help but think that things would probably feel very different if the internet had gone down the dystopian path of full transparency... Study Miden.

Saying that privacy on blockchains has no PMF is crazy. Blockchains have no PMF! In large part because they enforce global, immutable transparency! We solve privacy to have a shot at blockchain PMF.

A single ZKP can attest to correct execution of 1K (or 1M) transactions. These transactions could be nearly arbitrarily complex and it would still take just a few ms to verify all of them. Having said that, you are correct, ZKPs don't directly make a system faster. They do enable nearly unlimited throughput though and provide privacy. So, if the goal is to build a system that is as fast as possible but is fully transparent and has limited scalability - then ZKPs are not needed. Otherwise, there is no way to do without them.