This week: Raycash teased Paylinks with launch a few weeks away, Privacy Pools v2 went live with payments, yield and swaps, Zcash developers planned a fix for a quantum gap in ZEC swaps, and Zama opened claiming for confidential rewards.

In House

A few things from our side first.

What happened at Raycash this week:

We teased Paylinks this week. A Paylink is a private payment link. Getting paid on chain usually means handing someone a wallet address, and anyone holding that address can read the full history behind it. A Paylink gets you paid anywhere by anyone without that exposure.

Join the waitlist at raycash.xyz →

On Our Radar

Here is what got us excited this week:

Privacy Pools v2 adds payments, yield and swaps

0xbow launched Privacy Pools v2 on October 21 across seven networks, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and OP Mainnet. Once funds are shielded, you can pay any EVM address while hiding who paid whom and how much, and request money through a shareable link. Pooled deposits can earn Aave lending yield without leaving the pool, and a LI.FI integration allows private swaps, including into a different token or onto another chain. The compliance model stays the same: a screening service has to approve a deposit before it can be used privately, and it can revoke that approval later. Anyone can exit publicly on their own.

Shielded money has mostly sat idle, which keeps anonymity sets thin. Yield gives people a reason to stay inside, and every extra dollar makes everyone else harder to trace. We think that’s the right direction, and it’s the same idea behind confidential yield. The open question is the screening service. Whoever approves deposits, and can revoke approval, sits in the trust model.

Starknet holders back research into a post-quantum Layer 1

Starknet holders voted to research leaving Ethereum behind as an independent, post-quantum Layer 1. More than 93.5% of the voting power backed the proposal in a seven-day poll that closed October 22, with over 2,800 wallets taking part. StarkWare did not vote. For now it’s research only. A draft whitepaper is due in November, and STRK holders would have to vote again on any actual move. The Starknet Foundation says STRK stays the native token, no new token is planned, and Ethereum bridges stay open.

The reasoning is specific. Starknet is built on hash-based cryptography, and its accounts can adopt post-quantum signatures without protocol changes. Its bridge and data availability still rest on Ethereum, and those can’t become quantum-safe on their own. StarkWare’s CEO has set a 2027 target for Starknet and calls Ethereum’s 2029 target too late. Privacy systems have a longer horizon than most, since encrypted data posted today stays on chain for years.

Zama opens claiming for confidential rewards

Depositors in Zama’s confidential vaults on Morpho, which launched with 16 curated vaults in September, can now claim $cZAMA rewards from Merkl campaigns through confidential transfers. Neither the position nor the payout shows onchain, and rewards are calculated on encrypted balances. The Flowdesk Confidential High Yield USDT vault campaign ended October 12, and its rewards are claimable now.

Earn yield, hold a position and collect incentives without a public balance. That completes the loop, and incentives were the missing piece. One detail worth knowing: depositors grant Merkl delegated viewing access to their encrypted balance, on by default, and deposits that don’t share it earn no rewards. The privacy holds against the public, with one trusted viewer in the loop.

Thanks,
From the Raycash team

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This week: the waitlist is at 75K with launch a few weeks out, Tempo put its Zones privacy system into production with Deel, Starknet shipped Shadow Accounts for DeFi, and Vitalik said ZK proving is now fast enough and security comes next.

In House

A few things from our side first.

What happened at Raycash this week:

We’re at 75,000 people on the waitlist, and launch is only a few weeks away and the Raycash leaderboard is on fire.

Join the waitlist at raycash.xyz →

On Our Radar

Here is what got us excited this week:

Tempo takes its Zones privacy system into production with Deel

Tempo says Deel is the first production customer for Zones, its privacy system for stablecoin payments. Contractor balances and payout history stay out of public view, while Deel keeps the records it needs for reconciliation and audit. The wallet also keeps access to public yield products.

Payroll is about the clearest case for private payments there is. Nobody wants a contractor’s pay history on a public explorer. The trade-off sits in the design. Tempo’s own docs say each zone has a sequencer that sees all activity, so privacy depends on whoever runs it. That’s a reasonable call for an enterprise payroll product, and it’s a different bet from the FHE route we’ve taken, since FHE is built to avoid needing a party in the middle who can read the data.

Starknet launches Shadow Accounts for DeFi

Starknet launched Shadow Accounts on October 13. Each app gets its own persistent address, funded from shielded balances in the STRK20 privacy pool, so your lending position and your trading position no longer sit under one identity. Balances, transactions and positions in those accounts stay public. What gets hidden is the link back to your main wallet.

We like how narrow the claim is. One address touching many protocols lets analysts rebuild a whole portfolio, and splitting it per app makes that harder. The docs also admit that public deposits, withdrawals and timing can still leak depending on the wallet. Adoption now depends on wallets and apps implementing it.

Vitalik says the zkEVM speed race is won

Vitalik Buterin said this week that making zkEVM proving fast enough is done, after ZKsync reported its Airbender Prime prover finishing 99% of proofs in under 10 seconds across 7,200 consecutive mainnet blocks on a single GPU. Those numbers come from ZKsync’s own evaluation, and Ethereum produces a block every 12 seconds. His new priority is security, which he wants formally verified: match the Ethereum spec, cap prover cost against block gas, and rest on a sound proof system.

Fast proofs are what make private transactions usable, so this matters to us. The shift to security matters more. Issue 5 covered Aztec relaunching zk.money before a critical proving bug was fixed. Speed gets a proof system adopted. Formal verification is what makes it safe to rely on.

Thanks,
From the Raycash team

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This week: our waitlist hit 70K and episode 2 of They're Watching You series is out, FinCEN withdrew its proposed $10,000 reporting rule for self-hosted wallets, the Ethereum Foundation shipped a way to pay for AI APIs without an identity attached, and Monad revealed a design for private settlement aimed at banks.

In House

A few things from our side first.

What happened at Raycash this week:

We crossed 70,000 people on the waitlist.

Episode 2 of They’re Watching You is out, our mini-series on why private payments on chain matter.

Join the waitlist at raycash.xyz →

On Our Radar

Here is what got us excited this week:

FinCEN scraps the $10,000 self-custody reporting rule

FinCEN withdrew two proposals over the weekend that had hung over crypto for years without ever taking effect. The first, from December 2020, would have made banks and exchanges file reports on transfers above $10,000 to or from self-hosted wallets, with amounts added up over 24 hours, and collect details on the customer and the wallet on the other side. The second, from 2023, would have labeled crypto mixing a primary money-laundering concern. FinCEN frames both withdrawals as part of a deregulatory push toward digital-asset rules that fit the technology.

Good news for anyone who holds their own keys. The 2020 version would have treated a transfer to your own wallet like a transaction that needed a paper trail, and it sat unresolved for nearly six years, which is a long time to build a product under that cloud. Withdrawn proposals can come back, though. A protection that lasts needs to be in statute, which is why the self-custody language in the CLARITY Act that we flagged in issue 3 still matters.

The Ethereum Foundation ships zkAPI, private payments for AI APIs

The Ethereum Foundation and the Open Anonymity Project launched zkAPI this week, live on mainnet. You deposit credits into a vault contract once, and from then on a zero-knowledge proof authorizes your spending in place of an account. The AI provider sees your prompts. The payment server sees the spend. Neither can connect the two. Try to spend the same balance twice and the duplicate nullifier exposes the attempt and nothing else.

Today every API call hangs off a key, an account and a card, so a provider can stitch years of your prompts into one profile. That’s the exact pattern we dig into in They’re Watching You, just applied to AI instead of payments. The part we liked most is the limitations section. The authors say plainly that the provider still sees your IP and your prompt contents, and that your writing style alone can re-link your sessions. They suggest Tor for the network side.

Monad pitches private settlement to banks, in design form

Category Labs unveiled Monad Private Settlement at the Open conference in Singapore on October 6. The idea is encrypted execution domains that sit on the public Monad network, with no protocol fork. Institutions keep transactions, state and contract code encrypted while still settling on a public L1 and reaching its liquidity. Whoever creates a domain picks the validators and the privacy tech, whether that’s TEEs, a zkVM or MPC.

For now it’s a design synopsis with a forward-looking disclaimer attached. No testnet date, no audit, no contract address, no named bank. Two things we’d watch: which cryptographic scheme they commit to, and who ends up operating a domain, since the party that picks the validators is also the party you’re trusting. Zama and Morpho’s confidential vault in June, Aztec’s zk.money last week, and now Monad. Three ecosystems, four months, one direction.

Thanks,
From the Raycash team

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This week: our waitlist hit 50K and we launched a mini-series on why private payments matter, Vitalik published a long-term roadmap for privacy at Ethereum's base layer, a new RWA privacy standard already has a leak flagged in review, and Aztec brought back zk.money before its own disclosed bug is fixed.

In House

A few things from our side first.

What happened at Raycash this week:

We just crossed 50,000 people on the waitlist.

We also kicked off a mini-series called They’re Watching You, a few short pieces on why private payments on chain actually matter in practice, not as an abstract idea. First one’s out now.

Join the waitlist at raycash.xyz →

On Our Radar

Here is what got us excited this week:

Vitalik lays out where Ethereum’s privacy is actually headed

Vitalik published a long essay this week walking through how different Ethereum will look by 2030 compared to 2015. The clearest part is a table he includes: privacy of writes goes from “hope nobody analyzes the transaction graph” to actual zero-knowledge proofs, privacy of account policy goes from nothing to SNARKs plus private account abstraction, and network-layer privacy moves from “assume most mempool nodes are honest” to onion routing and mixnets built in. He’s calling the end state a “cryptographic world computer.” Not really a blockchain in the 2010 sense anymore. Closer to a system where cryptography does the work trust used to do.

Coming from Vitalik specifically, this reads like something other teams will build against for years. Worth reading the table in full. It’s the most concrete version we’ve seen yet of what privacy at the base layer is actually supposed to look like once this ships.

A new Ethereum standard tries to make compliant privacy work, and a reviewer already found a leak

A developer opened a draft called ERC-8424 this week, extending an existing private-token standard to give issuers real controls: freezing, forced transfers, eligibility checks, all while balances stay encrypted. It’s built for RWA issuers who need both confidentiality and the power to step in when compliance requires it.

A reviewer flagged a real problem within days. Two of the functions in the draft have no restriction on who can call them, so an attacker could work out a hidden balance in as few as 64 queries.

Worth remembering next time a “privacy plus compliance” pitch sounds too clean. Getting the legal framing right is the easy part. Getting every function locked down correctly is where these things actually fail, and it’s already happening here before the standard is even merged.

Aztec brought back zk.money

Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money this week, the private payments wallet it shut down back in 2023. The original had 75,000 wallets and over $100 million in volume before it closed. The new version hides balances, amounts, and who you’re paying, runs on Aztec’s own network, and lets you send money to a readable name instead of a wallet address.

Here’s the part that actually matters. Aztec disclosed a critical flaw in its proving system back in August, and the fix isn’t shipping yet. They launched anyway, capping user transaction at $2,500 and daily protocol deposits at $50,000, specifically to limit what a worst case looks like while that fix is still in progress.

Credit where it’s due, that’s a more honest way to handle a known risk than most teams manage: cap the damage and say so out loud instead of hoping nobody notices. Still worth being straight about what it means. Use zk.money before V6 ships, and you’re choosing to trust a system with a disclosed hole in it, caps or not.

Thanks,
From the Raycash team

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This week: our waitlist crossed 45,000, a French court kept the EU's crypto tax data rules in force despite a recent breach, Zcash is targeting a November upgrade to triple payment speed, and a16z's actual paper names the privacy tools banks would need to go permissionless.

In House

A few things from our side first.

We just crossed 45,000 people on the waitlist. If you haven't joined yet, sign up on the new website and start earning Raypoints by completing tasks, live now.

Join the waitlist at raycash.xyz →

On Our Radar

Here is what got us excited this week:

45K on the waitlist, Zcash gets faster, and France keeps its tax database anyway.

This week: our waitlist crossed 45,000, a French court kept the EU’s crypto tax data rules in force despite a recent breach, Zcash is targeting a November upgrade to triple payment speed, and a16z’s actual paper names the privacy tools banks would need to go permissionless.

In House

What happened at Raycash this week:

We just crossed 45,000 people on the waitlist. If you haven’t joined yet, sign up on the new website and start earning Raypoints by completing tasks, live now.

Check it out

On Our Radar

What got our attention this week:

France keeps DAC8 in force, weeks after its own tax agency got hacked

France’s Council of State turned down an emergency bid from Bull Bitcoin and Paymium to suspend DAC8, the EU rule that forces crypto platforms to collect and report customer data to tax authorities. The court’s reasoning: the risk of that centralized database getting hacked, or used to physically target crypto holders, was too speculative to justify an emergency pause. The bigger case, on whether DAC8 is even legal, is still working its way through the courts.

Here’s the thing though. France’s own tax agency admitted in August that a hacker had already stolen data on 678,438 taxpayers. So “speculative” is doing a lot of work in that ruling, about a month after the exact scenario stopped being hypothetical for a database run by the same government.

Zcash’s next upgrade makes shielded payments three times faster

Zcash developers are targeting November 5 for NU7, an upgrade that cuts block time from 75 seconds down to 25. A shielded payment waiting on multiple confirmations, the kind an exchange or bridge requires before releasing funds, would clear in roughly a third of the time. Supply stays basically flat, block rewards get divided by three and the halving interval triples to match. Code is due September 30, testnet is October 6, and the final go or no-go call lands October 20.

Zcash’s ETF pulled in real institutional money right after it launched, and speed has always been the actual weak point of shielded payments next to a normal card tap. This isn’t as flashy as a listing, but it might be the upgrade that decides whether people actually spend ZEC or just hold it.

a16z’s compliance paper names the tools banks would actually use

We covered a16z’s case last week that permissionless blockchains already satisfy US AML law. Their full paper is worth reading directly, because it names the actual toolkit banks would use to get there: proofs that a counterparty isn’t on a sanctions list, or that reserves exceed liabilities, without publishing the books behind either claim. One tool they cite by name is Privacy Cash, a zero-knowledge protocol on Ethereum and Solana that lets institutions transact confidentially while still holding a viewing key an examiner can ask for.

Most of that toolkit is still early. a16z’s own paper says sanctions and provenance proofs are in pilot testing, not production. The legal argument reads pretty settled at this point. Whether banks actually build or adopt the cryptography is a slower question, and a separate one.

Thanks,
From the Raycash team

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LinkedIn Twitter Website

This week: the new Raycash site is live, Raypoints are starting to take shape, a16z published an interesting argument around permissionless chains and AML, Washington has a fairly consequential crypto vote coming up, and private yield keeps moving closer to something ordinary people might actually use.

In House

A few things from our side first.

The new Raycash website is live.

We have been working on it for a while, so there is a lot that changed visually, although the part we care about most is what is happening behind the homepage. You can now create an account, complete challenges and earn Raypoints. The first challenges are already up, and we will be adding more as we go, including a few that are tied more closely to how people actually use Raycash rather than simply following us around the internet.

If you have been waiting for the beta, it is worth making an account now. You can start building up Raypoints while access continues to open, and beta invites are still going out in waves.

Join the waitlist at raycash.xyz →

On Our Radar

Here is what got us excited this week:

a16z says permissionless blockchains can meet US AML rules

a16z crypto put out a paper this week that is probably more important for banks than the headline makes it sound. Their argument is that US AML and sanctions rules do not require financial institutions to operate on infrastructure they control. The Bank Secrecy Act asks firms to build reasonable risk programs around the activity they conduct, which still leaves room for transactions to settle on public networks like Ethereum.

It sounds obvious when written that way. In practice, a lot of institutional blockchain discussions over the last few years have started from the assumption that public chains create a compliance problem while private infrastructure is inherently easier to manage. That distinction has already been getting blurry anyway. BlackRock has been running BUIDL on Ethereum since 2024, and Apollo has put tokenized credit across several permissionless networks. The infrastructure is already being used.

What a16z is doing here is giving the legal argument a much clearer shape. That could end up being useful for the person inside a bank who already wants to use public infrastructure and needs something credible to put in front of legal and compliance. Once that conversation starts happening inside more institutions, the question becomes less about whether permissionless infrastructure can be used and more about what controls need to sit around it.

Bessent pushes for CLARITY Act cloture, and Section 10307 is the real story

The CLARITY Act is heading into one of those procedural votes that sounds boring until you look at what is actually hanging on it.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been publicly urging senators to support the cloture motion scheduled for Tuesday, September 15. It needs 60 votes. Republicans have 53 seats, so some Democratic support is required, and expectations around passage have dropped sharply over the past few months.

The section we are watching most closely is 10307.

It would require Treasury to formally study the privacy and financial inclusion benefits of self-custody wallets. On paper, that sounds modest. In practice, getting self-custody recognized directly in statute would matter a lot.

Right now, many of the boundaries around wallets, custody, privacy and market infrastructure are still being worked out through regulators, enforcement actions and court cases. Legislation gives the industry a much firmer reference point.

So while most of the coverage will naturally focus on whether the bill advances, there is a quieter question underneath it: how much legal room will US users ultimately have to hold and transact with digital assets on their own terms?

Private vaults are becoming the norm

Another private yield product went live this week.

AnomaPay launched Shielded Morpho Vaults, allowing users to deposit into Morpho lending vaults without putting their balances and positions on display for anyone with a block explorer.

The system uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify what needs to be verified while keeping the underlying user information private.

What makes this interesting is the timing.

A few months ago, Zama and Morpho launched confidential DeFi yield infrastructure built around FHE and aimed much more at the institutional side of the market. Now we are seeing a separate team arrive at a similar product idea for retail users using a different cryptographic stack.

That starts to feel like a pattern.

Onchain yield inherited radical financial transparency because that was the easiest architecture to build first. Every deposit visible, every withdrawal visible, every position traceable back through a wallet.

There is no particularly good reason that needs to remain the default.

Morpho already simplified the lending experience by letting vaults handle market selection for users. Privacy feels like the next obvious piece of that UX: earn onchain without publishing your financial life along the way.

We expect to see a lot more of this.Thanks,
From the Raycash team

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Raycash Private Beta is live and we shipped to Sepolia, US sheriffs stepped back from the CLARITY Act fight, Ethereum researchers worked out how much gas a private transaction actually needs, and World open-sourced its identity-proving toolkit.

In House

Some updates on what happened at Raycash this week:

Raycash Private Beta opened last week. Two hundred people are in the app right now, poking at every corner of it, and their feedback has been monumental in improving the experience so far.

If you want to see confidential balances and transfers running for real, this is the first place to do it.

Beta access is still opening up in waves. Join the waitlist at raycash.xyz →

On Our Radar

Here is what got us excited this week:

National Sheriffs’ Association drops opposition to the CLARITY Act

The National Sheriffs’ Association had opposed the CLARITY Act since May, warning that Section 604, the provision shielding non-custodial developers from money-transmitter liability, would give mixers and DeFi platforms a blanket exemption from AML rules. On September 3, the association changed its position to neutral. A Senate cloture vote is scheduled for September 15 and needs 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats.

Section 604 protects code, not custody. Treating that as automatically dangerous was always the weaker argument, and it is notable that the group making it has now stepped back. The real obstacle left is unrelated to law enforcement: unresolved questions about how to limit a sitting president’s ability to profit from digital assets.

Optimism publishes framework mapping the onchain privacy tradeoff space

Optimism lays out six evaluation axes (what is hidden, usability, cost, regulatory compliance, maturity, ecosystem) across privacy architectures from consortium networks to private validiums, citing ERC-7984 (same framework used by Raycash) and its own Privacy Boost SDK, live on OP Mainnet since April 2026 and sanctions-screened via TRM Labs. A useful competitive map of how the market is segmenting privacy-by-design choices, and a direct reference point for where Raycash sits on that spectrum.

World open-sources ProveKit

World has open-sourced ProveKit, the zero-knowledge identity toolkit that has been running inside World ID since April. It lets someone prove a claim, such as age or valid ID ownership, without revealing the document behind it, and runs entirely on the user’s own device. The release is MIT-licensed and lands days after reports of a major driver’s license data leak.

A company with World’s user base putting real engineering behind on-device proofs is a meaningful signal for the rest of the industry. It suggests the next wave of adoption comes from whoever makes the unglamorous parts of this actually work, not from another paper.

Thanks,
From the Raycash team

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Why In Confidence

This is our first issue, so a word on why we are doing it.

Privacy in crypto is still treated as a niche. A feature for a particular type of protocol, user, or transaction.

We think that changes over the next few years.

Payments, payroll, savings, trading, credit, identity: almost every financial activity becomes harder to take seriously onchain once you assume that every balance, counterparty, and transaction should be visible to everyone forever.

But better infrastructure alone will not make privacy mainstream.

The space grows if all of us grow it.

That means building better products, but also explaining the technology properly, sharing what works, talking openly about what does not, and giving more people a reason to care about confidentiality in the first place.

That is what In Confidence is for.

In House

Some updates on what happened at Raycash this week:

In case you missed it

This week, we joined Zama to talk about what has been happening at Raycash: the confidential primitives we have been building and open-sourcing, where the product is heading, and Deployoor.

The bigger idea behind all of it is simple.

Programmable confidentiality should not live inside one application.

The useful primitives need to become infrastructure that other developers can pick up, combine, and build on top of. Raycash is one expression of that infrastructure. Deployoor is another.

The interview goes into how we are thinking about both.

Watch the full conversation

Our confidential-primitives are being audited by tier-1 firm BurraSec

Raycash is one of the first applications building on the Zama stack. As such, we had to build so much from scratch, from tooling to smart contracts. And we’re proudly open-sourcing everything that can help other devs build on Zama as well. All under MIT License.

The first of such public good codebases will be the confidential-primitives library: a set of smart contracts distilled from months of trial and errors. It will evolve continuously, and today it comes with new Wrappers for improved privacy and a singleton RecurringAllowance smart contract, similar in spirit to Permit2, that can be freely used by any project.

The audit process has started on the first half of August and we can’t wait to have the contracts production-ready for everyone to use.

On Our Radar

A new space with hand-picked news from the privacy space. Here is what got us excited this week:

Grayscale launches the first Zcash ETF

ZCSH started trading Tuesday on NYSE Arca, turning Grayscale’s nine-year-old Zcash trust into the first spot ETF tracking a privacy coin. The fund charges a 2.5% fee, and Grayscale’s Head of Index tied the pitch directly to privacy as a theme, not just Zcash as an asset: exposure through a normal brokerage account, no wallet, no seed phrase, no shielded address to manage yourself.

That distribution move matters more than the ticker. A privacy asset just became something a financial advisor can put in a portfolio next to bitcoin, without ever touching the technology that makes it private. The product is regulated and custodied like anything else on NYSE Arca. The privacy stays underneath, doing its job without asking the buyer to understand it.

Ethereum starts taking the public mempool seriously

Ethereum core developers are discussing encrypted mempools this week.

The problem is familiar: pending Ethereum transactions are visible before execution. Searchers can inspect them, reorder around them, or trade against the information they reveal. This is usually known as MEV (Maximal extractable value).

That architecture made sense when Ethereum was considerably smaller. At today’s scale, it amounts to broadcasting trading intent before settlement.

The difficult part is not agreeing that this should change. It is finding an encryption system that can operate within Ethereum’s latency, throughput, and decentralization constraints.

For years we have discussed about solutions to the MEV problem, and finally there might a consensus on what the best solution should be. Transaction privacy is starting to move from an application-layer feature to a protocol design.

Treasury starts writing the Genius Act Rulebook

The U.S. Treasury has proposed its first major rules for putting the GENIUS Act into practice, including who counts as a stablecoin issuer and how foreign players are treated.

One line caught our attention: Treasury says stablecoins should be treated as payment and settlement tools, not forced into rules built for traditional investments.

That sounds obvious, but it is a meaningful shift. The debate is moving from whether stablecoins belong in finance to how they should operate once they do.

Thanks,
From the Raycash team.