# The Privacy Trilemma | Jatin, Canton | ETHTaipei 2026 - Channel: [ETHTaipei](https://streameth.org/ethtaipei) - Date: 2026-10-03 - Duration: 14:28 - Topics: Science & Technology - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-U6OE8mZy-4A - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OE8mZy-4A ## Description The Privacy Trilemma | Jatin, Canton | ETHTaipei 2026 ## Transcript [music] Uh thank you so much uh for coming for the session. I think oh nice. So before I get started I just want to get started by thank you so much for anybody who is here and listening to this. Um this is a session particularly about something which I'm pretty sure a lot of people are sort of thinking is is defi doing something wrong or are we doing something right you know why are we not able to welcome the institutions at the scale that we all have expected right so this session is just going to talk more about the gap that we need to fill I'm not talking about what's missing what we went wrong but I'm just going to talk about the gap which is sort of something that we need to fill. Uh before I get started, I just want to talk more about you know a quick intro about me. I'm Jatan. I am the developer relations manager at the Canton Foundation. Um if you have heard of Canton network. So Canton Foundation is the nonprofit entity that caters the Canton network and we basically stewards the network by bringing governance and growth and education for the Canton network out there. For me, I have been in web 3 for more than four years. I have been in web 3 doing developer relations and growth from Ethereum ecosystem to move ecosystem and now on the institutional grade with the Canton network and the Canton foundation. So which gives me the place where I can talk about some of the missing elements. So I want to start by this one slide which is the most important. I want to start by giving the credit where it's due. Global state was the right call by Ethereum when we first started. Right? I don't want to start by oh this is bad, oh this is wrong. I want to get started by giving the credit to in order to bring the institutions we first have to thank that the D5 revolution started in the first place. So global state was the right call to bring D5 to bring that amount of onchain transaction to bring the world onchain in the first place. Right? So I just want to remind you that this transparency by design is an actual design choice that we took. It's not a problem. It's not a misconception. It was the need of the R at that particular point. And we needed this to happen. Permissionlessness where we don't need permission to call somebody else's contract. Verification where anybody can verify anything on chain. you know the kind of composibility that you have got where you don't have to consider a counterparty to have XYZ prerequisite everything that happened by design was important and I think this is where the credit was due the most but this was good this was a design choice but now let's sort of take a few step back and read the same thing two times when we Say the design choice was everything is visible and transparent to everybody. Right? The same thing can be read as something as you can see where it also gives you a universal disclosure. Everything is visible to everybody. So the data which is a sensitive kind of a data that should not be visible of an institution because that sort of makes their own client frontr run this institution right now it is also visible right. So whenever we read one particular design choice twice this is the thing where everything has both the sides of the coin right every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Similarly, every design choice comes comes with both the sides of the coin. The when we say autoomic composibility, universal, permissionless, everything is transparent, everything is fair, we also read that every position is articularly available to everybody. The people with the good intent and the people with the bad intent, right? It opens a big disclosure surface for a trillion dollar or a billion dollar institution coming on chain. Right now the biggest change in terms of mentality is more about like when we say institutions should come on chain. What do we mean by it? Institutions come with some of the major elements. If you compare them to general defi, they come with the size and the direction of where their next few orders are going. They also come with their counterparty, where they are investing, where they are not investing. Institutions come with a proper self research. They come to your blockchain, they do the transaction, the data is available before it is even publicly announced. Right? The moment transaction happens, they cannot announce the same thing publicly, right? So they're settling something beforehand, that information is available to everybody on a global state. People can basically, you know, use that information to start frontr running their own clients and start making money. And that's why a lot of the institutions that we talk to who supposed to open like billions and trillions and quadrillions of dollars have not knocked on the doors of DeFi. Right now it's not only and always about what is the best regulation strategy. It's also an always about how we are looking at the problem. Sometimes we look at the problem in a way where if a venue for example a settlement they leak your information to public somebody will be able to use that information on a global ledger to utilize and frontr run themselves. Right now I say that this is responsible for three different kinds of trilma. The reason why I call it a privacy trilma is because there are three things which are very important. First is composibility. For example, if let's just say Shinhan Bank of Korea is coming on chain, they should be able to be composible and work with some other blockchain or some other institution on the same blockchain. Right? For example, there you have SBI in Japan and you have Shinhan in Korea. There should be some kind of composibility. They should be able to work with each other even though they want to retain their private network. Right? which gives us the other part which is confusionality. Whereas privacy is a very important part. Nobody wants to sacrifice it. If you're talking about an institution, right? Confidentiality is very important. Every institution wants to keep the sensitive information very confidential, right? Should be to themselves, should be to regulators and should be only to the auditors. That is the third. And then scalability. Now here is a problem where we have so many chains that promises confidentiality and promises composibility but scalability takes a major hit. Right? If you come up with a really good solution you should be able to scale it but then you end up with so many other services where you have to pay a lot more money right which is not a scalable way to do things. Scalability should not come as a third or an afterthought. Now when we talk with institutions, institution have a lot of money. Institution have billions, trillions and quadrillions of dollar. They will not unlike your private D5 partner will ask you to to only like choose two out of the three. They will ask you that we will go with the infrastructure that offers us all the three at the same time. Right? composibility, confidentiality and scale. They want a solution to provide them all three. So far we have to choose two out of the three and that's where the major blockchain gap is. Now again I'm going to repeat what I said. It is not a law. It is not a flow. It is a design choice that happened when we needed it the most. Right? It is the same side of the coin where you read it once where you are saying we had a transparent surface on a any single global state blockchain where the same problem came as a design. Now I'm not saying this is a bug. I'm just saying that now it is the time to talk about more better solution that provide the institutions on what they want. They want the same scalability. They want the same composibility but not at the expense of privacy, not at the expense of confidentiality of their data. Right? They want to make sure that nobody will be able to see their transaction before it is publicly available on chain. And I think that's where the play is all about. And that's what I want you to all focus in my session is. I want you all to take a minute and think about where exactly all this money is getting stopped. Why are we not getting the billions and quadrillions of dollars? You know, now when we talk about what is the optimal solution, right? We talk about what is the best solution, what is available right now and what we can do. I feel like every single global state blockchain should start thinking about selective disclosure. Right? The one thing which I say is a validator should not participate in a transaction where it should not belong. Right? If two or three parties are in a single transaction, then the validators in their own particular level make sense. But if you are replicating every single thing to every single validator making a disclosure surface it comes with a major risk and I think it is time to think about a better alternative which is called as selective disclosure right in this particular example you can see there are four different parties right Alice is paying Bob is paying Charlie right and there is a synchronizer which is making sure that everything is composable Now let's replace it with actual institution. When you replace it with actual use case, you have an asset manager, you have a custodian and you have a collateral venue. Right? Custodian is somebody who is able to see both the information which is the money coming from the asset manager and the money going to the collateral venue. Collateral venue should not see the money is coming from an asset manager. An asset manager should not see the money going to which collateral venue and the synchronizer is just making everything composable and private by having encryption at the same time. Right? So this is how you actually bring all the three missing elements by introducing selective disclosure. Only the custodian is responsible for seeing the data. Asset manager cannot see the venue. Venue cannot see the asset manager. Hence both of them cannot frontr run their own clients. Yet selective privacy is what secures everything. Right? Now scaling should not be the thing that you should take away. Right? You pay a lot for exclusive solution that gives you this but this is not about scalability. When you have to pay a lot for scalability then it is not scalability. It is a premium service which works as a band-aid. Right? Scalability should not come at a cost of an additional premium service. Scalability, confidentiality and composibility should all work together without sacrificing any enumentment. And that is a basic need of every single ecosystem on a blockchain. I don't want you to be like do I have to build on Ethereum? Do I have to build on any other blockchain? Do I have to build on canton network? Right? I told you about canton network. I told you about where DeFi and Ethereum was right. I want you to know that now the time is changing. I want you to build for what matters. Institutions are coming on chain. Institutions are looking for the next revolution of privacy and scalability along with a build and composibility. Right? The example that we saw where there is a synchronizer a global synchronizer and having asset managers custodian and a collateral venue not able to see the sensitive information to each other. This is the way and this is the only way where we can introduce the millions and billions and quadrillions of dollars on chain right and this is the only way you can bring that amount of money on chain by giving them the piece of tech that they need and hence selective disclosure makes it much more perfect of a technology and that's why we use selective disclosure as the mechanism on canton network um so if this is something that makes sense to you that makes you curious you can just catch me around the venue. You can talk to me and I'm happy to talk to you. Um again I'm Zatin from Canton Foundation and uh thank you so much for being here for my presentation. Any any questions? [applause] Thank you so much. Thank you Jim for your wonderful presentation. >> [music]