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 Withdrawn proposals can come back, though.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
