# Soda Labs: full reference

Soda Labs builds Bubble, confidential infrastructure for institutional
on-chain finance, built on garbled-circuit multi-party computation (GC-MPC).
Data is encrypted end-to-end with quantum-resistant AES-256 and is never
decrypted during computation; the only disclosure path is an on-chain access
list (ACL) through which authorized entities (auditors, regulators,
counterparties) can request scoped decryption. The stack is EVM and Solidity
compatible via the gcEVM, independently audited by Hacken, protected by three
granted US patents, and runs in production as the privacy layer of COTI
mainnet (125,000,000+ confidential transactions since March 2025).

Measured performance (July 2026, end-to-end on Arbitrum, 15,000 transfers):
500 cTPS sustained, 750 cTPS peak, $0.14 per million transfers.
Compute-only ceiling: 3,400 cTPS per CPU core.

Chains live: COTI, Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base.
Chains coming: Optimism, BSC, Avalanche, XDC, Solana.

Founders: Avishay Yanai (Co-Founder & CEO; PhD in cryptography and secure
multiparty computation, Bar-Ilan University; five years of enterprise MPC at
VMware; 50+ peer-reviewed papers and US patents). Meital Levy (Co-Founder &
CTO; PhD in algorithms optimisation, Tel Aviv University; 15 years in
distributed systems and cryptographic protocols; lead developer of SCAPI).
Seed investor: NextBlock VC.

## Customers, pilots and proof

### COTI (Privacy layer)
Powering COTI mainnet privacy: Soda's GC-MPC is the first to deliver a cryptographic on-chain privacy solution, operational on the COTI network since mainnet launch (March 2025), with 100% availability outside planned upgrades.
Outcome: Proof the Soda stack performs in production, at mainnet scale, day after day.

### European Central Bank (Central banking)
Selected for the European Central Bank's Pioneer programme: Soda Labs presented a pilot for confidential transactions in the digital euro context.
Outcome: A working pilot presented at the highest institutional level of European finance.

### Chainlink Labs (Oracle pilot)
Soda completed a pilot with Chainlink Labs: a secure and private channel between institutions, providing privacy-preserving bridge policy enforcement (e.g., rate limits).
Outcome: A working demonstration of private, oracle-connected on-chain workflows with one of the most widely used oracle networks.

### Hacken (Security audit)
Soda completed a security audit with Hacken: a full security audit of the Soda GC-MPC solution.
Outcome: An independent audit report available for security and compliance teams.

### Messari (Research coverage)
Featured in Messari's comprehensive report on "The Privacy Layer: Understanding the Inner Workings of Decentralized Confidential Computing".
Outcome: Independent analyst coverage of Soda Labs' GC-MPC approach within the confidential-computing landscape.

### NextBlock VC (Seed investor)
NextBlock VC backs Soda Labs as our seed investor, supporting the mission of bringing confidential infrastructure to real-world on-chain finance.

## Frequently asked questions

Q: What is Soda Labs?
A: Soda Labs builds Bubble, confidential infrastructure that lets institutions operate on public blockchains without exposing positions, strategies or customer data.

Q: What is Bubble?
A: Bubble is an all-in-one confidential stack for privacy-preserving portfolio management and confidential transactions of funds, across any L1, L2 and cross-chain operation.

Q: Who is Bubble for?
A: Banks and financial institutions, funds and asset managers, payment and stablecoin providers, RWA issuers, and infrastructure or wallet teams that need confidentiality on-chain.

Q: Which blockchains are supported?
A: Live today: COTI, Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base. Coming next: Optimism, BSC, Avalanche, XDC and Solana, plus cross-chain operations. The chains band on the homepage always shows the current status.

Q: How does Bubble keep data private?
A: Bubble encrypts data end-to-end and computes on it using garbled-circuit MPC, so balances, amounts and strategy stay hidden on-chain. Data is never decrypted during computation; the only disclosure path is the on-chain access list (ACL), through which authorized entities can request scoped decryption.

Q: What is garbled-circuit MPC?
A: A form of secure multi-party computation that evaluates encrypted logic without revealing the inputs: fast and light, with no trusted third party.

Q: Is Bubble audited?
A: Yes. The Soda Labs stack is independently audited by Hacken, protected by three granted US patents, and runs in production as the privacy layer of COTI mainnet with 125,000,000+ confidential transactions processed. Audit reports are available for your security and compliance teams.

Q: How fast is Bubble?
A: Measured end-to-end on Arbitrum over 15,000 confidential transfers (July 2026): 500 cTPS sustained, 750 cTPS peak, at $0.14 per million transfers. Methodology and raw results are available on request.

Q: Is the encryption post-quantum secure?
A: Bubble uses standards-based AES-256, which is quantum-resistant: even with Grover's algorithm, an attacker faces 128-bit security, which remains computationally infeasible. No experimental cryptography sits in the critical path.

Q: How can it be private and compliant at the same time?
A: Selective disclosure through the on-chain access list (ACL) lets auditors and regulators see exactly what they need, and nothing else, while the public chain sees nothing.

Q: How hard is it to integrate?
A: Bubble ships a clean SDK and familiar tooling: you can add confidentiality to existing contracts in a few lines, and start from a working reference application.

Q: Do I need cryptography expertise?
A: No. The cryptography is handled for you behind a developer-friendly API.

Q: Is there a reference application?
A: Yes. A working confidential portfolio app you can try, fork and use as the blueprint for your own integration.

Q: How do I get started?
A: Book a demo and our team will walk through a confidential deployment mapped to your use case.

Q: Do you offer enterprise support and SLAs?
A: Yes. Bubble is built for production, with enterprise support and service levels for institutional customers.

## Privacy Hub: the on-chain privacy market map

The Privacy Hub (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub) is a neutral, sourced
directory of the on-chain privacy field across FHE, MPC/GC, ZK and TEE. Every
entry has its own page, its own primary sources and a markdown twin at the same
URL plus ".md". The whole directory is available as JSON at
https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/data.json and as markdown at
https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub.md, free to quote and reuse under CC BY
4.0 with attribution. Corrections: https://www.sodalabs.xyz/contact

- Bubble [project, MPC-GC]: Enterprise confidential finance. Privacy-preserving portfolio management and confidential transactions across any L1, L2 and cross-chain operation. Garbled-circuit MPC with NIST-standard AES-256, measured at roughly 500 confidential transactions per second sustained, end to end, at about 14 cents per million transfers, so confident (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/bubble)
- Zama [project, FHE]: FHE coprocessor. Zama did what most of the field assumed was still years out: it brought fully homomorphic encryption to Ethereum at the end of 2025, with confidential tokens whose balances and transfers are computed on while they stay encrypted. Its open-source library, TFHE-rs, is the foundation a large part of th (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/zama)
- Fhenix [project, FHE]: FHE coprocessor. Fhenix builds CoFHE, a fully homomorphic encryption coprocessor that lets an ordinary EVM contract hand encrypted work to an off-chain compute layer and get a verified result back. A team can add confidential state to the chain it already ships on instead of migrating to a new one. The architecture  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/fhenix)
- Inco [project, TEE]: Confidential token framework. Inco ships Lightning, a confidential token framework that gives ERC-20 style assets encrypted balances and transfers while keeping the developer experience close to ordinary Solidity, which is the part most confidentiality stacks make hard. That is what makes it usable today: performance and latency (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/inco)
- Aztec [project, ZK]: Privacy L2. Aztec has been building private smart contracts for Ethereum since 2017, and along the way it wrote much of the toolchain the wider field now uses. Noir, its circuit language, has become one of the most widely adopted ways to write zero-knowledge programs anywhere. Alpha V5 activated on mainnet in J (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/aztec)
- Aleo [project, ZK]: Privacy L1. Aleo is one of the very few teams to have shipped a zero-knowledge Layer 1 with a full stack of its own. Leo, a purpose-built language for writing private applications, runs on snarkVM, its own execution environment, with proofs generated off chain so program state is private by default rather than  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/aleo)
- Railgun [project, ZK]: Private DeFi protocol. Railgun is the most used private DeFi protocol on Ethereum, with 4.5 billion dollars moved cumulatively by early 2026. Its design is notable for keeping the privacy on chain: balances are shielded inside a smart contract and can be spent straight into public DeFi protocols, so users never have to le (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/railgun)
- Privacy Pools [project, ZK]: Compliant privacy pool. Privacy Pools implements one of the most consequential ideas in the field: association-set proofs, from a paper co-authored by Vitalik Buterin. They let an honest user prove their deposit belongs to a set that excludes illicit funds without revealing which deposit is theirs. It is the clearest answe (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/privacy-pools)
- Zcash [project, ZK]: Shielded-pool L1. Zcash invented shielded payments at scale and handed the rest of the field its foundations. zk-SNARK shielded transactions have been in production since 2016, the Sapling upgrade made them practical on ordinary hardware, and Halo 2 removed the trusted setup and is now used well beyond Zcash itself.  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/zcash)
- Miden [project, ZK]: Client-side proving chain (upcoming). Miden spun out of Polygon with 25 million dollars behind a genuinely different architecture: client-side proving. The user executes and proves their own transaction locally and the network only verifies the proof, so the chain never handles the data at all. That inverts the usual privacy trade-off,  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/miden)
- Penumbra [project, ZK]: Shielded DEX chain. Penumbra is one of the most elegant designs in the field: a fully shielded Cosmos chain where every action is private, staking and trading included. Its DEX batches swaps so trades clear at a shared price and no individual order is ever exposed, and the specification is openly published and holds up (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/penumbra)
- Oasis Sapphire [project, TEE]: Confidential EVM. Oasis Sapphire is the confidential EVM that has been in production the longest: ordinary Solidity, encrypted state and encrypted calldata, running inside Intel SGX enclaves. The developer experience is deliberately close to a normal EVM chain, which is why teams can ship on it without relearning how (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/oasis)
- Phala [project, TEE]: Confidential compute network. Phala runs a decentralized confidential compute cloud, where workloads execute inside attested hardware and a customer can verify what is running before trusting it with anything. It is also one of the most operationally serious teams in this corner of the field, and the field's hardest test is wher (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/phala)
- Secret Network [project, TEE]: Confidential L1. Secret has run encrypted smart contracts in production longer than anyone else, since 2020, and a good deal of what the industry knows about operating TEE-based privacy at real scale it learned here first. The network has also done that learning in the open: the 2022 consensus-seed research and a Ju (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/secret)
- Seismic [project, TEE]: Encrypted EVM L1 (pre-mainnet). Seismic raised seventeen million dollars from a16z to build an encrypted EVM where confidentiality is a language-level primitive. Shielded types such as suint256 mean a developer marks a variable private and the chain takes care of the rest, which is about as low-friction as confidential smart contr (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/seismic)
- Partisia [project, MPC-GC]: MPC L1. Partisia carries as much academic MPC pedigree as anything in this field, tracing back to the Aarhus cryptography group behind several of the foundational secure-computation results. It turned that into a working mainnet, out of beta since 2024, where MPC nodes compute over secret-shared inputs as a (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/partisia)
- Arcium [project, MPC-GC]: Confidential compute network. Arcium is the most substantial MPC effort on Solana, running an encrypted execution engine that handles hundreds of thousands of confidential computations a day and already carries third-party products such as the Umbra wallet. The design gives builders a choice of trust model rather than one settin (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/arcium)
- Nillion [project, MPC-GC]: Blind-compute network. Nillion is building blind compute: a network where data is split across nodes and operated on while it stays encrypted. It targets storage and AI workloads rather than another smart-contract chain, which is a corner of the problem almost nobody else is working on. It mixes MPC, homomorphic encryptio (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/nillion)
- COTI [project, MPC-GC]: Confidential EVM L2 · in production. COTI runs a confidential EVM in production on Ethereum rails, built on garbled circuits developed with Soda Labs technology, with more than 125 million transactions behind it. It is the strongest existing evidence that the approach holds at public-network scale: standard EVM contracts, encrypted sta (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/coti)
- PriveX [project, MPC-GC]: Private perpetuals DEX. PriveX is the first exchange powered by garbled circuits, running perpetuals with private execution on COTI's confidential EVM, built on Soda technology. Order flow stays encrypted until settlement, which takes the alpha leak out of trading and removes the front-running surface that public order flo (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/privex)
- Zoniqx [project, MPC-GC]: Private RWA tokenization. Zoniqx tokenizes real-world assets on COTI's confidential EVM, keeping cap tables, registers and positions off the public record while staying inside a compliance framework. That combination is precisely what has kept most regulated issuers off public chains. It is built on the same garbled-circuit  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/zoniqx)
- Umbra [project, MPC-GC]: Shielded wallet on Solana. Umbra is a private wallet and shielded pool on Solana, public since March 2026, and the clearest evidence yet that Arcium's encrypted execution engine can carry a consumer product. Send, receive and hold with balances and amounts hidden, in an interface that behaves like an ordinary wallet. Building (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/umbra)
- Panther Protocol [project, ZK]: Compliant private DeFi. Panther shipped its shielded pool on Polygon in May 2026 with disclosure designed into the protocol rather than bolted on afterwards. A user can prove what a counterparty or a regulator needs proven without opening the rest of their position. It got there after years of research and a deliberately c (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/panther)
- Fluidkey [project]: Private payments. Fluidkey wraps stealth addresses in a payments product polished enough that people actually use it, across seven EVM chains, with real traction for receiving funds privately. Every incoming payment lands on a freshly generated address with its own smart account, derived automatically from the user's (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/fluidkey)
- Hinkal [project, ZK]: Private DeFi layer. Hinkal took shielded balances further than most, letting users hold assets privately and then deploy them directly inside DeFi protocols across several chains, rather than shielding transfers alone. An access check put compliance in front of the pool rather than after it. In July 2026 an exploit dra (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/hinkal)
- MetaMask [integration]: Wallets. Self-custody through the wallet most of the market already uses. The signing key never leaves MetaMask; Bubble only handles the encryption material, so a confidential transfer feels like any other transaction to the user. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-metamask)
- Privy [integration]: Wallets. Embedded self-custody wallets for apps that onboard users with an email address. Privy handles the key, Bubble handles the confidentiality, and the app ships private balances without asking anyone to install anything. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-privy)
- Turnkey [integration]: Wallets. Wallet infrastructure for teams that run signing at scale. Turnkey policies govern who can sign; Bubble keeps what they sign confidential on chain. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-turnkey)
- Silence Laboratories [integration]: Wallets. MPC wallets meet MPC privacy. Threshold signing on the wallet side, garbled-circuit computation on the chain side, and no single machine ever holds either the full key or a plaintext balance. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-silence-labs)
- Gnosis [integration]: Wallets. Smart-contract wallets with programmable policies. Account logic stays on chain and public where it should be; balances and transfer amounts stay private where it matters. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-gnosis)
- Private ERC-20 [integration]: Standards. Our own standard. Full 256-bit amounts stored as two ciphertexts, standard ERC-20 semantics, verifiable settlement on a public explorer. The world sees that a transaction happened and settled, and learns nothing else. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-private-erc20)
- ERC-3643 [integration]: Standards. The permissioned-token standard behind most institutional RWA issuance, maintained by the ERC-3643 Association. With Bubble underneath, eligibility stays enforced while positions and transfers stop being public signals. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-erc3643)
- ERC-7943 (uRWA) [integration]: Standards. The universal RWA interface, integrated with Brickken. Issuers keep the compliance controls the standard defines and gain confidential balances for the assets themselves. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-erc7943)
- ERC-7984 [integration]: Standards. The confidential-token standard drafted with OpenZeppelin. A common interface for encrypted-amount tokens, so wallets and protocols integrate confidentiality once instead of per vendor. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-erc7984)
- x402 [integration]: Standards. The agentic payment protocol. Machine-to-machine payments are exactly the flows nobody wants published, and Bubble gives x402 settlements confidential amounts by default. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-x402)
- Gnosis Safe [integration]: Vaults & platforms. Treasury vaults with multi-signer policies. The Safe keeps its governance; Bubble keeps the treasury's balances and flows off the public record, which is usually the point of having a treasury policy at all. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-gnosis-safe)
- Tokenization platforms [integration]: Vaults & platforms. Issuance platforms integrate Bubble to keep subscriptions, redemptions and holder registers confidential. Case studies are available on request. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/int-tokenization)
- iExec [project, TEE]: Confidential compute network. iExec has been running decentralized confidential computing since 2017, with a network of trusted-execution nodes and a data-governance layer that lets someone monetize access to a dataset without ever handing over the data itself. That combination of confidential compute plus enforceable usage rule (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/iexec)
- Mina [project, ZK]: Succinct blockchain. Mina keeps the entire blockchain small enough to verify on a phone, using recursive zero-knowledge proofs so that a constant-size proof stands in for the whole chain history. It is one of the most elegant applications of recursive proving anywhere, and it makes verification genuinely accessible rath (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/mina)
- Namada [project, ZK]: Multi-asset shielded L1. Namada runs a single shielded pool that works for any asset, native or bridged, so every token shares one anonymity set instead of each having its own thin one. That is a real cryptographic and economic insight, since privacy in a shielded pool is a function of how many people are in it, and pooling (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/namada)
- Noir [project, ZK]: ZK programming language. Noir is a domain-specific language for zero-knowledge circuits that made writing provable programs feel like writing Rust, and it has become one of the most widely adopted ways to build zero-knowledge applications anywhere. It is backend-agnostic, so a circuit written once can target different provi (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/noir)
- Shutter Network [project, MPC-GC]: Threshold encrypted mempool. Shutter encrypts transactions until they are already ordered, using threshold cryptography and distributed key generation so a committee can only decrypt after the block is fixed. That closes front-running at the protocol level rather than policing it afterwards, and the same mechanism protects voti (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/shutter-network)
- Ethereum [chain]: Bubble live · no native privacy. The base layer is transparent by design and will stay that way, so every privacy option here is opt in at the application layer. Aztec's private rollup reached alpha in March 2026, Railgun's shielded pool carries most of the volume, and the Ethereum Foundation is wiring its Kohaku SDK into wallets.  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-ethereum)
- Polygon [chain]: Bubble live · third-party privacy. Polygon PoS has no native privacy, but it has one of the deeper third-party ecosystems. The official Polygon wallet added a Privately Send option in May 2026, powered by Hinkal's shielded pools for USDC and USDT, alongside Railgun and Fluidkey. Those routes are KYT gated with a discretionary kill sw (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-polygon)
- Arbitrum [chain]: Bubble live · no native privacy. Arbitrum's 2026 roadmap sketches three confidentiality models, and its own FAQ confirms network-level confidential execution is not live yet, with the Arbitrum One variant subject to a DAO vote. Today privacy is app layer: Railgun and Fluidkey, plus Renegade's dark pool for matching. Hinkal was expl (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-arbitrum)
- Base [chain]: Bubble live · enterprise-gated native option. Base is shipping Base Ledgers, a private settlement rail where balances stay off public explorers while funds settle on Base, currently in early access and operator run with its own KYC. Inco's TEE-based Lightning went live on Base mainnet in June 2026. Both are gated or hardware trusting rather tha (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-base)
- Monero [project]: Private-by-default cryptocurrency. Monero is the most used private cryptocurrency in existence and the field's most thoroughly battle-tested design. Ring signatures, stealth addresses and confidential transactions hide sender, receiver and amount on every transaction, with no optional transparent mode to thin the anonymity set. It ha (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/monero)
- COTI [chain]: Bubble live · garbled-circuit EVM in production. COTI's V2 mainnet has run a garbled-circuit confidential EVM since March 2025, the first on-chain implementation of the technique, built with Soda Labs. Contracts stay Solidity, privacy arrives as parameters rather than a rewrite, and selective disclosure is built in. The live surface includes COTI' (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-coti)
- NYM [project]: Mixnet for metadata privacy. Nym runs a mixnet that defends the layer encryption leaves exposed: not what you said, but who you talked to, when and how often. It adds cover traffic and timing obfuscation so that even a network-level observer watching every packet cannot reconstruct the pattern, and it ships a consumer VPN built (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/nym)
- Starknet [chain]: Native shielded tokens. Starknet is the clearest counterexample to the idea that ZK rollups are private by default. It built privacy deliberately: the STRK20 note-based framework reached mainnet in June 2026, shielding balances and hiding sender, receiver and amount for any ERC-20, with client-side STARK proofs and encrypt (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-starknet)
- Renegade [project, MPC-GC]: On-chain dark pool. Renegade runs a dark pool where orders are matched under multi-party computation, so that no one, including the operators, sees an order before it executes, with zero-knowledge proofs confirming the match was valid. This is the most cryptographically serious answer to trading privacy on chain: not h (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/renegade)
- Solana [chain]: Native confidential tokens. Token-2022 confidential transfers are live on mainnet, using ElGamal encryption with an optional auditor key. Amounts are hidden while addresses stay public. Arcium's MPC network and the Umbra wallet built on it add shielded transfers on top. The gap is adoption: proof generation still needs Rust ba (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-solana)
- Aptos [chain]: Native confidential assets. Aptos shipped its Confidential Asset framework and a confidential APT to mainnet in April 2026 after a near unanimous governance vote, built on twisted ElGamal encryption with governance-controlled auditor keys. Amounts are encrypted, sender and receiver addresses are not, so transaction-graph analy (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-aptos)
- Sui [chain]: Encryption and access control. Sui's Seal provides threshold encryption with on-chain access policies, and Nautilus adds confidential compute inside AWS Nitro enclaves, still on testnet. What Sui does not offer is confidential transfers. Its own privacy documentation describes encryption, access control and selective disclosure r (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-sui)
- semaphore [project, ZK]: Anonymous signalling protocol. Semaphore is the primitive a large part of this field is built on: prove you belong to a group and broadcast a signal, exactly once, without revealing which member you are. It is small, audited, well documented and reused everywhere from anonymous voting to whistleblowing tools, which is the highest (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/semaphore)
- NEAR [chain]: Confidential execution in TEEs. Confidential Intents launched in February 2026, executing cross-chain swaps inside trusted execution environments so trade details stay hidden from observers. The protection is hardware based rather than cryptographic, and it covers swap execution rather than account balances. Volume is modest again (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-near)
- Session [project]: Metadata-resistant messenger. Session is an encrypted messenger that needs no phone number and no email address, routing messages through an onion network so that even the servers cannot see who is talking to whom. Most secure messengers protect content while still collecting the social graph through phone-number registration, a (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/session)
- Avalanche [chain]: Encrypted token standard. Ava Labs publishes Encrypted ERC, a token standard combining zk-SNARKs with partially homomorphic encryption and client-side proving, usable on the C-Chain and on custom L1s. It is a standard rather than a protocol feature, so nothing is confidential unless an issuer adopts it, and public deployment (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-avalanche)
- BNB Chain [chain]: Native privacy on the roadmap. Native privacy is planned rather than present. BNB Chain's 2026 technical roadmap targets testnet by the end of 2026 and mainnet in early 2027, with selective disclosure for transfers and contract calls. Until then privacy comes from third parties, mainly Railgun's shielded pool and the newer Gh0st  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-bnb)
- Cosmos Hub [chain]: Privacy lives on neighbouring chains. The Hub itself has no privacy, and the 2026 stack roadmap still lists it as research. Confidentiality lives on separate chains reachable over IBC: Penumbra's shielded DEX, Namada's multi-asset shielded pool and Secret's TEE contracts. All three had a difficult 2026, with Namada's pool drained of rou (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-cosmos)
- Cardano [chain]: Privacy via the Midnight sidechain. Cardano's privacy answer is Midnight, a separate partner chain that reached federated mainnet in March 2026 with a dual ledger, ZK proofs and selective disclosure. It is not Cardano mainnet, and it is not yet permissionless: nodes are operated by a named federation while decentralization is phased i (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-cardano)
- Polkadot [chain]: Confidential compute only. Polkadot has no shielded transactions, and its privacy footprint is contracting rather than growing. Manta's ZK privacy parachain wound down when its slot expired in August 2026, and Phala left the ecosystem entirely in November 2025 to run its own Ethereum L2. Integritee's TEE-based confidential co (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-polkadot)
- Tron [chain]: Shielded standard never shipped. Shielded TRC-20 was specified back in 2020, using zk-SNARKs to hide addresses and amounts, and it never left the Nile testnet in any meaningful form. Tron moves enormous stablecoin volume across a fully transparent ledger, and its own quarterly reporting no longer covers the shielded standard at all (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-tron)
- Bitcoin [chain]: Coordination-based privacy only. Bitcoin has no confidential transactions. Privacy depends on coordination techniques such as CoinJoin, PayJoin and silent payments, and that layer took heavy legal damage: Samourai's founders were sentenced and zkSNACKs closed its coordinator, leaving smaller anonymity sets behind. Bitcoin Core stil (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-bitcoin)
- TON [chain]: No financial privacy today. TON has no shielded transactions. Catchain 2.0 sped up on-chain proof verification in April 2026, which enables future privacy work rather than delivering it. In practice the ecosystem offers a small Tornado-style mixer and Telegram's Cocoon network for confidential AI inference, which protects comp (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-ton)
- Monad [chain]: Third-party privacy pool. Monad launched in November 2025 as a transparent parallel EVM. Privacy arrived in June 2026 through Unlink, a third-party pool where balances are held encrypted and moved with ZK proofs. It is portable EVM infrastructure rather than anything chain specific, and it is still measured in weeks rather t (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-monad)
- Optimism [chain]: Vendor-gated privacy. Privacy on the OP Stack arrived in April 2026 through Sunnyside Labs' Privacy Boost, a hybrid of ZK proofs and trusted execution offering confidential transfers and sanctions screening. It runs on OP Mainnet for that vendor's customers rather than as a protocol default, and nothing privacy related s (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-optimism)
- zkSync Era [chain]: Privacy only on permissioned instances. Public zkSync Era has no confidentiality. Its ZK proofs serve scaling, and the Atlas upgrade is about throughput. The privacy option is Prividium, a licensed permissioned L2 whose data stays off the public chain while proofs settle on Ethereum, first deployed with Deutsche Bank. In other words, priv (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-zksync)
- Linea [chain]: No privacy live today. Linea's reputation for privacy is largely inherited from zkEVM branding and its Consensys enterprise heritage. Nothing shielded is live: the 2026 work is Type-1 zkEVM, a RISC-V pivot and sequencer decentralization, while the Status merge promises gasless ephemeral accounts rather than hidden amounts (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-linea)
- Celo [chain]: Enterprise pilots only. Celo became an OP Stack L2 in 2025, fully transparent at the base layer. Ligero's integration in July 2026 brought KYC-gated private payments aimed at payroll and treasury, and the older SocialConnect service still protects phone-number lookups rather than payments. Meanwhile roughly 16 million Mini (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-celo)
- Scroll [chain]: No privacy work. Scroll has no privacy features and no privacy roadmap, so confidentiality there means Ethereum's ordinary pseudonymity. The wider context is a chain under strain: total value locked is down sharply from its 2024 peak, a major protocol migrated away, and governance has been cutting scope through 2026 (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-scroll)
- Berachain [chain]: No privacy story. Berachain has no privacy features, no privacy partnerships and nothing privacy related on its 2026 roadmap. There is an architectural reason as well as a scheduling one: Proof of Liquidity depends on liquidity and emissions data being public, which makes confidentiality awkward to retrofit. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-berachain)
- XDC Network [chain]: Bubble live · no native privacy. XDC Network is an EVM-compatible layer 1 built around trade finance and tokenized real-world assets, running delegated proof of stake with fast finality and near-zero fees. It ships no native confidentiality: balances, counterparties and amounts are public, which is a hard blocker for the trade-fina (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/chain-xdc)
- PayPal [token]: Stablecoin issuer. PYUSD is the clearest example of privacy that exists on paper only. Solana's confidential transfer extension was initialized on the PYUSD mint at launch in 2024 and has never been switched on, so balances and amounts stay public. PayPal frames it as optionality pending regulatory clarity, which is e (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-paypal)
- JPMorgan [token]: Bank · deposit tokens and payments. The deepest privacy research programme among the banks. Project EPIC is an explicit proof of concept in JPMorgan's Kinexys sandbox combining zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption with several vendors. Serious work, not yet production. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-jpmorgan)
- HSBC [token]: Bank · tokenized deposits. HSBC is among the seventeen banks in SWIFT's shared ledger pilot for tokenized deposits, where privacy and data localisation are named as open challenges and zero-knowledge proofs are cited as a possible answer rather than a shipped component. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-hsbc)
- Ripple [token]: Payments and stablecoin issuer. Ripple Research published a Confidential MPT design in March 2026, using EC-ElGamal encrypted balances with zero-knowledge proofs to hide amounts while keeping sender, receiver and total supply auditable. It is a proposed amendment rather than a live feature, and RLUSD is transparent today. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-ripple)
- Mastercard [token]: Payments network. Mastercard's Multi-Token Network is a permissioned environment for tokenized deposits, and its Verifiable Intent work uses selective disclosure so each party sees only what it needs. Both are identity and data-minimization layers rather than confidential amounts or balances on chain. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-mastercard)
- Uniswap [token]: Decentralized exchange. Every swap, amount and liquidity position on Uniswap is public. A third-party proposal to add execution privacy through v4 hooks reached technical review in mid 2026 with no prototype or deployment, and the private Uniswap experiences people cite are all external wrappers. Order flow protection is n (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-uniswap)
- Tokeny [token]: Tokenization platform · ERC-3643. Tokeny created the permissioned token standard behind much of institutional RWA issuance, and its identity layer stores hashes rather than personal data. Balances and transfers stay fully public, which the company itself calls the last blocker for open finance, saying it is working with privacy prov (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-tokeny)
- Backed Finance [token]: Tokenized equities. Backed mints its tokenized stocks on Solana with confidential balances initialized but switched off, the same pattern as PYUSD. The capability is permanently baked into the token and unused, while compliance runs through transfer hooks and a permanent delegate instead. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-backed)
- Anchorage Digital [token]: Custody · federally chartered bank. Anchorage's researchers publish on zero-knowledge techniques, and its venture arm explicitly asks founders for systems that prove KYC or reserve adequacy without exposing metadata. That is research and investment interest; the custody product has no confidential transfer capability. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-anchorage)
- Ethena [token]: Synthetic dollar protocol. USDe is a plain ERC-20 with fully transparent balances and no public confidentiality work. The documentation covers whitelist gating for mint and redeem, and openly describes collecting on-chain data. For a product whose whole mechanism is a hedged position, public flows are strategy leakage. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-ethena)
- Agora [token]: White-label stablecoin issuer. Agora issues institutional digital dollars across several chains with no privacy features, no confidential transfer extension and no public statements on the topic. The product story is reserves, yield sharing and interoperability. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-agora)
- First Digital [token]: Stablecoin issuer. FDUSD moves significant volume with nothing public on transaction privacy. The messaging is reserves, attestations and transparency, and the only confidentiality language in its materials concerns corporate data protection rather than on-chain amounts. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-firstdigital)
- BlackRock [token]: Asset manager · tokenized fund. BUIDL is the most cited example of the transparency problem in tokenized funds. Every mint, transfer, redemption and holder balance is readable on a block explorer, and the allowlist that gates participation is access control rather than confidentiality. Coverage through 2026 has treated this openne (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-blackrock)
- Fidelity [token]: Asset manager · tokenized fund. Fidelity's tokenized treasury fund launched on public Ethereum in 2025 with balances visible on chain, and no privacy technology, partnership or public statement has followed. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-fidelity)
- WisdomTree [token]: Asset manager · tokenized funds. WisdomTree's tokenized funds allow peer to peer transfers between onboarded wallets while the transfer agent holds the official register. That is gating and off-chain bookkeeping rather than confidentiality: what happens on chain remains visible. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-wisdomtree)
- Hamilton Lane [token]: Asset manager · private markets. Hamilton Lane's tokenized credit funds run across several public chains, and recent work has increased visibility rather than reduced it, extending composability and multichain reach. No privacy work is public. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-hamiltonlane)
- Apollo [token]: Asset manager · private credit. Apollo's tokenized private credit fund trades on public infrastructure with no privacy feature or public statement on confidentiality, so allocations and movements are observable by anyone who cares to watch. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-apollo)
- Securitize [token]: Tokenization platform · transfer agent. The largest tokenization platform solves confidentiality by keeping the holder register off chain at the transfer agent while on-chain tokens use permissioned allowlists. It works, but it means the register's privacy depends on a database rather than on cryptography, and everything that does happen  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-securitize)
- Aave [token]: Onchain lending. Balances, health factors and liquidation thresholds are public on Aave, which is precisely the data that gets positions hunted. Privacy work has been limited to trials of private governance voting, and shielded deposits exist only through third-party wrappers. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-aave)
- Curve [token]: Stableswap exchange. No privacy product, research track or governance proposal on confidential swaps. Curve's pools, trades and positions are fully public, and its most famous incident involved a founder's visible position being liquidated as the market watched. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-curve)
- Lido [token]: Liquid staking. Stake sizes, rewards and vault activity are all public, and Lido's 2026 work centres on modularity and vaults rather than confidentiality. For institutions staking at scale, the position is a public disclosure. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-lido)
- Centrifuge [token]: Tokenization platform · credit. Centrifuge's privacy language refers to the off-chain exchange of loan documents on its older chain rather than transaction confidentiality. Since the 2025 migration to its EVM-native V3, vaults, net asset values and holders are visible to whitelisted wallets rather than fully public, and the roadma (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-centrifuge)
- Superstate [token]: Tokenized funds and equities. Superstate keeps its share register off chain and markets real-time shareholder visibility to issuers, which is the opposite of holder confidentiality. No zero-knowledge, FHE or enclave work has been published. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-superstate)
- Swarm Markets [token]: Regulated DeFi venue. Swarm's private offers gate who can see an order rather than encrypting anything, so settlement, amounts and addresses remain public on chain with KYC applied at the perimeter. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-swarm)
- Brickken [token]: Tokenization platform · SMEs. Brickken's material covers onboarding, dividend distribution and information security rather than on-chain confidentiality. Its privacy commitments concern data handling, not what the ledger publishes about issuers and holders. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/tok-brickken)

## Privacy and the rulebook: what the regulation actually says

The regulation map (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation) reads the
instruments themselves rather than summaries of them. The recurring finding:
nearly every rule that looks like a demand for transparency binds a regulated
institution to know and disclose specific facts to specific parties, not to
publish those facts to the world - which is precisely the shape of disclosure
Bubble's on-chain access list provides.

- The travel rule binds institutions, not ledgers [Global]: The rule everyone assumes ends on-chain confidentiality. The most common objection to confidential transfers is that the travel rule forbids them. Read the standard and it does not. Recommendation 16 obliges the institution to obtain, hold and transmit originator and beneficiary details to the counterparty institution. Nothing requires that data to be written into the transaction, and in practice it never is: compliant systems move an IVMS101 payload ov (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-travel-rule)
- Erasure against an append-only ledger [Global]: The one collision with no clean answer yet. This is the collision that does not dissolve on closer reading. European regulators treat a public key as personal data wherever it can identify someone, and are explicit that encryption does not take data outside the rules, nor does hashing. Against that sits an append-only ledger. The EDPB's answer is architectural rather than doctrinal: keep personal data off chain, and design so that on-chain  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-erasure)
- Selective disclosure as a compliance primitive [Global]: Bilateral disclosure versus publishing to everyone. Supervisory access, external audit and suspicious activity reporting are all bilateral disclosures to a named party under a legal duty. Public-ledger transparency is something else entirely: universal, unauthorised disclosure to everyone, permanently. No other part of the financial system is asked for the second in order to satisfy the first. Viewing keys are the oldest worked example, letting a h (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-viewing-keys)
- Proving where funds did not come from [Global]: Association sets, and the Tornado Cash aftermath. The 2023 Privacy Pools paper made a design argument that has held up: instead of hiding everything, let a depositor prove in zero knowledge that their withdrawal belongs to a chosen set of deposits, or does not belong to a flagged one. Honest users dissociate from illicit funds without revealing which deposit is theirs, and the policy judgement moves to an identifiable, contestable curator rather  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-privacy-pools)
- Central banks are building confidentiality themselves [Global]: What the people writing the rules do when they design money. The strongest evidence that public authorities do not equate confidentiality with wrongdoing is that they keep building it. The BIS Innovation Hub's Tourbillon prototypes, developed with the Swiss National Bank, were designed around payer anonymity: a consumer pays without revealing personal information to the merchant, to the banks or to the central bank, while the payee remains identified to the (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-central-banks-build-privacy)
- Why regulated institutions cannot use a transparent ledger [Global]: The demand side, which is usually left out of the debate. The compliance debate usually asks whether institutions are permitted to use confidentiality. The prior question is whether they can function without it. An institution operating on a fully transparent ledger publishes its order flow, inviting anyone to trade ahead of it; its counterparty set and exposures; its treasury positions; its payroll; and its clients' commercial terms. Where counterpartie (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-institutions-need-it)
- Sanctions screening on a confidential ledger [Global]: The genuinely open problem. Worth stating plainly rather than glossing: this is the weakest part of the case for confidential ledgers. Sanctions liability under the US regime attaches without knowledge or intent, so any design that leaves a regulated intermediary unable to determine whether it dealt with a designated party hands that intermediary unmanaged legal risk. That mechanism, more than any explicit prohibition, is wh (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-sanctions-screening)
- Anonymity is not the same thing as confidentiality [Global]: Why two privacy designs get treated differently. Regulators keep drawing a line that the debate tends to flatten. What the instruments actually turn on is who holds the disclosure lever, not how strong the cryptography is. A protocol with mandatory, protocol-level anonymity leaves a regulated intermediary with no compliant posture at all, because it cannot produce records it has no mechanism to obtain. A design with encrypted state and a disclos (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/why-programmable-confidentiality)
- MiCA [Europe, European Union · ESMA]: Market licensing · Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. MiCA carries exactly one operative anonymity rule, and it is narrower than its reputation. Article 76(3) requires a trading platform's operating rules to prevent admission of crypto-assets with an inbuilt anonymisation function, unless the platform can identify the holders and their transaction history. It binds trading venues only: custody, transfer, exchange and execution are untouched, no coin  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-mica)
- FATF [Global, Financial Action Task Force]: The source of almost every travel rule on earth. Nothing else in this section has as much reach. FATF sets standards rather than law, but the mutual evaluation process and the grey list make adoption close to compulsory, which is why the same travel rule appears in every jurisdiction below. Recommendation 15 brought virtual assets into scope in 2018, and its interpretive note carries the transfer threshold. The July 2026 targeted update found pe (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-fatf)
- EU Transfer of Funds Regulation [Europe, European Union · EBA]: Travel rule · Regulation (EU) 2023/1113. This, not the privacy-coin headline, is what actually ends unattributed transfers at the EU perimeter. The recast travel rule attaches originator and beneficiary name, address and account identifier to every crypto transfer between providers, with no de minimis threshold at all, where the fiat regime it recasts has one. Above EUR 1,000 to or from a self-hosted address, the provider must take adequ (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-eu-travel-rule)
- GENIUS Act [Americas, US Congress · Treasury · FinCEN · OFAC]: Stablecoins · censorability as a licensing precondition. The most restrictive thing in current US law on this subject, and it is architectural rather than procedural. A payment stablecoin may only be issued if the issuer has the technological capability to comply with any lawful order, and a lawful order is defined as one requiring it to seize, freeze, burn or prevent transfer. In other words the ability to censor is a precondition of the licence, desig (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-genius-act)
- EU AMLR Article 79 [Europe, European Union · AMLA · national FIUs]: Anti-money laundering · Regulation (EU) 2024/1624. Reported almost everywhere as an EU ban on privacy coins from 1 July 2027. Two things are wrong with that. The date is 10 July 2027, when the AMLR begins to apply. And the prohibition binds obliged entities, not people: banks, financial institutions and licensed crypto providers may not keep anonymous accounts, or accounts that anonymise the holder or obfuscate transactions including through anony (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-eu-amlr)
- Monetary Authority of Singapore [Asia-Pacific, MAS]: The regulator that priced the risk instead of banning it. Worth reading closely because it is the road not taken elsewhere. Faced with the same assets that Dubai and Malaysia prohibited outright, Singapore's regulator chose enhanced obligations instead, and said so in Parliament: privacy coins, privacy wallets and mixers are to be risk-assessed and monitored, not barred. Firms are told to pay special attention to technologies that favour anonymity, which (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-mas)
- VARA [Middle East & Africa, Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority]: The most explicit prohibition in any rulebook. Most regimes reach anonymity-enhanced assets sideways, through listing criteria, liquidity gates or traceability tests. Dubai's regulator simply writes it down: issuance of such assets, and every activity related to them, is prohibited in the Emirate. That makes VARA the clearest counterexample to the pattern running through this section, and it is quoted far beyond the UAE precisely because so fe (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-vara)
- OFAC and Van Loon [Americas, US Treasury · Office of Foreign Assets Control]: Sanctions · where the law found a limit. The most severe action ever taken by a government against privacy tooling, followed by the most significant legal retreat from one. Sanctioning Tornado Cash in 2022 meant that touching a set of immutable contracts became a strict-liability violation, with no intent requirement. The Fifth Circuit held that unlawful in November 2024 on a narrow but durable ground: property under the statute means so (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-ofac)
- FinCEN [Americas, US Treasury · Financial Crimes Enforcement Network]: Bank Secrecy Act · the deepest US constraint. Registration, identity verification and suspicious activity reporting for anyone acting as a money transmitter in crypto all originate here, and none of that has loosened. What has changed is the perimeter around it. The two most aggressive proposals aimed at self-custody were both withdrawn: the 2020 unhosted wallet rule in 2024, and the plan to lower the cross-border transfer threshold to USD 25 (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-fincen)
- Hong Kong SFC [Asia-Pacific, Securities and Futures Commission]: Retail exclusion achieved without naming anonymity. A useful case study in how a market gets closed without a rule that mentions the thing being closed out. The Hong Kong regime bars retail access to any asset that is not an eligible large-cap virtual asset, defined by presence in two acceptable indices from separate providers. Monero and Zcash fail that liquidity test, so they never reach retail investors, and yet the guidelines contain no referen (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-hk-sfc)
- NYDFS [Americas, New York State Department of Financial Services]: The most privacy-restrictive US regulator, state or federal. Where federal policy has softened around non-custodial software, New York has not moved at all. Its licensees must run blockchain analytics across onboarding, monitoring and sanctions screening, tracing the flow of funds through the chain and treating anything processed through a mixer as a monitored typology. The listing guidance is the most explicit anti-anonymity language from any US regulator: (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-nydfs)
- Japan FSA and JVCEA [Asia-Pacific, Financial Services Agency · Japan Virtual and Crypto assets Exchange Association]: A traceability test, applied by the industry body. Japan is the clearest example of a rule written against untraceability rather than against named assets, and of that rule being applied by an industry body rather than a regulator. The self-regulatory handling rules have barred members since 2018 from dealing in any asset whose transfer records cannot be traced or are markedly difficult to trace, which is why the well-known privacy assets have bee (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-japan-fsa)
- IRS broker reporting [Americas, US Internal Revenue Service]: Tax · live at the custodial perimeter, dead beyond it. The clearest illustration of the US perimeter split. Custodial reporting arrived exactly as planned and is now in its first year of cost-basis reporting, which means identity, proceeds and acquisition history all flow to the tax authority for anyone using an intermediary. The attempt to extend the same duty to non-custodial software went the other way entirely: Congress nullified the DeFi broker r (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-irs-broker-reporting)
- OECD CARF [Global, OECD · Global Forum]: Tax reporting · the fastest-moving instrument in this section. The quiet instrument that will do the most to end pseudonymity at the intermediary layer, and it arrives before the AML rules do. Providers must collect self-certifications of identity and tax residence and report exchanges and transfers, including transfers to unhosted wallets, with no minimum on either. First exchanges begin in 2027 on 2026 data across 46 jurisdictions. The privacy architecture  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-oecd-carf)
- DFSA and ADGM FSRA [Middle East & Africa, Dubai Financial Services Authority · Abu Dhabi Global Market]: The regulators that went after the tools, not just the assets. The two financial free zones inside the UAE regulate separately from Dubai's virtual assets authority, and they went a step further than it did. Where most instruments in this section reach assets, the DIFC rulebook reaches the tool: it bars the use of a privacy device, meaning mixers and tumblers, in or from the zone. Abu Dhabi's regulator put the prohibition on privacy tokens into its rules in J (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-uae-free-zones)
- Basel Committee, SCO60 [Global, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision]: Bank capital · the sharpest traceability rule anywhere. The single most privacy-restrictive sentence in global financial regulation is probably here. To qualify for the favourable capital treatment, a network must be well-defined such that all transactions and participants are traceable. A chain that obscures the transaction graph cannot satisfy it. Worth being precise about what this does and does not mean: it binds banks, not protocols, and sets a ca (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-basel-sco60)
- Financial Stability Board [Global, FSB]: Financial stability · and explicitly not the privacy body. Included here mainly to correct a common misattribution. The FSB coordinates national authorities on financial stability, and its 2023 framework is frequently cited in arguments about on-chain surveillance, but it expressly scopes both AML/CFT and data privacy out of its coverage, and its own peer review confirms that anti-money-laundering work sits outside its mandate. What it does ask for is aut (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-fsb)
- IOSCO [Global, International Organization of Securities Commissions]: Securities regulation · the one body that calls transparency a risk. IOSCO pulls in both directions, which makes it more interesting than most. Its DeFi work treats pseudonymity as an obstacle, citing participants who use multiple addresses to obfuscate activity, and answers by identifying responsible persons. But its November 2025 tokenisation report is the only text from a financial standard-setter that names over-transparency as a risk in its own right. It recor (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-iosco)
- GDPR [Europe, European Union · national data protection authorities]: Data protection · Regulation (EU) 2016/679. The law most often described as a problem for blockchain is also the strongest European argument for building with privacy technology. Article 25 requires data protection by design and by default, and Article 5(1)(c) requires minimisation, which is a legal instruction to publish less, not more. The friction is real in two places: Article 17 erasure against an append-only ledger, and whether a wall (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-gdpr)
- EDPB blockchain guidelines [Europe, European Data Protection Board]: Data protection guidance · Guidelines 02/2025. The reference text on how European data protection law lands on a ledger, final since 7 July 2026. Its positions are demanding: a public key is personal data whenever it can be associated with an identifiable person, encrypted or hashed on-chain data is not automatically outside GDPR, and unsalted hashes are treated as insufficient on a public chain. On erasure the Board offers architecture rather (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-edpb-blockchain)
- BIS Innovation Hub [Global, Bank for International Settlements]: Central bank prototypes that build privacy on purpose. If you want evidence that the institutions writing the rules do not equate confidentiality with crime, this is where to look. Tourbillon concluded that it is feasible to implement a CBDC providing payer anonymity while combating illicit transactions, with the consumer disclosing nothing to the merchant, the banks or the central bank, and compliance handled at the merchant's bank instead. Agorá goe (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-bis-innovation-hub)
- Digital euro [Europe, European Central Bank · co-legislators]: Central bank digital currency · COM(2023) 369. A central bank designing confidentiality into money on purpose is the most direct evidence that European regulators do not equate privacy with illegality. The design is two-tier. Online payments are pseudonymous to the Eurosystem, with intermediaries rather than the ECB holding identity. Offline payments are meant to be cash-like: the data stays between payer and payee, with no intermediary or cen (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-digital-euro)
- US Treasury and the Working Group [Americas, US Treasury · President's Working Group on Digital Asset Markets]: The first federal endorsement of privacy technology. The most significant shift in this section, and the one most easily overstated. Official US government documents now treat privacy-preserving technology as part of the compliance toolkit rather than an obstacle to it. The 2025 Working Group report prioritises privacy and civil liberties, encourages privacy-preserving digital identity for customer verification, and concedes the technical and legal  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-us-treasury-pwg)
- eIDAS 2 and the EU Digital Identity Wallet [Europe, European Commission · member states]: Digital identity · Regulation (EU) 2024/1183. The clearest counterexample to the idea that regulators are uniformly against cryptographic privacy: here EU law names the technology and requires it. Recital 14 says member states should integrate privacy-preserving technologies such as zero knowledge proof, so a relying party can validate that a statement is true without seeing the data behind it. Recital 32 requires providers to be unable to se (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-eidas2)
- CJEU on identifiability [Europe, Court of Justice of the European Union]: Case law · is a wallet address personal data. Whether a blockchain address is personal data is not a settled question, and the two European institutions answering it are drifting apart. The Court's line is contextual. Breyer held in 2016 that data are personal to a party who has means reasonably likely to be used to identify the person, and in September 2025 the Court sharpened this considerably: the same pseudonymised dataset can be personal (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-cjeu-identifiability)
- The third-party doctrine [Americas, US federal courts]: Why chain analysis needs no warrant. Any account of US financial privacy that stops at statutes misses the layer that actually decides things. Because records handed to a third party carry no constitutional protection, chain analysis combined with a subpoena to the exchange is a lawful warrantless route from an address to a name. The Fifth Circuit blessed exactly that sequence in 2020, noting that agents used a commercial clustering  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-third-party-doctrine)
- APG [Asia-Pacific, Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering]: How the global standards actually reach Asia. Standards do not travel by themselves, and this is the machinery that moves them across Asia. The regional body assesses its 41 members against the FATF Recommendations, and it is those assessments, rather than any direct FATF instruction, that turn the travel rule and the virtual asset provider regime into domestic law across the region. Read the jurisdiction entries for Asia in this section and  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-apg)
- MENAFATF [Middle East & Africa, Middle East and North Africa Financial Action Task Force]: The same machinery, across the Gulf and North Africa. The regional counterpart to the Asian body, and the reason the Gulf entries in this section rhyme with one another. Its members include every UAE and Gulf jurisdiction covered here, along with Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, and its evaluations are the route by which the global standards become national obligations. It is worth knowing about when reading the Gulf rulebooks, because the striki (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-menafatf)
- Convention 108+ [Global, Council of Europe]: The only binding international data protection treaty. The counterweight instrument, and the one that has not arrived. Convention 108+ modernises the only binding international data protection treaty open to states outside Europe, adding minimisation, proportionality, privacy by design, breach notification and a right not to be subject to decisions taken solely by automated processing. Every one of those bears directly on transaction monitoring and bl (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-convention-108)
- Egmont Group [Global, Network of national Financial Intelligence Units]: How financial intelligence crosses borders. Rarely discussed in privacy debates about crypto, and structurally one of the more significant bodies in this section. The Egmont Group is not a rule-maker and runs no investigations; it operates the closed network over which 182 national financial intelligence units exchange information about people and transactions. What makes it matter is the channel itself. Because the material is intelligence (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-egmont)
- ISO and IEC standards [Global, ISO/TC 307 · ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27]: The standards bodies that specify privacy instead of policing it. Set this against the financial standard-setters and the contrast is sharp. In February 2026 ISO and IEC published guidelines on privacy preservation based on zero-knowledge proofs, meaning there is now an international standard for deploying the primitive that the anti-money-laundering bodies do not mention at all. FATF's July 2026 report on information sharing identifies data protection law as th (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-iso)
- NIST [Global, US National Institute of Standards and Technology]: The vocabulary that makes privacy claims testable. A national agency rather than a global one, included because its output gets adopted internationally as reference material and because it does something no financial regulator has. NIST turns privacy claims into things a supervisor can check. SP 800-226 gives an evaluation method for differential privacy guarantees and names the implementation hazards that make a formally correct deployment leak a (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-nist)
- EU Data Act, Article 36 [Europe, European Commission]: Smart contract requirements · Regulation (EU) 2023/2854. A useful case of a rule written for one context landing awkwardly on another. Article 36 sets essential requirements for smart contracts used to execute data-sharing agreements, including robustness, access control and, the contested one, safe termination and interruption. Read broadly, a mandatory kill switch cannot coexist with an immutable, non-upgradeable contract. Read as drafted, it addresse (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/reg-eu-data-act)
- Australia [Asia-Pacific, AUSTRAC · ASIC · OAIC]: Travel rule without a threshold, no coin ban. Australia constrains confidentiality through anti-money-laundering law and not through any coin-specific rule. No Australian instrument prohibits anonymity-enhancing assets; AUSTRAC lists privacy coins, tumblers and mixers among its suspicious activity indicators, and delistings to date have been commercial and bank-driven rather than mandated. The travel rule that starts applying to virtual asset (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-australia)
- Thailand [Asia-Pacific, SEC Thailand · Bank of Thailand · AMLO · PDPC]: Closed by whitelist, not by prohibition. Thailand is the jurisdiction most often cited as having banned privacy coins, and the claim does not survive reading the instrument. Notification No. Kor Thor. 18/2564 prohibits four categories (meme tokens, fan tokens, NFTs and exchange-issued tokens) and stops there. Anonymity is never mentioned. The exclusion is real but it works through market architecture instead: exchanges may list only what (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-thailand)
- India [Asia-Pacific, FIU-IND · RBI · CBDT · Data Protection Board]: No crypto statute, regulated through AML and tax. India has no bespoke crypto statute and regulates the sector through anti-money-laundering law and tax instead. Providers became reporting entities under the PMLA in March 2023, and FIU-IND has enforced that perimeter hard against offshore exchanges, issuing show-cause notices to nine of them in December 2023 and following with penalties and URL blocking. We found no Indian instrument restricting  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-india)
- Singapore [Asia-Pacific, MAS · PDPC]: Regulates anonymity by risk assessment, not prohibition. The one jurisdiction in this section that declined to exclude anonymity-enhancing assets and chose to price the risk instead. MAS set the position in Parliament in October 2022: privacy coins, privacy wallets and mixers attract enhanced obligations rather than prohibition. The notice requires providers to risk-assess such tokens before dealing and to pay special attention to technologies favouring (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-singapore)
- Hong Kong SAR [Asia-Pacific, SFC · HKMA · Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data]: Retail exclusion by liquidity gate, not by anonymity rule. A good illustration of exclusion happening without a rule that mentions the thing being excluded. Hong Kong's platform guidelines say nothing about privacy coins, anonymity or mixers anywhere in the text. What they require is that any token offered to retail clients be an eligible large-cap virtual asset, present in at least two acceptable indices from two different providers. Monero and Zcash fai (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-hong-kong)
- Taiwan [Asia-Pacific, Financial Supervisory Commission]: The travel rule that has never come into force. Two things commonly reported about Taiwan are wrong. The VASP Act is not pending; it passed its third reading on 30 June 2026, though commencement still has to be designated and licensing runs on a 21-month tail after that. And the travel rule, often described as operative with an NT$30,000 threshold, has never been in force at all. The provision has carried a deferred effective date since 2021, a (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-taiwan)
- South Korea [Asia-Pacific, FSC · FSS · KoFIU · PIPC]: Identity-maximalist, and exporting the model. The most identity-maximalist regime covered here, and the only one actively trying to export it. Untraceable assets have been barred from Korean platforms since 2021, layered on top of a real-name bank account requirement that makes the won on-ramp a chokepoint. The August 2026 amendments go further than anything else in this section: the travel rule threshold is abolished outright so it applies t (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-south-korea)
- Japan [Asia-Pacific, FSA · JVCEA · Personal Information Protection Commission]: Untraceability barred by self-regulation, now moving into ordinance. Japan shows the pattern in this section at its clearest: the rule is written against untraceability, never against named assets. The industry body's handling rules have barred members since 2018 from dealing in any crypto asset whose transfer records cannot be traced or are markedly difficult to trace, which is why Monero, Zcash and Dash have been absent from Japanese venues for years without any  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-japan)
- China [Asia-Pacific, People's Bank of China · CSRC · NFRA · SAFE]: Crypto banned, and a state currency designed for anonymity. Two things are true here at once, and most coverage reports only the first. Decentralised crypto is prohibited, and the prohibition was renewed in February 2026 by an eight-agency notice that replaced the 2021 one and extended the perimeter to offshore RMB-pegged stablecoins and domestic tokenisation of real-world assets. Then the same central bank built a retail currency around deliberate anonymi (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-china)
- Kazakhstan [Asia-Pacific, National Bank of Kazakhstan · ARDFM · AFSA in the AIFC]: Surveillance tooling required of operators, not run by the state. Worth correcting a claim that circulates about Kazakhstan: the law does not establish a state system watching digital asset transactions. It requires each licensed operator to run its own analysis and control system, built to the National Bank's specification, which is a mandated chain-analytics obligation rather than centralised surveillance. The teeth are in the identification rule. Operators mu (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-kazakhstan)
- Malaysia [Asia-Pacific, Securities Commission Malaysia]: A categorical ban written by definition, not by coin name. The most explicit categorical ban in the Asia-Pacific set, and notable for how it is drafted. Malaysia does not list forbidden coins. It prohibits exchange operators from permitting a privacy token to be offered for trading, then defines a privacy token by purpose: one intended to enhance user anonymity and transaction confidentiality. That catches the technique wherever it appears, including desi (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-malaysia)
- Philippines [Asia-Pacific, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas · SEC]: Every transfer is a cross-border wire, inside a closed chain. Read in full, the circular contains no provision on privacy coins, mixers or tumblers, and no express treatment of self-hosted wallets. What makes the Philippines restrictive in practice is structural instead. Every virtual asset transfer is treated as a cross-border wire transfer, so the travel rule applies to flows other regimes would consider domestic, and providers may deal only inside what th (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-philippines)
- Bangladesh [Asia-Pacific, Bangladesh Bank]: Barred through exchange control, not a crypto law. Bangladesh is a useful reminder that a country does not need a crypto statute to prohibit crypto. The bar here runs through exchange control: because virtual currencies are not currency within the meaning of the 1947 foreign exchange law, dealing in them is not an approved transaction, and the central bank's 2022 circular states plainly that such transactions and any facilitation of them are not p (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-bangladesh)
- United States [Americas, Treasury · FinCEN · OFAC · SEC · CFTC · IRS · state regulators]: Split by perimeter, not by ideology. The US moved in both directions at once between 2024 and 2026, and the dividing line is custody rather than politics. Where an intermediary holds customer assets, identity obligations expanded: broker reporting went live on schedule, the travel rule is unchanged, and stablecoin issuers must now be able to freeze and seize. Where software is non-custodial, the direction reversed: the unhosted walle (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-united-states)
- Sri Lanka [Asia-Pacific, Central Bank of Sri Lanka · Financial Intelligence Unit]: Unregulated rather than prohibited. Sri Lanka occupies the position a lot of countries were in five years ago and few still are: crypto is neither licensed nor forbidden. The central bank has said it has authorised nobody to operate schemes involving virtual currencies and approved no token offering, and has warned about the risks, but it has not prohibited holding or trading. That leaves no privacy position to describe, because the (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-sri-lanka)
- United Kingdom [Europe, FCA · Bank of England · Information Commissioner]: Risk-based, with an explicit central bank no-access pledge. The UK has built a full regulatory perimeter without reaching for a single prohibition on privacy technology. There is no ban on anonymity-enhancing assets and no bar on transfers to unhosted wallets; firms are expected to document a risk-based approach, and transfers into jurisdictions that have not implemented the travel rule call for enhanced assessment rather than refusal. Two things are worth (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-united-kingdom)
- Switzerland [Europe, FINMA · Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner]: Crypto-friendly and strict on anonymity at once. A useful corrective to the assumption that a crypto-friendly jurisdiction is permissive about anonymity. The two are unrelated, and Switzerland proves it. Nothing in Swiss law bans privacy coins, and the regulator treats anonymity as a risk factor rather than a prohibited property. But since 2019 supervised institutions have only been able to move tokens to an external wallet where that wallet bel (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-switzerland)
- Turkey [Europe, Capital Markets Board · MASAK · KVKK]: Caps, delays and a compelled purpose description. Turkey reaches the same destination as an anonymity ban without ever writing one. No primary instrument prohibiting anonymity-enhancing tokens was found. What exists instead is a stack of operational controls that make routine confidentiality impractical at licensed venues: value caps on transfers, doubled only if the full travel rule dataset is collected, a mandatory waiting period before withdra (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-turkey)
- Norway [Europe, Finanstilsynet · Norges Bank · Datatilsynet]: MiCA via the EEA, with a privacy-innovation sandbox. Norway took the EU rulebook through the EEA route and enforced it promptly, closing its transition window in July 2026 with providers told to wind down. That means the zero-threshold travel rule applies here as it does inside the union. The counterweight is unusual and worth knowing about: the Norwegian data protection authority has run a regulatory sandbox for privacy-enhancing innovation since 2 (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-norway)
- Ukraine [Europe, NSSMC · National Bank of Ukraine · Ombudsman]: The law that passed and never commenced. An unusual case: the virtual assets law passed in February 2022 is recorded in the official register as never having entered into force. With no operative licensing regime, there is no in-force restriction on anonymity-enhancing assets and no constraint on unhosted wallets, not as a policy choice, but because the machinery was never switched on. A MiCA-based replacement passed first reading in 202 (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-ukraine)
- Georgia [Europe, National Bank of Georgia · State Audit Office]: The one place where privacy oversight went backwards. Across every jurisdiction surveyed for this section, institutional privacy oversight was either strengthening or holding steady. Georgia is the exception. Its independent data protection authority was liquidated in March 2026 and the function folded into the State Audit Office, which removes the separation that made the supervisor independent in the first place. On the financial side the picture i (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-georgia)
- Russia [Europe, Bank of Russia · Federal Tax Service · Rosfinmonitoring]: Wallet addresses reported to the state by statute. Russia has the most direct on-chain deanonymisation mandate found anywhere in this section. Miners must report the address identifier itself, mining pool included, to the tax authority, which passes it to the financial intelligence body and the central bank without any suspicion trigger. That is wallet-address disclosure written into statute rather than inferred from analytics. The digital rouble  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-russia)
- Israel [Middle East & Africa, ISA · Capital Market Authority · IMPA · Privacy Protection Authority]: Light on-chain, heavy on data protection. Israel splits cleanly along the axis this whole section turns on. On chain, the constraint is light: no instrument restricts anonymity-enhancing assets or transfers to self-hosted wallets, and those questions fall under ordinary anti-money-laundering supervision rather than any dedicated rule. Off chain, the regime got considerably heavier a year ago. Amendment 13 to the Protection of Privacy Law  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-israel)
- United Arab Emirates [Middle East & Africa, VARA · DFSA · ADGM FSRA · CBUAE]: The most explicit prohibition anywhere in this section. If you want the counterexample to the pattern running through this section, it is here. Almost everywhere else, exclusion happens through listing rules, whitelists or traceability tests that never mention anonymity. Dubai's regulator simply writes it down: issuance of anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies, and every activity related to them, is prohibited in the Emirate. The financial free zones go  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-uae)
- Kenya [Middle East & Africa, Capital Markets Authority · Central Bank of Kenya · Data Protection Commissioner]: The ban written into primary legislation, not a rulebook. Most prohibitions in this section live in rulebooks that a regulator can amend without going back to a legislature. Kenya's does not. The 2025 Act puts the restriction in primary law: a service provider may not undertake mixer or tumbler services, or anonymity-enhancing services, with the latter defined broadly enough to reach any transaction whose effect or intention is to conceal information. Br (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-kenya)
- Ghana [Middle East & Africa, Bank of Ghana · SEC · Financial Intelligence Centre]: The regulator that put self-custody in writing. Worth citing well beyond Ghana, because a central bank stated plainly in writing what most regimes leave to inference. Its FAQ says that neither the regulatory authorities nor the government will control private wallets or individual transactions, and that the law regulates service providers rather than personal ownership of digital assets. That is the custodial-perimeter principle running through (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-ghana)
- South Africa [Middle East & Africa, FSCA · Financial Intelligence Centre · Information Regulator]: A travel rule that starts at any value above zero. The most precisely drafted travel rule in this section, and the one that leaves least room. Where other regimes debate where to set a minimum, South Africa defined a qualifying transfer as any crypto asset transfer above zero, then used its R5,000 line to reduce how much data is required rather than whether the rule applies at all. Providers must refuse to execute where they cannot comply. Self-cu (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-south-africa)
- Bahrain [Middle East & Africa, Central Bank of Bahrain · Personal Data Protection Authority]: A listing test written against effects, not asset names. Bahrain never names a coin, and its rule is broader for it. Licensees may not list assets that facilitate, or may facilitate, obfuscation or concealment of a client or counterparty's identity, and the phrase may facilitate does a great deal of work, since it reaches capability rather than demonstrated use. The second limb is arguably more consequential: a licensee may only list assets it actually  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-bahrain)
- Qatar [Middle East & Africa, QFC Regulatory Authority · Qatar Central Bank]: Exclusion by perimeter rather than prohibition. Qatar reaches exclusion without ever writing a prohibition on anonymity, because its perimeter is drawn as a positive list. Only permitted tokens may be issued or traded: assets anchored to a verified real-world asset or legal right, passing a defined validation and tokenisation process. Cryptocurrencies and stablecoins are outside that definition entirely, so anonymity-enhancing assets never come (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-qatar)
- Nigeria [Middle East & Africa, SEC · Central Bank of Nigeria · Data Protection Commission]: Securities-first, with banking access restored. Nigeria took the securities route rather than building a bespoke crypto statute, bringing digital assets under the securities regulator through the 2025 Act while the 2022 rules continue to carry the operational detail. The more consequential shift for anyone actually operating there was the central bank reversing its 2021 banking restriction in December 2023, which restored the account access tha (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-nigeria)
- Seychelles [Middle East & Africa, Financial Services Authority]: No anonymity rule, but the offshore route is closing. Seychelles matters here because of how many crypto entities are domiciled in it rather than because of anything it says about confidentiality, and it says nothing. No located instrument restricts anonymity-enhancing assets. What changed is the plumbing around that silence. The 2024 Act arrived with an unusually complete set of regulations, and the regulator paired them with substance requirements  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-seychelles)
- Oman [Middle East & Africa, Financial Services Authority · Central Bank of Oman]: The only rule found that names privacy wallets. Most rules in this section reach assets, and a few reach tools. Oman's drafting reaches further than any other we found. The registration decision already bars virtual assets that conceal the identity of the originator or the nature of the transaction, which is broad on its own. The consultation framework then extends the intent to tumblers, mixers and, unusually, privacy-enhanced wallets, and tar (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-oman)
- Rwanda [Middle East & Africa, Capital Market Authority · National Bank of Rwanda]: Anonymity defined out of the regime rather than banned. Rwanda uses a technique worth understanding because it is different from a ban. Rather than prohibiting anonymity-enhanced assets, the law writes them out of the definition of a virtual asset altogether, alongside NFTs, algorithmic stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. The effect is that no licensed provider can deal in them, because they are not the thing the licence covers. Whether de (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-rwanda)
- Mauritius [Middle East & Africa, Financial Services Commission]: A mature licensing regime that never mentions anonymity. Mauritius matters here out of proportion to its size, because a great many crypto entities are domiciled in it. Its regime is mature rather than minimal: a licensing act in force since 2022, five distinct licence classes with capital requirements, and seven detailed rules covering everything from custody to cybersecurity. What it does not contain, anywhere we could find across the act, the rules a (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-mauritius)
- Kuwait [Middle East & Africa, Capital Markets Authority · Central Bank of Kuwait]: A ban whose stated reason is anonymity itself. Kuwait is worth including precisely because its regulators said the quiet part out loud. The prohibition covers payment use, investment recognition, provider licensing and mining, and the stated reason is not volatility or consumer protection but anonymity: the central bank's warning is that the anonymous nature of crypto transactions creates room for illegal use. That makes it one of the few plac (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-kuwait)
- Egypt [Middle East & Africa, Central Bank of Egypt · Personal Data Protection Center]: Crypto barred, so data protection is the live constraint. Egypt inverts the usual shape of an entry in this section. There is no crypto privacy regime to describe because there is no lawful crypto activity: the banking law requires central bank approval to issue, trade or promote cryptocurrencies, and no approval has ever been granted. What is live instead is data protection. The 2020 personal data law sat without executive regulations for years and fina (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-egypt)
- Morocco [Middle East & Africa, Bank Al-Maghrib · AMMC · Office des Changes]: Liberalising in direction, with a ten-year retention sting. Morocco is moving from prohibition toward a framework, and the direction is genuinely liberalising after years in which crypto activity sat outside the exchange control rules. The detail worth attention is not the licensing but the retention. The draft would require providers to keep transaction data for ten years, which is longer than most regimes in this section and creates a large standing pool (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-morocco)
- France [Europe, AMF · ACPR · CNIL]: Hardest against anonymity, most literate about privacy tech. France pulls harder in both directions than any other member state. On one side it legislated against transactional anonymity earlier and more explicitly than the EU baseline required: providers may not hold anonymous accounts, identification is required before any occasional transaction with no minimum value, and anonymous electronic money cannot be used to buy digital assets. On the other, its d (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-france)
- Germany [Europe, BaFin · Bundesbank · BfDI and the Länder authorities]: A national custody licence, and secrecy for tokenised securities. Germany's divergence runs in two directions and neither is about coins. It built a national licence for crypto custody before the EU had one, and that licence survives alongside the European regime without carrying a passport. But it drew the line at self-custody in unusually clear terms: holding your own assets is not the licensed activity, because you are not doing it for anyone else. Less discu (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-germany)
- Liechtenstein [Europe, Finanzmarktaufsicht]: Identification unbundled into its own licensed role. Liechtenstein made a structural choice worth understanding: rather than requiring every participant to identify counterparties, it turned identification into its own licensed role. An identity service provider is defined as the party who identifies whoever is entitled to dispose of a token and records them in a register, and the corresponding duty is to assign identifiers correctly to the lawful h (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-liechtenstein)
- Iceland [Europe, Seðlabanki Íslands · EFTA Surveillance Authority · Persónuvernd]: MiCA a year late, the travel rule not yet switched on. Iceland is worth a card mainly for what it reveals about the EEA route into EU financial law. It adopted the European crypto framework a full year behind the union, shifting the internal dates forward so the transitional architecture still worked. More consequentially, the two instruments that matter most for confidentiality have arrived at different speeds. The travel rule was incorporated into t (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-iceland)
- Netherlands [Europe, AFM · De Nederlandsche Bank · Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens]: The wallet verification demand that was abandoned. The Netherlands ran the most aggressive self-hosted wallet identification demand in Europe and then gave it up, which makes it the most instructive European case in this section. Providers had to verify the address on every transfer to or from an external wallet, in practice by asking customers to photograph their wallet or sign a message. Worth being precise, because the headlines were not: the c (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-netherlands)
- Poland [Europe, KNF · GIIF]: The one EU state with no functioning licensing regime. Poland is the exception that shows how the EU framework behaves when a member state cannot implement it. Three presidential vetoes have blocked the national act, so no authority has been designated to licence providers. Meanwhile the European deadline passed regardless: since July 2026, serving the Polish market without authorisation breaches Union law, and the only lawful route in is cross-border (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-poland)
- Ireland [Europe, Central Bank of Ireland · Data Protection Commission]: A central bank piloting zero-knowledge KYC. Ireland adds nothing of its own to the EU rules on crypto confidentiality, and that is worth saying plainly rather than inventing local colour. What makes it worth a card is the opposite move. Its central bank ran its first innovation sandbox specifically on financial crime, and one of the seven projects put zero-knowledge proofs to work inside the compliance process itself: verifying a customer's (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-ireland)
- Spain [Europe, CNMV · Banco de España · AEPD]: First in the EU to regulate how crypto is advertised. Spain's national contribution sits on the marketing side rather than the confidentiality side, and it got there first. Its advertising circular, in force since February 2022, was the earliest crypto advertising regulation published in any EU member state: it compels a specific risk warning and requires campaigns aimed at more than a hundred thousand people to be notified to the regulator ten busin (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-spain)
- Italy [Europe, CONSOB · Banca d'Italia · Garante per la protezione dei dati personali]: Customer-level reporting to a public registrar. Italy's national addition was a reporting channel rather than a prohibition, and it went further than the European baseline in an unusual direction. Providers registered in the special section had to transmit, every quarter, identification data for each customer together with summary data on that customer's overall activity in Italy. That is customer-level reporting to a registrar, on a fixed cycl (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-italy)
- Canada [Americas, FINTRAC · Canadian Securities Administrators · Privacy Commissioner]: Delistings without a rule that names the assets. Canada is the clearest case in this section of an outcome that looks like a ban and is not one. Anonymity-enhancing assets have largely disappeared from Canadian platforms, and yet across the securities administrators and the financial intelligence unit we found no instrument that names them or prohibits them as a class. The mechanism appears to be the combination of know-your-product duties on pl (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-canada)
- Portugal [Europe, CMVM · Banco de Portugal · CNPD]: A data regulator stopping biometrics bought with tokens. Portugal's distinctive contribution came from its data protection authority rather than its financial regulators, and it addresses a question the financial rules do not reach. When an identity system offered crypto tokens in exchange for iris scans, the authority suspended collection of biometric data across Portuguese territory as an urgent measure, citing collection from minors without parental  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-portugal)
- Brazil [Americas, Banco Central do Brasil · CVM · ANPD]: A named anonymity rule, and a CBDC that could not solve privacy. Brazil holds the two halves of this section's argument in one place. Its listing rule is among the most explicit anywhere, requiring providers to bar assets designed to favour money laundering by facilitating anonymity, while the same framework expressly contemplates a client choosing self-custody and asks only that the provider explain the risks. Then there is Drex. The central bank spent a pilot (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-brazil)
- Mexico [Americas, Banco de México · CNBV · UIF]: Anonymity named as the reason to exclude the asset class. Mexico states the reasoning that most regulators leave implicit. Its central bank says plainly that offering virtual asset services to the public through financial institutions is not advisable, and lists the anonymity those assets provide in transactions among the reasons. That is anonymity named as the ground for keeping an entire asset class outside the regulated banking perimeter, rather than  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-mexico)
- Argentina [Americas, CNV · Unidad de Información Financiera · AAIP]: Self-custody providers written out of the regime. Argentina drew its perimeter in the place this section keeps arguing is the right one. Providers of self-custody wallets are exempt from the registration regime by the resolution's opening article, which is the most explicit carve-out for non-custodial software we found anywhere in the Americas. What the rules do restrict is the service rather than the asset: registered providers must not offer me (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-argentina)
- Bahamas [Americas, Securities Commission of The Bahamas · Central Bank]: Issuance of privacy tokens barred, trading not. The Bahamas holds the sharpest contradiction in this section, and both halves are deliberate. Its 2024 act bars issuers from offering privacy tokens for sale in or from the jurisdiction, and makes the provision of anonymity-enhancing services a regulated activity. The nuance almost always dropped in reporting is that the bar is on issuance: trading and exchange of such tokens is not prohibited, so (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-bahamas)
- Bermuda [Americas, Bermuda Monetary Authority · Privacy Commissioner]: A travel rule with no minimum, reaching self-hosted wallets. Bermuda restricts no asset by name and still runs the most comprehensive transaction surveillance requirement found in the Americas. There is no minimum value: every virtual asset transfer carries originator and beneficiary information. More unusually, the obligation expressly reaches transfers to self-hosted wallets, where most regimes either carve out an exemption or say nothing at all. Set agai (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-bermuda)
- Cayman Islands [Americas, Cayman Islands Monetary Authority · Ombudsman]: A mature regime that never addresses confidentiality. Cayman matters because so many funds and token issuers are structured through it, and the finding is a set of absences rather than rules. The licensing framework is mature and the travel rule has applied since 2022, with a second licensing phase for trading platforms and custodians since April 2025. But across the regulator's own provider guidance and its dedicated travel rule page, there is no po (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-cayman-islands)
- British Virgin Islands [Americas, BVI Financial Services Commission · Information Commissioner]: Structural confidentiality kept, transactional confidentiality not. The British Virgin Islands is a useful illustration that confidentiality is not one thing. At the level of corporate structure it deliberately preserves it: beneficial ownership information is filed with the regulator but not publicly disclosed, which is a policy choice other jurisdictions have abandoned under pressure. At the level of transactions it does the opposite, applying a travel rule from (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-british-virgin-islands)
- Estonia [Europe, Finantsinspektsioon]: The licence cull that reshaped the European market. Estonia mattered to this market out of proportion to its size, because for a few years it issued more crypto authorisations than anywhere else in Europe. The 2022 amendments ended that: capital requirements, real local presence, a compliance officer and fit and proper testing of owners took the register from over fourteen hundred licences to roughly a hundred. Worth being precise about what that w (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-estonia)
- Lithuania [Europe, Bank of Lithuania]: Capital requirements used as a filter. Lithuania took the same route as Estonia and reached a similar destination by a different instrument. Rather than testing substance and ownership, it raised the capital floor to EUR 125,000 and struck off everyone who had not met it by the end of 2022. Firms lost the right to operate from the first day of 2023. Like Estonia's, this was a filter on who may hold a licence rather than a rule about co (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-lithuania)
- Wyoming [Americas, Wyoming Division of Banking · Secretary of State]: Property law written for self-custody. Wyoming is the clearest example in the United States of a legislature building around self-custody rather than treating it as a gap. Classifying digital assets as property under the commercial code sounds technical and is not: it gives a holder a defined legal interest in an asset they control directly, rather than leaving the question to be answered by whoever holds it for them. Declining to requ (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-wyoming)
- California [Americas, Department of Financial Protection and Innovation]: A licensing regime that arrived in July 2026. California is the counterweight to Wyoming within the same country, and the contrast is instructive because neither state legislates about anonymity at all. California built a licensing regime for digital asset businesses that took effect at the start of July 2026, and the confidentiality consequences follow from the licence rather than from any rule naming an asset: a licensed business keeps reco (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-california)
- Texas [Americas, Texas Department of Banking · State Securities Board]: No licence for non-stablecoin crypto. Texas belongs in this section for what it does not do. Non-stablecoin cryptocurrency does not require a money transmitter licence there, which leaves a large share of activity outside the perimeter that elsewhere carries customer identification and record-keeping duties with it. Legislative energy has gone into stablecoins instead, including proposals for a commodity-backed state token. As with th (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-texas)
- Belgium [Europe, FSMA · National Bank of Belgium]: EU baseline, with no national layer on confidentiality. Belgium adds no national layer on confidentiality, and that is worth stating plainly rather than manufacturing local colour. The authority to deal with is the FSMA, working alongside the National Bank on prudential questions, and the rules that actually bite are the European ones covered elsewhere in this section: identity attached to every transfer regardless of size, and from July 2027 a bar on  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-belgium)
- Austria [Europe, Finanzmarktaufsicht]: EU baseline, with an early transition close. Austria's only real distinguishing feature in this area is timing. It was among the member states that chose a short grandfathering window, closing the door on national-regime operators near the end of 2025 rather than running to the outer limit the following July. On the substance of confidentiality it adds nothing: the FMA authorises and supervises, and the operative rules are the European ones. (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-austria)
- Luxembourg [Europe, Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier]: EU baseline, seen through a fund domicile. Luxembourg carries weight here because of what is domiciled in it rather than because of any national rule on confidentiality. It is one of Europe's main fund jurisdictions, so the questions that arise are institutional: what a regulated fund may hold, through which custodian, and what diligence the manager must do on the assets themselves. Those duties tend to bite on provenance and on who contro (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-luxembourg)
- Sweden [Europe, Finansinspektionen]: EU baseline, with a hawkish supervisory tone. Sweden has a reputation for hostility to crypto that is worth separating into its parts. Its supervisors have been openly sceptical about crypto as an investment and about its energy use, and that scepticism is real. But it is a view about an asset class, not a rule about confidentiality, and the two get conflated constantly. We located no Swedish instrument restricting anonymity-enhancing assets  (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-sweden)
- Denmark [Europe, Finanstilsynet · Skattestyrelsen]: EU baseline, with tax as the historic pressure point. Denmark is a useful reminder that the financial supervisor is not always the body that matters most for privacy. Its crypto framework is the European one, administered by Finanstilsynet, with no national rule on anonymity-enhancing assets or self-hosted wallets that we could locate. The pressure historically came from the tax side, where the administration has obtained transaction and identity dat (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-denmark)
- Czechia [Europe, Česká národní banka]: EU baseline, supervised by the central bank. Czechia is one of the member states that put crypto supervision inside the central bank rather than with a separate markets authority, which matters more for how firms experience the process than for what the rules say. On confidentiality it adds nothing to the European position: we located no Czech instrument restricting anonymity-enhancing assets or self-hosted wallets. The operative constraints (https://www.sodalabs.xyz/privacy-hub/regulation/jur-czechia)

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