JY Jonathan

@castle_labs Love to see it, Castle is a great partner

Welcome to the new Castle Labs!

STRK20 on @Starknet: 13.5/17 Aztec: 8.5 Railgun: 6 Zcash: 4.5 Monero: 4 Tornado Cash: 2 The gap between STRK20 and the next closest protocol isn't a matter of one or two features. It's a difference in how many hard problems get solved within a single architecture.

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Zcash makes you scan every single transaction to find your own notes. Tornado Cash locks you into fixed denominations. Neither has any real compliance story. Starknet's new privacy protocol is trying to fix all of that at once👇 What it actually does: > Hides sender, receiver, and amount using client side ZK proofs > Note discovery scales with your own activity, not the entire pool > Compliance built in from day one, not added on top > Anonymous AMM swaps work atomically without a temp public account The compliance design is the interesting part. Viewing keys are encrypted to an auditing entity at registration, so regulators can trace a specific user without touching anyone else's privacy. That's the piece that makes @Starknet actually usable for institutions, not just crypto natives🔥

Privacy at scale for the real world @LiorGoldberg2 @MayaDotan_ and the team cooked Privacy using client-side STARK proofs for any ERC20. Gives you anonymous DeFi out of the box, no major changes needed to existing DeFi + an audit path that can trace specific users if required by law enforcement, without deanonymizing anyone else

STRK20 technical paper. Scalable Compliant Privacy on Starknet.

Private stablecoin payments. Private BTCFi. Private Ethereum. All on Starknet in 2026.

Great to see the coverage

1/ The STRK20s Technical Paper is now live. It outlines the design, architecture, and core ideas behind STRK20s, a privacy capability for any ERC-20. If you’re bullish on privacy as crypto’s next major unlock, this paper is for you 🧵

Privacy matters and Starknet is trailblazing the path! People talked non-stop about privacy back when CT was more active and why it's important. What isn't discussed nearly as much is how do you actually build Privacy. So many people will say: ZK. Yes, they're right at the high level. But how do you design it? Privacy isn't like pulling a curtain to hide something. ZK is complex tech, blockchain is complex tech, and there are many ways to design and build privacy on blockchain. Luckily, we are experts at both! Said it before, will say it again: Starknet will have (already has?) the best privacy solutions in crypto. For users, apps, institutions, for everyone.

In my opinion, something has been quietly shifting in how BTC maxis and institutional players think about on-chain activity (and privacy). My reasoning is that public companies holding BTC nearly doubled from 90 to ~167 in a year. But the real number that gets me is this: only 0.35% of public companies currently hold BTC. We're barely at the starting line. --> Over 1.1M BTC sits on corporate balance sheets, roughly 5.2% of the circulating supply. --> Holdings surged by 260K BTC in just the last six months of 2025 alone. --> Merchant BTC payments up 74% YoY. --> Spot ETFs just pulled in $1.4B in five days, with March 3rd posting $843.6M, the largest single-day inflow of 2026. --> Total AUM across spot BTC ETFs sits at ~$88.3B now, with ~$55B in cumulative inflows since launch. --> MSCI cleared companies to hold BTC without index exclusion risk. --> Over 60% of top U.S. banks are developing BTC products. And BTC makes up 95% of all corporate crypto holdings. But what does all of this mean? Well, to me, it means BTC is moving into active economic use at a pace we haven't seen before. Treasuries, DeFi, payments, and real on-chain capital flows. But here's what the industry is starting to confront: every single one of those flows is fully visible by default. Balances, positions, counterparties, all exposed, and, for a retail user, that's annoying, but, for a fund or a corporate treasury running a strategy on-chain, that's a dealbreaker. This is why BTCFi + privacy is becoming a serious narrative and not just a cypherpunk talking point. BTC maxis have always believed sound money should function like money. And money requires discretion. Not secrecy. Discretion. So...The ability to manage exposure without broadcasting every move to competitors and front-runners. The problem until now has been that privacy meant fragmentation. You had to leave mainline liquidity, use isolated chains, or rely on custodial workarounds. And guess what...none of that scales. None of that appeals to the institutional wave that's clearly arriving (90% of top RIAs have BTC allocations, but only 0.006% of their managed assets are actually in BTC... that gap is closing). And here is where I see Starknet positioning itself at the forefront of this with their strkBTC which is a BTC wrapper built with optional privacy from day one. Meaning that users can move between unshielded and shielded states freely. In shielded mode, sender and receiver are unlinkable. In unshielded mode, it works like any standard wrapped BTC across DeFi. Oh, and the good thing is that both states earn Starknet staking yield. Same liquidity pool, same markets, no fragmentation. They're launching with clearly defined, auditable security assumptions and a public roadmap toward Bitcoin-native cryptographic enforcement, and the direction is away from multisig and custodial trust toward fully trustless verification as the tooling matures. And yes, I strongly believe that's a path BTC maxis can actually get behind, because it respects the core ethos rather than asking you to compromise on it. So far, the industry is adapting to a reality where BTC on-chain activity keeps growing, but the infrastructure to do so privately hasn't kept pace.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately. Traditional financial systems run on confidentiality. Your transactions aren’t public, but regulated entities can still access information when required. On blockchains, it’s the opposite. Every balance and transaction is public. Seeing @Starknet experiment with privacy through STRK20s is interesting because it tries to balance both sides. The idea seems to be that transactions can remain private onchain, while compliance checks still happen at the wallet level when funds enter or exit the system. If something like this works, it might make onchain activity more comfortable for funds, institutions, and even large DAOs that don’t want every move visible to the whole market. Definitely something I’m curious to watch.

In crypto, your wallet has always been that guy at the poker table who can’t stop showing his cards. Trillions move on-chain, yet every balance, every swap, every counterparty is public record. Sounds great for transparency. Not so great if you're deploying serious capital. Because broadcasting your entire strategy to competitors (and the internet) is basically financial suicide. One of the reasons institutions, funds, and even sophisticated DAOs still hesitate with DeFi. Privacy is way to important for them to compromise. @Starknet is trying to change that with STRK20. Instead of pushing users into separate privacy ecosystems, Starknet's way is to embed confidentiality directly into the chain where there's liquidity already. Assets can move privately while still interacting with the same markets and liquidity. Sure is a way around that “go private or go liquid” trade-off. Same asset. Same market. Two modes. Visible when you want it. Invisible when you need it. And that unlocks some obvious doors. Traders can execute without broadcasting their size to every MEV bot watching. Institutions can move capital without giving competitors a live feed of their positions. DAOs can run treasury ops without turning every move into public theatre when needed. All with compliance hooks built in from day one. The timing is interesting too. Crypto spent years competing on speed and fees. That’s basically table stakes now. I strongly feeling that Privacy might be the next real moat. Once capital starts operating in private workflows, going back to fully transparent systems leaks information through timing, amounts, and patterns. And that creates real stickiness. Phase 1 is expected on mainnet around April, starting with private transfers, withdrawals, and multi-asset balances like strkBTC and xstrkBTC. UX should be good too, since this is just a new capability baked into the chain. Privacy not as a trade-off but as a proper standard.

Most chains competed on speed and fees… but that’s commoditized. Privacy is the next differentiator and Starknet just made it native. STRK20 = private balances + private transfers on any ERC-20. Same shared liquidity, no sidechain and no tradeoff. And for traders: swap intent stays private until atomic settlement. - No intermediate state - No MEV window - No exposure Compliance is baked in from day one which is exactly what makes it viable for funds, DAOs, and corporates moving real size. Phase 1 kicks off with strkBTC and xstrkBTC. Worth watching closely.

this one is interesting. STRK20 basically means a new capability for any erc20 to have privacy and confidentiality of balances and private transfers. when i entered crypto, it felt truly private, until it was not. i could check everyone's transactions. i could tell what garyvee or other influencers bought. it was anonymous, not private. this issue still remains. my friends tell me that no one can see their venmo cash, but everyone can see their stablecoins/crypto. this changes with STRK20. you get: - shielded balances - private transfers - clean transitions between private and public states - private defi (very important) if you are building on starknet, it becomes insanely easy for you to enable private ERC20. you get a fully composable environment as well. you can get started by using @EkuboProtocol for anonymous swaps and anonymous staking for BTC and STRK. why do i tweet about this? i am bullish starknet team. they have done a great job early on, and have been building regardless. they are true to their privacy values and really deeply care about it. 🫡🫡

STRK20 is not a separate token environment. it's not a new token standard. it's a model where privacy can be embedded at the token level while preserving composability and shared liquidity strkBTC will be the first STRK20 asset but it's just the first deployment of a broader privacy capability that can be applied to ERC-20 assets on Starknet

Every privacy solution in crypto has been a cope (so far). Isolated pools, weird tokens, ghost towns. And the whole time, institutions have been sitting out not because of volatility, but because their whole portfolio would be visible to anyone with a block explorer. STRK20 is about to change that. 1⃣ the transparency problem nobody wants to talk about Hundreds of billions of dollars move on-chain today. BTC. ETH. Stablecoins. All of it entering DeFi, and all of it fully visible to anyone watching. Balances. Counterparties. Every single transaction. All public by default. That's not a feature for anyone moving serious capital. It's the reason serious capital has been sitting on the sidelines. Not because the yields aren't there. Not because the tech isn't ready. Because operating with full financial transparency isn't how any real market participant, institution, fund, DAO, or sophisticated trader (like Jared from Subway) actually wants to operate. And honestly? It's not how you want to operate either. Nobody needs CT watching them get rekt on a memecoin at 3am. STRK20s is built to fix that. For everyone. 2⃣ what is STRK20? Think of token standards like ERC20, BEP20, TRC20 etc. STRK20 follows the same logic, though it's rather a privacy framework that any team can add to an ERC20 token by simply deploying on Starknet. No extra code. No extra audit. Just deploy. Not a separate chain. Not a special token. Not another ghost town pool that fragments your liquidity and disconnects you from real markets. A native framework that plugs into the tokens and applications that already exist. Leverage at its finest. @Starknet calls this transaction-layer privacy: private ownership, public execution. In practice, users can: 🔵 shield assets 🔵 hold private balances 🔵 transfer privately 🔵 use DeFi/squeeze yield anonymously 🔵 unshield when needed All within the same asset. The same pool. Existing accounts, no new keys required. 3⃣ a milestone, not just a feature This is where STRK20 stops being a small improvement and starts being a structural shift. Every previous attempt at on-chain privacy forced a choice: full privacy in isolation, or shared liquidity with behavior that leaks the moment you touch a real market. Timing, amounts, execution patterns, it all bleeds through at the edges. Starknet is the *first* L2 where privacy and shared liquidity coexist on the same chain. That's the differentiator. Private activity will settle against the same liquidity that public DeFi uses. Users won't have to leave the ecosystem to get privacy (like some couples have to leave the bar and find a room(not me though, I have no waifu)). The money stays where the money already is. That combo has never existed on a [scalable] L2 before now. That's why this is a milestone. 4⃣ privacy and compliance aren't opposites This is the part that matters most for institutions, funds, and DAOs, and it's the part that makes STRK20s viable where everything before it wasn't. Confidentiality by default. Auditor access on request. That's not a compromise, that's exactly how every mature financial system already works. STRK20s just brings it on-chain. Selective disclosure to auditors, regulators, or accountants is available through viewing keys when legally required. Institutions and funds get the privacy they need to operate without exposing sensitive data to competitors. Not privacy as a workaround. Privacy as the way the system should have worked from the beginning. 5⃣ what's live from day 1? The DeFi use cases are already in place. Anonymous swaps (identity never exposed) on @EkuboProtocol . Private staking (yield without leaking your activity), private P2P transfers: no sender, no receiver, no amount visible on-chain. One of the things BTC was designed for, but failed at. Full design details and a technical deep dive are coming in the next few days. And I'll be here to share a TL;DR (including mild pun). 6⃣ the opportunity Private BTC and BTCFi. Private stablecoin payments. Private ETH. Your memecoin bags, finally safe from public humiliation. One framework. Every ERC-20. Starknet-native. The market will soon be one click away from privacy on any token. Serious capital will finally have the infra it's been waiting for. And the rest of us can stop broadcasting our on-chain activity (you know, when we get rekt) to the entire internet. That's not a feature. That's a new default.

STRK20 changes something fundamental about DeFi design. Until now, composability has come with a trade-off: every position is fully visible. → Collateral sizes → Liquidation thresholds → LP allocations → Vault balances All of it becomes public the moment capital moves onchain. That transparency has benefits, but it also turns DeFi into an environment where strategies leak signal by default. STRK20 introduces a different model: Privacy at the token layer. Any ERC-20 on Starknet can now support: → shielded balances → private transfers → and transitions between private and public states. The interesting part is what happens when these assets move through composable DeFi primitives. Take liquid staking tokens (LSTs) as an example. At Endur we issue LSTs representing staked assets that can then be deployed across the ecosystem: → lending markets → liquidity pools → automated vaults With STRK20, those LST balances can remain shielded while still being usable across these protocols. This changes the dynamics of money markets and capital coordination. Large collateral positions no longer have to publicly reveal: → collateral size → borrow capacity → liquidation thresholds Strategies can move across lending, LP, and vault systems without broadcasting the entire position structure to the market. In other words: → composability remains public → ownership and balance exposure can remain private. That’s a very different architecture for DeFi. Not isolated privacy pools. But confidential capital moving through a fully composable ecosystem. And that’s where things start to get interesting.