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.