I've been a privacy advocate for a long time but when it comes to privacy in Web3 we've mostly accepted that it isn't possible. Yes, we do have certain silos that allow transactional anonymity with networks like Monero and Zcash, but those are often frowned upon by regulators and don't address privacy on a much larger and broader scale.

In the last few months I've seen and experienced several solutions that address privacy on a small contract level. Popular players in the field include Oasis, Secret and others like Aztec and Railgun which don't have an associated token so far. One common problem I've noticed is the poor UX. I have to sacrifice convenience and move all my logic over to a siloed network – it's clunky and not scalable at all.

Oasis, which for most part has a siloed confidential EVM runtime, does have a very promising solution to this problem – a privacy layer for Web3. It would be very similar to Railgun but what's exciting is that it hugely improves UX as the end user would be using their existing frontends and wouldn't even know they're protecting their on-chain activity, on any EVM compatible chain, using the Oasis Network.

Privacy unfortunately is only a nice have for most users in Web3. This means that unless we vastly improve the UX pain points we won't see any meaningful interest. You can see a demo of this presented at ETH Denver a couple of weeks ago for a secret ballot use case on BNB Chain.

Would love to know your thoughts on this 🙂