Starknet Taps EY’s Nightfall for Institutional Privacy on Ethereum Rails
Starknet developer StarkWare has integrated EY's Nightfall privacy protocol to enable institutions to conduct private payments and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on public Ethereum-aligned rails, targeting banks and corporations that need privacy without interrupting audits.
In a Tuesday release shared with Cointelegraph, Starkware will audit multiple organizations while working with the Big Four as a way for enterprises to use bank-only networks instead of closing down shared open Layer-2.
The integration brings Nightfall, an open-source zero-knowledge (ZK) privacy layer developed by EY that enables transactions to be verified without revealing underlying data, private B2B and cross-border payments on StarNet, confidential treasury management and 24/7 tokenized asset transfers onchain.
Starkware said institutions can access Ethereum DeFi for functions such as lending, swaps and leverage strategies, with transactions by default private but supporting selective disclosure, auditing and know-your-customer (KYC) protocols.
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Starknet and Nightfall target institutional flows
StarkWare positions this as a “major breakthrough” in making public blockchains usable for institutional capital with full onchain transparency and resulting compliance and competition risks.
Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and CEO of StarkWare and founding scientist of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC), said in a release that blockchains can provide each institution with blockchains “equivalent to a private superhighway for stablecoins and tokenized deposits,” a concrete step towards the vision of the Nightfall space on Stalknet.
Alex Grull, global head of business development at StarkWare, told Cointelegraph that the nightfall is “particularly useful for institutions looking for process-ready KYC verification as part of their move to blockchain” and is part of a broader privacy push at StarkNet.
He said “mountains were moved” when crypto-native teams built ZK's infrastructure, adding an additional layer of institutional integrity and “regulatory efficiency” to the EY-built system.
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Grull also called Starknet plus Nightfall interoperability between institutions, comparing it to rival networks that are “siloed” institutional environments that “don't serve as interoperable infrastructure” and permissioned models like the Canton network that “have not yet integrated into the Web3 ecosystem.”
They stressed that Nightfall will be license-free and fully integrated into StarNet, which will continue with a planned rollout, with the initial deployment focused on “full and secure sequencing of private payments and transfers” with “confirmatory updates and expanded functionality as the system scales.”
Starch development and dental caries
Starknet has steadily grown into one of the largest ZK stacks with a total value locked (TVL) of around $280 million currently, mainly through DeFi protocols and native ecosystem applications.
At the same time, Starknet's push for rapid scaling has exposed reliability challenges. In the year By 2025, the network has faced major outages linked to series and infrastructure issues, promising to strengthen reliability before public postmortem and more institutional outpouring.
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