# "Made in Argentina: Building Web3 Privacy" - Panel // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025 - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 27:55 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, congress, ethereum cypherpunk, buenos aires, argentina, vitalik buterin, privacidad - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-673Y7KNOJoM - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=673Y7KNOJoM ## Description Panel with : ... Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress by Web3Privacy Now is the world's largest cypherpunk and human rights event. 4500 people gathering in Buenos Aires to celebrate privacy with internet freedom leaders like Richard Stallman, Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, and Eva Galperin. Join us in building a free internet for all. Website: https://web3privacy.info/ Congress site: https://congress.web3privacy.info/ ## Transcript Thanks everyone for being here. Uh plan for today is to share a bit about interesting stuff being developed here in Argentina when it comes to privacy. Uh our goal is basically to share all the contributions happening from the local community to the global web3 space when it comes to privacy. Uh so in that I'll let all the folks awesome folks here introduce themselves and well briefly share what they're working on. Uh let's start like just one second like your name your team and then we'll go a bit deeper on what each of you are building. >> Okay. I am Milto Merman. I am co-founder of wake up labs. I am a informatics engineer here from UA in Argentina. And yeah, we are working with a great team of engineers here at Wake Up Labs for different Dows and organizations such as Arbitro, Aztec, Optimism, Coinbase and others. So happy to be here. Thank you Bala and organization. >> Hey everyone, I'm Ti. Um I work at Wonderland. I'm leading privacy initiatives like Privacy Pools and Gohagu. Um for the ones who don't know what Wonderland is, we are a group of core developers um which are obsessed with uh best quality and I don't know um best practices and everything that we do working with Aztec, Optimus, the the Foundation, Drums um and many many more partners. I'm going to leave the >> Hello O. Hello. What's up? I'm Casio. I work at Fat Solutions. I'm a co-founder and dev in there. Um, we basically we've been working for the last two years on making privacy a little bit less unusable because I think most protocols are pretty difficult to use. There's a lot of friction in there and we're trying to focus on there. Yeah. Um, and I also wanted to say that Argentina is a beautiful country. I came here like 3 days ago and everyone is so kind. It's beautiful. I think I might like live here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. like Assados and Fernet are beautiful, man. Yeah, love these people. I love Argentinians. >> Well, I like to stay to start saying that I love the Fat Solutions thing. That's a great that's a great name. My name is Diego. I worked in the government for three years and I co-created Quark ID, which is a self-s sovereign identity protocol now used by almost 1 million citizens in the city of Buenosirus. I co-ounded sorbra.io which is a company focusing in digital trust and digital identity focusing in privacy and we are partnering with Lambda class implementing the FXL1 L2 client in valid mode. >> Okay, thank you guys. Uh oh, I'm Santiago. I work with Aztec. We're building a private first uh L2 chain. Uh you can also grab a matcha from our stand back there and yeah I well from Aztec we have the chance to work with many of these teams and I I can confirm that all they're saying on being obsessed on quality and being fantastic developers is 100% true. Honestly the the quality that that's coming out of Argentinian development teams it's amazing. So okay now that we're all here that we know each other uh let's take like one or two minutes each to share like what what developments have you been working on. and yeah basically share the the projects that you're working from your respective teams. >> Good. Okay. We'll focus on privacy. Of course, we have been working uh this year. We made a bunch of stuff. Uh we were testing and doing PC's. For example, we created a private ERC20 token standard for Starnet using Noir this year. We presented it in East Denver. Um, also we did a CK proof verifier for Arton silos also with no h that's a that's a great project we did and now we are happy to launch in a couple of weeks there is Fran our technical lead h we are about to launch a private prediction market product that will be a proof of concept in Aztec and that will be huge so we will add a privacy layer for guys that do bets on stuff. So yeah, and also in the past I I had the chance to build a protocol, the first self-s sovereign identity protocol in Argentina and for LATAM, similar to what Diego is now working on. H so we focus in identity platform and the people in the center, the people controlling the data and privacy is a must. So yeah, we are I am super interested in privacy. I don't know if you saw the the movie The Net Sandra Bulock 1995. That's where I stuck with privacy and that's why I'm here. So happy to continue contributing with you guys. >> Thank you. So um on my end as I mentioned uh from Wonderland, we worked on privacy pools and Kohaku which are really related. Um for the ones who don't know what privacy pools is, basically it allows you to do compliant private onchain payments. Uh the way it does it like very very quickly um Alice deposits in a pool across like with other actors and then Oxbow analyze it with KYT and if she's a good actor she's going to get whit listed which will allow her to do private withdrawals right and the good thing about that is that she would then uh in order to do this private withdrawal she will prove that she has uh the knowledge of the keys uh to her funds in the pool that her funds belong to the and that her address is actually whitel listed and then the relayer is going to broadcast this transaction for her. So when she wants to pay for a coffee, let's say um Alice is not going to expose her address. A relayer is going to do it for her. Um so that's like really really cool. It's a must uh for blockchain adoption that we have this uh private onchain payments and the compliant layer is fundamental and related to that it's Kohaku. I will be really quick sorry. Um so uh you probably heard Vitalik uh he just presented what Kohhagu is and it's the way that all wallets are going to adopt these privacy features. So from now on the Ethereum experience is actually private by default and I will leave it there for now. So, >> okay. Um, well, from Fat Solutions, we've been working on privacy related stuff since we started. Like the the idea when we founded the company, we were like a group that really like Monado in general, mostly privacy tools that really worked and we could use with good UX. And since tornado cashache we started looking at Ethereum more like like really looking at the Ethereum because before that you didn't even had anything related to privacy. That's why I think tornado cash made a huge impact uh not only on technology side but also on a cultural side. I think it um lightened up a lot of uh initiatives to create privacy tools inside Ethereum on chain and I think that's really important. uh and on fat solutions. Yeah. Well, uh we basically worked on a social login with s knowledge uh using gr 16 and circum to create accounts with a construction um and just sign with a proof that you own a certain account like Google account for example. Uh we built that last year. Then uh we also did some work with Aztec uh doing some research on private share state and MPC uh leaded by Dumbito which is there um and then we also work with Maiden uh doing some uh research and PC's for their wallet because it's pretty difficult to do a wallet on a chain that is different from UVM and that was tough but Maiden is an interesting uh chain I guess. Yeah, it's privacy oriented. Yes. And then we worked on privacy pools. Yes, privacy pools is one of our biggest uh projects right now. We're building with Wonderland and the Oxbow team. We're doing the SDK and relayer. We really love it. And yeah, we also did uh proof of innocence for tornado cache. Uh it's like you can prove that you're not on the on the terrorist list. Like if he if you already deposited into tornado cash before the sanctions uh you can prove when you withdraw that you are not uh on the let's say the blacklist and you're part of the good people I guess. Um and then you can uh connect that into privacy pools so you don't get flagged just for being on tornado cashache. So you can prove that you're not a North Korean hacker basically. And um and then our product is uh Tongo. Tongo.cashe is the URL if you want to check it out. It's uh ERC20 wrapper for making confidential transfers. Um we are not using any like noir or circum. We did our own circuits. We did our own prover and verifier. It's pretty cool. It works all client side. You don't have to use tees. No delegated probing. No [ __ ] So I think it's pretty interesting. Uh we are launching it like this week. We finished the audits like last week. So yeah, pretty interested in what happens with that. Um, and yeah, I think that's it, right? >> Yeah. Well, as I mentioned before, we work mostly in the ID/digital trust arena, not that much financial. We started working kind of four years ago and fortunately technology evolved dramatically and now we have a lot of possibilities that we didn't have just four years ago. So our systems today basically rely on privacy but giving users 100% control of their data. The only thing that we store on chain is a hash of that data but not the data itself which is stored for the time being in users wallets. That of course presents some inconveniences because if the user loses the wallet then they will lose that information that they will need to re-relaim that information from institutions. I think it is very good that privacy is again part of the main talks and it's not a forbidden word for some years if you said privacy people would start sort of seeking you and some of us went to prison because of that. I am happy to see that now privacy is again on top of the table and we're freely discussing it because for me it's a basic and I guess for most of us is a basic human right we are working and and I think that that's a good thing our customers are 100% big legacy institutions we have big governments in Mexico and Colombia in Argentina and in several other places in the region to which we provide them with systems in order to issue wbert licenses is for birth certificates and which other every other official document as well as banks and and big companies. And the good news here is that although you need to do some kind of uh teaching them but they are willing to put information in hand of users and not being able of controlling not even being able of controlling when verifying that information because the verifying is done without what what is called in this technology without phone home. So the issuer does not know who is verifying their their IDs or where. So we're pretty excited what was coming. We will do a big upgrade to our systems hopefully Q1 or Q2 2026 implementing lots of new technology that has appeared which will make this much more straightforward. >> Awesome. Thank you guys. Uh I want to pick up on a couple of things you guys mentioned like I find it awesome for instance that from wake up you are bridging different ecosystems like deploying noir on starknet or like yeah basically breaking silos from local develop via local development teams I think that's fantastic and well kohaku was presented by vitalik on main stage and you have to go the whole loop going from vitalik and the foundation back to local development team here in Argentina actually doing the ground work for for pushing that forward. I think that's amazing. And uh well also you started touching on this the fact that privacy is now on part of the main narrative and like the technology that's pushing it and the fact that we have access to that technology thanks to many of the many of the much of the work that teams here are doing. um also find it great like the fact that we are building solutions and we I mean a sergentian community both from like cypher punks hackers to more legal institutions and like trying to cover as much ground as possible and in that regard I wanted to ask you like how do you see more like more immediate pain points or deployments of the technology you're working on like whether it's in Argentina the world or whatever like we have discussed uh well you you guys have presented the solutions they're working on I'm curious about the applications and use cases that you see probably the the most immediate ones or the most interesting ones you see >> well I think of course there are privacy concerns regarding data in general you know the Facebook stuff 10 years ago h that's something that is still concerns us but in this ground I think the the first thing we can do better because this is a hot take but banks are doing better than us in terms of privacy so that's not good. Uh we have to catch up on that. We have to be better on financial privacy. uh because nowadays if I do a payment to you, you know my address and you know my net worth now before and forever and I have to change my wallet address if I don't want that and that's super complex and we need to build uh and be better on that and we Aztec and many of you and everybody here I know many people is working towards that but I think that's the main the pain point because nowadays we use it and we are tech guys but when this becomes more massive people will realize that they will be more private using a bank if we don't change what we have now. So I think we have to put lesser focus there privacy for finance and also in the other space I think it's super important that we continue with the principles of self-s sovereign identity when we build apps one there are 10 principles that Christoalen wrote 10 years ago I know them from heart but one that is super important is we control our data we should control our data and also the apps should be built with uh minim minimization principle that is share the less amount of data required. Don't share everything just because that app requested. We have to build on those two path. That's my opinion. Yeah. >> Yeah. I I really agree. Uh I think that we have already gained like self- custody of assets and now we need to regain the ownership of data. Um the main point that I see is actually like onchain payments. Uh I guess that all of us are using crypto because we fell in love with the with the technology behind it and for some time we assume that the cell anonymity that you provided was good enough but it's not anymore at all. Uh and if you were to explain like uh crypto to anyone and then you get to the point like yeah everybody can see your funds it's like that's risky like extremely risky. Uh and no one would like how are we expecting adoption that way. Um privacy is a must is for everyone. Um and actually it's like we are not hiding like we needed to protect. So that's actually what we are building with privacy pools that enables this and on top of privacy pools that provides like the the protocol and all the all the tech for it. We need adoption and like one thing people usually forget is that the way you communicate with Ethereum and you use it is through wallets. So we need this on every wallet and that's what Kohaku is doing. Um so from like the goal is that from now on in the next few months uh once every wallet uh starts adopting Kohaku uh your payments will be private by default. All right. You will have your private account as you could see in the in the demo. uh and there will be like no reason at all to do it publicly because like why would you is that he said like uh the bank uh the banks are better in some way uh to provide you that privacy and like we have all this vision and like uh this ethos about uh being decentralized but people ends up using centralized solution to gain some sort of privacy so we need to fix this as hopefully like the good thing is that we are fixing it and the Ethereum foundation is actually very concerned about this um so I'm bullish and like Ethereum and everything like we will make things good uh for privacy. Um go ahead. >> Um okay so paypoints right? Um what I think is that right now nobody is using privacy not even us. Um we can compare the the TVL of a is like 35 billion and the whole biggest uh privacy protocols are I don't know rail gun and privacy pools combined have like 105 million TVL nobody's using them. So I think we have to accept that and start doing something about it and not circle jerk like hey yeah we're all cipher punks but we have to do something you know. Um what I think my vision is that um we should start paying more attention to SDKs so we can integrate with existing stuff. Um that's why I really uh like uh the Kohaku initiative that the Ethereum Foundation is doing. Finally, I'm aligned. Yes. Uh it's beautiful. I think it makes sense. Um that's why all the products that we are doing right now and all the work that we do, we pay the most attention to the SDKs to be DevX like a good Dex to be able to integrate quickly and relatively easily with a complex system like privacy protocols in general are a pain to integrate because they're difficult. They are new. Nobody understands them. So that's our biggest focus right now. uh to make good SDKs. Uh because the the front end, I mean, you can have the front end of of privacy pools. Yeah. It's beautiful. It has UX. It has. Yeah. But nobody like if you got to pay me for the the money I lent you, you're not going to use privacy pool sadly because it's a pain in the ass. Like you you will send me from your MetaMask and I will see your address and you will see mine and everything will be [ __ ] So we have to pay more attention to SDKs, I think. And if the SDKs have good developer experience then existing protocols will be able to integrate us a little bit more easy I guess. Um and then the other point that I like is uh having composable tools on related privacy related stuff like I like to have a a privacy thing that I can unlink a depositor from a withdrawer and I also interested in having uh confidential payments for example. Yeah, I know that's our product. Yeah, I'm shelling it. But it makes sense like right now we cannot do uh confidential payments like uh you can use privacy pools but you will see the amount that you're sending. So I think that the future is is going to be like uh composing different components and achieving the stack the privacy stack that you want to use and that you need to use because maybe you have different needs than a bank for example. Um so that's kind of my take I guess. Well, as I mentioned, we work with one feet in the crypto world and the other feet in the legacy world. And the main battles that we are doing or fighting right now is first precisely UX. If people when you're targeting millions of users, most of them non-technical. I always mention the case of my 85year-old mother. Even MetaMask seems like rocket science. So they need as simple as possible web two interface without sacrifying the self-s sovereign identity principles and the privacy features. So our main goal now is achieving a world class UX in web two terms without sacrifying again those self-s sovereign identity and privacy principles. And our second biggest challenge is are sort of breaking up some preconceptions that big institutions have. And I will mention two of those. The first one comes through governments. Governments usually try to come up with this idea of hey I'm gonna have this super app where everybody will be able of putting documents and credentials on top of it and the citizens will be very comfortable because they will have not only my driver's license but the provinces I don't know working permit and the private company whichever credential they issue. Funny thing is that every initiative in that sense failed utterly failed. Carpet Sudan in Colombia was a good app but not a single subnational government was willing to give data to the national government. People work that way. They don't want to share the data and it's correct. And the second thing that battle is still ongoing. I think that is mostly won but not yet completely won. The second big battle that we're doing is against private blockchains. I don't know why big institutions tend to have this crazy idea about doing private blockchains that they control which is in my humble perspective the same thing at as it were intranets in 1990s it doesn't make sense they failed in the '9s they're going to fail again I think that the Fusaka rollout will be a great thing in in that sense basically because of the combinations of two things first the ability of running blockchains In balium mode, we will allow you to keep the data private but the blockchain non-p permission and completely open and the second thing because any given institution using base rollups will be able of using the layer one consensus and not having centralized sequencers. So that is that's going to be a great advantage because any given institution will be able of hosting their own nodes and not depending on any other nodes and that is for me something that will be a gamecher. Thank you guys. Um I want to pick something that you guys said about uh well for sure privacy for for onchain payments over crypto products that are already in there. I think that ties back with the opportunity that most people coming here for Devcon have that one in five Argentinians use crypto and have crypto not necessarily self-custodial and I think that throwing privacy on top of that is probably the missing component to enable people to hold their own crypto own it and manage it and I think that that already existing crypto adoption here is a good stepping stone for builders coming from all over the world here in order to test their assumptions and actually work with privacy on top of a user base that's already halfway there into crypto. Um, Casio don't promise holding back. I mean, if he wants to kick your ass after all you have saying been saying about preiples. Okay, you guys love each other. >> Oh, okay. Oh, >> please outside this place. >> Happy to hear you guys love each other. Um, but okay, we're we're running short on time, so I'll ask you just 10 seconds. Someone is a developer here, they want to get started on privacy. What should they do? Oh, now now it's easier than I don't know one year before. I would say let's go and write a noir no contract. That's not because of you, but but yeah, it's super easy. I have a bunch of engineers that they are programmers and they are not circum developers for by heart and they took noir and they were like, "Oh, [ __ ] I can use it. I can write circuits in just uh I don't know five minutes." And that one year ago that didn't happen. So I would tell any developer to do that. >> Uh one thing I wanted to say first uh regarding what he said is that one misconception usually is that you think you use a privacy protocol and like it grants you this privacy and the truth is that we need a huge anonymity set. So it's true like put your money where your mouth is right uh so for developers um I would recommend to go and try to build on secret. It's actually easier than it seems. Uh I would suggest noir because it's even easier. Learn about miracle trees. Like most of circuits end up being like you recmp compute a hash and you prove inclusion in a miracle tree and with that you can build tons of things and again it's easier than it thinks like that you would think. So try it out. >> Okay. I would recommend you to read the gross 16 paper. No, just kidding. Um, I think you should go to look for existing protocols and see which you like the most. I would suggest going for one that has a little bit of a community and start uh looking at the issues on the PR uh like the issues on the repo on GitHub. I really suggest you you can do maybe a good first issue or something pretty small and that can get you into contact with a lot of interesting and crazy people and I think that will drive you to do awesome stuff. I mean I always like privacy but I started getting into the community like two years ago before I didn't do [ __ ] about privacy. I just was a user and still when I started like meeting people and actually talking with developers I realized that it's not that difficult I guess on the last cipher congress I met I mean I was like hey I want to work with you and he said yes and we started working with him that's it and you just do things and it will work yeah girl 16 paper >> well it's not a recommendation but I'm going to share with you something that we're investigating and doing research and working on which is fully omorphic encryption which is kind of magic. Huh? Being able of computing encrypted data uh without ever accessing the data that will unleash a huge possibility regarding doing analysis on medical records in order to speed up investigations, processing tons and tons of uh house titles or IDs without ever accessing the personal data behind them. That will unleash a big big industry and a bunch of possibilities. and we're really interested in investigating that. >> Thank you guys. Last thing I I want to highlight here is um crypto adoption is huge in Argentina not just because of our financial struggles but because of the fantastic talent that we have here and these are just four of the people represent representing that that you see today. Okay, thank you and big round of applause for everyone.