No one wants privacy (yet)! by Matthew Wyatt

Despite the crypto community in outrage over Tornado Cash and members fighting in court for our right to privacy- we (Nucleo) have proof points that as a whole, most of the communities and users we've worked with don't want privacy (yet)! What's our support? From our 2 fundraisers that allowed private and public donations, individual private donations were only ~15% compared to public. From our work on privacy tools with DAOs and organizations, there's been heavy skepticism of introducing any privacy into the orgs as people love Dune Dashboards and orgs being able to be tracked as well as whales and snooping. From beta testing with individual users to general stats on Aztec Connect for private DeFi (only about 1/5th the size of ZK Sync), there is clear evidence that privacy does not have the same traction as others. So then the question is why? Most cited is: • Regulatory Risk - People we have worked with - spanning from DAOs to Sotheby’s to Market Makers to Chainalysis to individual users have cited fears of getting an address blacklisted just for using any sort of privacy because of the OFAC sanctions • User Education - Privacy is a spectrum and most users do not know the differences in privacy offered between pseudonymous chains like ETH/BTC, mixnets, L1 contracts like Tornado Cash, L2 Zk rollups like zk sync, L2 ZK-ZK rollups like Aztec - Most users do not know the limits of existing privacy tools on these spectrums and the technical areas being worked on from account level privacy with audit keys to proof of reserves to configurable asset privacy - everything and every tool is just being marketed as PRIVATE with no differentiation explained • Technical Work to be done to make privacy as easy as can be - Piggy backing on the last point - there is still a ton of work to be done to make the types of privacy most consumers have been asking for AND to make it as easy and usable as existing non-privacy tech. Walk through one technical example of ZKP over many notes for refund hitting max data limit sizes and needing to SNARK pack notes to prove So does this mean privacy is dead? We will all just continue to exist in a surveillance state? No! The great news is that there’s work being done in all 3 areas :) On Regulatory risk • fantastic folks like Coinbase and Bankless are fighting for our rights and legal clarity around rights to privacy while folks like Aztec have built more advanced account based privacy systems that don’t mix funds in with any stolen funds so no need to worry there On education • We are working on this and it’s why we are here! We need more people to spread the word and would love to get more people in on it! On technical work to be done to make privacy as easy as can be • We are also working on this and are confident we will get there and would love to work with anyone interested in making this happen :)