Crypto needs privacy to scale with payments: Binance co-founder CZ
According to Changpeng Zhao, co-founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, the lack of privacy for onchain transactions is one of the biggest obstacles to the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies for payments and remittances.
Commonly known as “CZ”, the lack of privacy prevents businesses and institutions from paying expenses in crypt. He gave this example:
“Lack of privacy may be the missing link in adoption for crypto payments. Imagine a company paying employees in crypto onchain. In the current state of crypto, everyone in the company can click on the ‘from' address and see how much they're getting paid.”
In a previous conversation with investor and All-In podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya, CZ also cited physical security concerns as a reason why onchain transparency is a concern for users. The comments follow the revival of privacy and the cypherpunk ethos in the crypt.
The cypherpunk ideology is central to the birth of cryptocurrency, a peer-to-peer digital currency that can be transferred without an intermediary and to protect online communication by encrypting it from tracking messages.
Related: ‘No Privacy' CBDCs Aren't Coming, Billionaire Ray Dalio Warns
Encrypt everything: increasing onchain privacy
Businesses and institutions will not adopt crypto, Web3 platforms or blockchain if they cannot protect their transactions, Avidan Abitbol, a business development expert at Caspa's cryptocurrency project, told Cointelegraph.
Marketing information contains critical information about corporate operations, trade secrets, business relationships and provides clues to competitors about the company's overall financial health, he said.
These issues can lead to corporate theft, negatively impact businesses on business deals and increase the risk of an institution being targeted by fraudsters, Abitbol added.
According to Iran Barak, CEO of privacy firm Shield Technologies, the continued technological advancement of AI systems will exacerbate this issue.
Centralized servers that contain critical or valuable information will be more attractive to AI-powered hackers, he told Cointelegraph.
This means that onchain privacy technologies will become essential to protect valuable online information as AI becomes more powerful and can gather heuristic inferences about potential targets and statistically model potential outcomes, he said.
Magazine: 2026 is the year of practical privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash and more.
