Bobbin's Threadbare

Privacy is reaching every corner of onchain finance – from the original digital asset, Bitcoin, to the newest frontier in agentic payments, to institutional rails being built for serious capital. This week delivered concrete evidence across all three.

@0xAbix @0xMiden Depends on what you consider to be "best" and "worst". In the most privacy-preserving case, a Guardian is run in a TEE and so just sees encrypted state updates. On the opposite side of the spectrum, a Guardian see full user state. More info is here: miden.xyz/blog/what-is-m…

@bobbinth @0xMiden What does guardian see in the best case (encrypted blobs + key rotation) vs worst case (MPC co-signing)? Also anywhere to read more about it ?

Why I really like Miden's Guardian approach: it simultaneously strikes the right balance on multiple dimensions

Blockchain is empowering individuals online: Giving the power to self-custody, without relying on anyone. @0xMiden pushes this even further, letting people take care of their own data and get private self-custody. But as Spiderman would agree, with great power comes great responsibility – and this can be overwhelming. That's why Guardian is so useful: you get the best of both worlds. Self-custody thanks to blockchain technology with privacy thanks to @0xMiden design, and practicality thanks to Guardian.

How the Guardian works in four steps.

privacy scales better

Who needs a privacy-preserving blockchain? Everyone.

Today we're experimenting with an AI Protocol Day at @0xMiden Goal: 95% of all new PRs should be 1-shotted, and not require ANY back-n-forth on the review, speeding up the engineering work. To achieve this, we make our repo @claudeai-native and codify our internal knowledge.

Introducing @0xMiden Guardian: A Non-Custodial Compliance Layer for Private Accounts on @0xMiden — built for institutions that need privacy AND policy enforcement. Today, blockchains force a tradeoff. Public chains like @ethereum expose everything — balances, counterparties, transaction history. That's a liability for any institution trying to operate onchain. But fully private chains aren't the answer either — once money goes in, there's no way to validate compliance. No AML, no policy, no audit trail. Miden is different. Private accounts on Miden store state entirely offchain — not encrypted onchain, literally offchain. Only a cryptographic commitment lives on the chain. This is what makes Miden parallelizable and performant, but it also means private state management feature is a must. That's where Guardian comes in. TLDR: - Guardian is a non-custodial off-chain coordination layer for private accounts - It backs up, syncs, and co-signs transactions — without ever taking custody - Multi-key threshold design — guardian holds one key, can never move your funds alone - Operators configure their own compliance module — AML screening, spending limits, geo-based policy controls - Users can rotate guardians anytime using their own keys - Built with @OpenZeppelin, fully open source and ready for you to backup your private state on Miden! Full talk: youtube.com/watch?v=8KBG_G… Always a pleasure to work with @ekang426 and @eth_seoul_, greatly appreciate for the speaking opportunity!

Universal compatibility was always the whole point of @Agglayer. Whether your chain is EVM or not shouldnt matter. @0xMiden plugging into Agglayer proves it. A privacy first zkVM with a completely different execution model now shares liquidity with every chain on Agglayer without giving up the privacy.

Miden's DevRel Lead @BrianSeong explains the essence of the Guardian during his presentation at BUIDL Asia.

At Consensus Miami last week, it was clear the industry has moved on from altcoin launches to building real financial instructure. Here are a few thoughts on what this means for privacy and projects like Miden. This was originally published in "Privacy Dispatch" - our new newsletter: privacydispatch.beehiiv.com Consensus, Revisited I have been going to Consensus conferences since 2016. For six years, I helped build them: the programming, the speakers, the shape of the conversation. So walking the Consensus Miami floor last week as a civilian felt strange. Familiar and foreign at the same time. The vast halls were the same. But a very different industry walked around inside it. The most striking absence was new token projects. In previous years, Consensus was a launchpad: for coins, for protocols, for the latest iteration of whatever the retail market was chasing. That energy is gone. In its place: stablecoins, real-world assets, tokenization, and policy. The show floor was full of well-dressed people from banks, fintechs, and financial market infrastructure companies. The conversations were about integration, not disruption. About fitting blockchain into existing systems, not replacing them. In one bit of consequential news, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, an important Democrat vote on crypto policy in Washington, told attendees that the CLARITY Act would not pass before August at the earliest. The regulatory picture remains unresolved, but the direction of travel is clear. This is now an industry that Washington takes seriously, and that takes Washington seriously in return. What does this mean for privacy? More than people might assume. The retail-driven token world was built on transparency. That was a feature, not a bug. Public ledgers let communities audit launches, track whales, and verify that the rules of the game weren't being broken. Transparency served a purpose when the participants were individuals willing to accept pseudonymity as their privacy model. Institutions are not willing to accept that bargain. A bank running treasury operations on-chain cannot expose its positions to the market. A fintech processing payroll cannot put its customers' financial data on a public ledger. An asset manager executing a trading strategy on-chain cannot afford to have that strategy visible to competitors before settlement. The institutional world is, by necessity, a private world. The infrastructure it builds on must reflect that. This is why privacy was genuinely present at Consensus this year, not as a niche concern but as a structural requirement. Canton, Midnight, and Miden all had visible presences on the floor. Our own Privacy Salon on Monday drew senior figures from Morgan Stanley, Bitwise, and Silicon Valley Bank. These are not people attending out of ideological conviction. They are attending because they have a problem that needs solving. The transition Consensus reflects – from token issuance to financial infrastructure – is exactly the transition that makes privacy non-negotiable. The old transparency model served the old industry. The new one requires something different: privacy that is cryptographic, compliant, and programmable. Privacy that institutions can build on without trusting an intermediary with a god's-eye view of their operations. That is what Miden is built to deliver. And if last week was any indication, the market is finally ready to hear it.

Super proud of the work we’ve done, huge team effort. What’s cool about this integration is that you’ll be able to move assets from L1 or any Agglayer L2 through Miden, benefiting from Miden’s privacy features.

Any chain architecture can plug into Agglayer. Any private chain can access unified liquidity. Miden just proved both. You can have private infra with full access to the ecosystem's liquidity, without tradeoffs. That's what the Open Money Stack makes possible via Agglayer.

Agglayer is officially chain-agnostic. Two milestones in one: Agglayer has connected the first non-EVM chain via @0xMiden. Miden can access unified liquidity without giving up privacy. Your private chain no longer has to be an island.

A special episode of the Privacy Podcast. Ben Schiller sits down with Miden co-founders @azeemk and @bobbinth on why privacy is no longer optional for crypto's survival, and how Miden is building the infrastructure to fix it. youtube.com/watch?v=h2n9fH…

Crypto custody has mostly forced a tradeoff, self custody or institutional custody Miden Guardian sits in the middle - users keep control, while operators provide recovery and policy enforcement without taking custody

This week in privacy, confidential payments went live on @0xPolygon and @Multicoin Capital disclosed a significant Zcash position at Consensus Miami, calling private store of value a market-structure necessity as finance moves onchain. Two signals from opposite ends of the industry – a major ecosystem and a top-tier crypto fund – arriving at the same conclusion: privacy is no longer optional infrastructure.

Have had a lot of people ask me what it’s been like having a16z crypto on the cap table this past year. One thing I can definitively say is their GTM team is beyond elite. Genuinely second to none when it comes to support. Every person I’ve worked with there has been phenomenally helpful and just genuinely kind as well. cc @meigga @lordvolth @sungmo_apac16z @cc_crowley

It's been a week since end-to-end transaction debugging landed for @0xMiden Time for a proper walkthrough, so here's what changed for anyone building in the ecosystem today 🧵