The list continues to grow. Sui, zkSync, Polygon, and Solana were all built as fully transparent public networks, and all four now add confidential transactions. Cardano’s new Midnight sidechain does the same for that ecosystem. The goal is not anonymity. It is privacy that banks, accountants and regulators can support.
Why the sudden rush to hide transactions?
Public blockchains are built on transparency; everyone can read every balance and transfer. That was a selling point for years. It is now a barrier for the institutions where crypto will be courted in 2025. A bank will not keep payroll, cash movements or customer settlements in a ledger that competitors can view in real time. Tokenized real-world assets, encrypted stable currency flows and satisfies DeFi they all need a way to keep amounts and counterparties private while proving the math is correct.
The common thread is confidentiality, not anonymity. The details of a transaction are hidden from the public while the network can still verify them, and most of these chains let users release specific data to an auditor or regulator when necessary. It’s privacy built for regulated finance, not to avoid it.
The public chains are confidential
Four networks are driving this trend, each with a different approach and a different stage of progress.
Sui
Co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun confirmed on June 5 that Sui (@SuiNetwork) This year there will be confidential transfers. The feature uses range proofs to hide transfer amounts while still enforcing the offer, so unauthorized hitting remains impossible by design, Abiodun said. It is part of a broader 2026 roadmap that already includes gasless stablecoin transfers, on a network that has processed more than $1 trillion in stablecoin volume since August 2025. No definitive launch date has been given.
zkSync
Matter Labs has built its institutional game around Prividium, private chains that function as validiums. Execution and data stay off-chain in the infrastructure the institution controls, and only a zero-knowledge proof makes it to Ethereum. The first production implementation, Memento ZK Chain, was built in collaboration with Deutsche Bank. A separate effort, the Cari Network, aims to attract five regional banks in the US with more than $600 billion in combined deposits, with a pilot planned for the third quarter of 2026.
Polygon
In May, Polygon (@0xPolygon) has added a privacy configuration to its Chain Development Kit, allowing institutions to launch private chains that still tap public liquidity through AggLayer. The setup, built with Succinct Labs, stores raw transaction data within the institution’s owned infrastructure and only sends a cryptographic commitment and proof to Ethereum. The principle that Polygon reiterates is private data, public verification. It fits into the company’s Open Money Stack framing as the zkEVM mainnet beta is finalized.
Solana
@solana was here first, but with an asterisk. The confidential transfers were sent within the Token-2022 standard, using homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to hide transfer amounts and balances, with an optional auditor key for compliance. The catch is that the ZK ElGamal pilot program on which the feature depends has been disabled from the mainnet since mid-2025, after a researcher discovered a flaw that could have allowed forging valid proofs. It remains disabled pending a security audit, so confidential transfers won’t be usable on the live network for now.
Where does Midnight fit?
Midnight is not a public chain that focuses on privacy. It’s a new privacy-first sidechain that Cardano extends. It launched a federated mainnet on March 31, 2026, with Google and Vodafone as node operators. It uses a dual-token model, NIGHT for governance and DUST for transaction fees, plus a special language for confidential smart contracts. Founder Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) calls the approach “rational privacy” and has made it clear that Midnight is not after Monero users. Selective disclosure is built in, focusing on finances, healthcare and identity rather than anonymity.
Who else does this?
The names above are the loudest examples, not the entire field. On the $XRP General ledger, @Ripple Researchers have proposed a confidential token standard, XLS-0096, that would encrypt balances and transfer amounts for issued assets using EC-ElGamal encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, while keeping the total supply public. It’s still a proposal going through XRPL’s amendment process, though contributors pushed for it again this week.
The momentum also predates 2026. Litecoin (@litecoin) added optional confidential transactions via the MimbleWimble Extension Blocks in 2022, and $BTC payments routed through the Lightning Network remain completely off-chain, keeping most details out of public view as a byproduct of going off-chain. Privacy is no longer a niche pursued by a few special coins. It’s becoming a feature that almost every serious network expects to offer.
The standard private originals
Opposing all this is a group of chains that considered privacy the standard from day one.
- Monero ($XMR) hides sender, recipient and amount on every transaction via ring signatures, stealth addresses and RingCT. There is no opt-out. That purity is also the problem: exchanges including Binance and OKX have delisted it and it largely trades outside regulated platforms. The FCMP++ upgrade, now on a beta test network, replaces ring signatures with full-chain membership certificates to further increase anonymity.
- Zcash ($ZEC) offers a choice. Transactions can be transparent or shielded with zk-SNARKs, and display keys enable selective disclosure. That flexibility helped Monero overtake in market value by the end of 2025 and gave it a cleaner story for regulated products, although a recently disclosed vulnerability in the Orchard component has tested confidence.
- Canton (@CantonNetwork) is the institutional view of private-by-default. It is built for regulated financing and keeps transaction data visible only to the parties involved. DTCC tokenizes US government bonds on this; JPMorgan transfers its deposit token; and Visa joined in March as Super Validator, one of the current 55 that helps run the network.
Confidentiality versus anonymity is the real divide
Sorting these chains into public or private misses the actual split. The privacy-adding public chains and the institutional natives like Canton are converging on one model: encrypt the details, maintain public verifiability, and allow selective disclosure. The really different animals are Monero and, if shielded, Zcash, where the idea is to make transactions unlinkable rather than just confidential.
That difference determines who can use what. Confidential designs provide composability, liquidity, and a route through compliance, which is why banks are circling Sui, zkSync, Polygon, and Canton. Mandatory anonymity buys stronger privacy at the expense of exchange access and liquidity, as evidenced by the delisting of Monero.
The chains chasing institutions are betting that selective disclosure is enough. Does a network that the right authority can always look at count as private, or just as transparent to a smaller audience?
Sources
- ZKsync Prividium documentation explaining how Prividium private Validium chains keep data off-chain and anchor proofs to Ethereum.
- Polygon Labs Blog which describes the CDK privacy configuration, AggLayer connectivity, and the Open Money Stack.
- Solana documentation on the Confidential Transfer extension, noting that the ZK ElGamal proof program has been temporarily disabled on the mainnet pending a security audit.
- Canton network primary page on DTCC’s plan to tokenize government bonds on Canton.