Blockchains were built as public networks in the best tradition of open-source technology. But their future is private. And that future is arriving faster than most people realize.

This month, Tempo — the Stripe-backed payment blockchain that raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation, with Visa, Mastercard, Paradigm, and UBS among its backers — published a detailed architectural proposal for private enterprise stablecoin transactions. Tempo is not a scrappy privacy-native project. It is arguably the most institutionally credentialed blockchain launch in years, built by people who deeply understand what banks, payment processors, and enterprises actually need. When a network with that pedigree makes privacy a launch-week priority, it isn’t a signal. It’s a verdict.

The question of whether or not institutional chains will be private has been settled. What remains is the harder one: what kind of privacy are we actually building?

The problem with public chains

Bitcoin solved a problem that had stumped computer scientists and bankers for decades: how to transfer value between strangers without a trusted intermediary. Ethereum took blockchains further, offering programmable value alongside value transfer — smart contracts that could encode agreements, automate settlement, and eliminate entire categories of middlemen. Then came stablecoins, which married programmability to the stability of the dollar, and from there, the migration of real-world assets to onchain protocols began.

Each wave has brought added institutional interest, capital, and ambition. And now, as regulatory clarity emerges, institutions are ready to deploy resources onchain.

But there’s one thing holding them back — a fundamental flaw that becomes more consequential the larger the numbers get.

Everything is visible. Every wallet. Every balance. Every transaction, in real time, is readable by anyone with a browser. In financial markets, this is not a feature. It is an existential problem. Imagine if every hedge fund’s positions, every corporate treasury’s holdings, every pension fund’s rebalancing trade appeared on a public screen the moment it was executed. Sophisticated counterparties would front-run. Competitors would map your strategy. Criminals would identify targets. The financial system as it exists today would seize up overnight.

Blockchains have been asking institutions to accept exactly that. Tempo’s announcement on April 16 is the clearest possible signal that institutions have finally said: no.

Architecture is destiny

Here is where the conversation gets more consequential — and more nuanced.

Tempo’s solution is Zones: private parallel blockchains connected to the main network. Within a Zone, participants transact privately. The public sees only cryptographic proofs of validity, not underlying data. Compliance controls travel with the token automatically. Assets remain interoperable with Tempo Mainnet. For enterprises running payroll, treasury operations, or settlement workflows, it is a thoughtful and practical design.

But Tempo’s privacy model is operator-visible. The Zone operator — an enterprise or infrastructure provider — sees all transactions within its Zone. The public sees nothing. The operator sees everything. For many regulated institutions, this is acceptable, and may even be required. But it means privacy is contingent on trusting an intermediary. You have moved the visibility problem; you have not eliminated it.

This is not a criticism of Tempo. It is a description of a genuine architectural choice — one with real consequences for anyone thinking carefully about risk.

Zero-knowledge cryptography offers a different path. ZK proofs allow a party to prove that a transaction is valid without revealing the underlying data. A new generation of ZK-native blockchains builds this privacy-preserving functionality into the execution layer itself. Accounts execute transactions locally, with the chain storing only a cryptographic commitment. Nothing sensitive ever touches a public ledger. Transaction history is not browsable. And crucially, no operator has a god’s-eye view — privacy is enforced at the base layer, not delegated to an intermediary.

If Bitcoin gave us trustless transfer and Ethereum gave us programmable trust, ZK-native blockchains offer verifiable privacy: the ability to prove that everything happened correctly without revealing what actually happened.

Compliance without full transparency

The obvious objection is regulatory. Privacy and compliance have long been framed as incompatible — oil and water. That framing is becoming obsolete.

Regulatory compliance does not require that everyone can see your transactions. It requires that the right parties, under the right conditions, can verify that your transactions were legitimate. That is a meaningful distinction, and it is one that ZK cryptography is uniquely positioned to enforce. Selective, programmable disclosure — revealing what regulators need to see, nothing more — is not a workaround. It is a more precise implementation of what compliance actually demands.

Tempo’s model handles this at the operator level. ZK-native approaches handle it at the cryptographic level. Both satisfy the compliance requirement. But they distribute trust very differently.

The question that matters

The financial industry knows it needs to move onchain. It now knows — Tempo’s announcement makes this undeniable — that it cannot do so on fully public infrastructure. The era of public-by-default blockchains as the assumed standard for institutional finance is ending.

What comes next depends on a choice the industry is only beginning to make clearly: privacy through trusted operators, or privacy through cryptographic guarantees that require no trust at all.

Both are legitimate answers. But they are not equivalent. The privacy model you choose determines your risk surface, your compliance posture, and your exposure to the failure modes of the intermediaries you depend on. Architecture is not a technical detail to be resolved later. It is the decision that determines everything else.

The question for the industry is not whether privacy. That debate is over.

The question is what sort of privacy — and who, if anyone, you are willing to trust with the view.

TLDR

• IO Global submitted nine treasury proposals for 2026 to support Cardano’s Leios scaling roadmap.
• The company requested just under 50% of the funding it sought last year.
• Voting on the Cardano treasury proposals will remain open until May 24.
• Leios is expected to enter testnet in June with a mainnet launch planned by late 2026.
• IO Global projected a 10% to 65% throughput increase under the Leios upgrade.

Input Output Global has filed nine treasury proposals for 2026 as it prepares the Leios scaling rollout. The company said it seeks just under 50% of last year’s funding request. Voting remains open until May 24, while the roadmap centers on Leios testnet progress and a planned 2026 mainnet launch.

Cardano Treasury Request Targets Core Upgrades

Input Output Global detailed nine proposals tied to core infrastructure, developer tools, and economic changes. The firm said its combined request equals just under 50% of the prior year’s ask. It confirmed that community voting will remain open through May 24.

The roadmap aligns with its 2030 Vision for network growth and higher transaction capacity. The consensus proposal stated, “Cardano must scale from today’s approximately 800,000 transactions per month to over 27 million.” It added that “Leios is the mechanism purpose-built to get there.”

IO Global expects Leios to enter testnet in June and plans mainnet deployment by late 2026. However, its public tracker shows development in mid-stage, with testnet progress near 24%. Specifications appear largely complete, while testing continues toward broader validation.

The company projected a 10x to 65x throughput increase under the Leios upgrade. It said the change will preserve Cardano’s existing consensus mechanism. IO linked the scaling effort to support for DeFi, real-world assets, and enterprise use cases.

Layer 2 and Developer Reforms Expand Roadmap

IO Global placed Layer 2 initiatives within the broader scaling plan and named Hydra and Midgard rollup. The proposal stated that “only with both does Cardano have a credible L2 story.” It positioned the two systems as complementary components of the network’s expansion.

The company also requested 62.1 million ADA for ongoing network maintenance and operations. It valued the amount at over $15.8 million based on current market prices. IO said the funds will support node upgrades, monitoring tools, and security systems.

Several proposals addressed developer experience and onboarding challenges within the ecosystem. IO described the current environment as “fragmented” and said it deters growth. A six-month initiative will streamline tooling and reduce onboarding costs.

Internal research showed many developers leave due to high setup demands and unclear processes. One proposal aims to expand formal verification across smart contract development. IO said it will improve Plutus tooling so users avoid “a PhD and three months of setup.”

Other measures focus on user interaction and new economic functions within the protocol. Planned upgrades include “Babel Fees,” which would allow transaction fees in tokens other than ADA. The company also proposed wallet-based micro-fees to create fresh revenue streams.

A separate proposal called Pogun targets bitcoin liquidity within the ecosystem. The document described BTC as “the world’s most valuable digital asset” that remains “almost entirely idle.” IO said Cardano could serve as a credit and yield layer for that capital.

The crypto industry is frequently finding bankers involved in its top-priority regulatory efforts, and this time, a coalition of bank trade associations has asked the U.S. Department of the Treasury to extend the window in which the public can weigh in on implementation of last year’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.

In a letter sent this week to the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., bankers in the U.S. are asking that three different GENIUS Act rule proposals get extended comment periods, at least 60 days after another rule effort (at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) is finished. The OCC’s push to implement its rule for policing stablecoin issuers is meaningful to the outcome of other rules being pursued at the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), plus a related rulemaking at the FDIC.

All the efforts are “directly contingent on the OCC’s final framework,” the bankers contend. The collective efforts, in addition to regulatory proposals that haven’t yet emerged from the Federal Reserve and other agencies, “represent a body of regulatory work of extraordinary scope and complexity.”

The banking organizations, including the American Bankers Association and the Bank Policy Institute, said that their comments “will necessarily be more comprehensive, and therefore more useful to the agencies, if we have sufficient time to evaluate the proposed rules together and to evaluate each against the finalized OCC framework.”

The GENIUS Act is meant to be in place by 2027, though it’s not unusual for federal agencies to grant extensions of comment periods on complex rules. The Treasury Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the bank industry’s request.

The same bankers are also embroiled in a stablecoin-related debate with the crypto industry that’s so far managed to delay the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act for months, and potentially jeopardize its potential for becoming law this year.

Read More: U.S. Treasury proposes demands that stablecoin firms be set to police bad transactions

Even after more than a decade and a half, the identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, is still an active mystery that provokes discourse and disagreement.

In the last couple weeks, a New York Times piece authored by investigative journalist John Carreyrou suggested that Satoshi is in fact Adam Back, while the recent documentary Finding Satoshi pegged a two-person team, namely Hal Finney and Len Sassaman.

Protos has reviewed the evidence pointing to several of the internet’s favored candidates for this illustrious role and laid out our findings below.

Adam Back

Adam Back, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Blockstream, has often been labeled as a likely candidate for Satoshi.

Among the reasons for this is his identity as a cypherpunk, an online community which believed in the beneficial effects of freedom technology tools developed using cryptography.

Satoshi generally appears to be a cypherpunk, or at the very least to be sympathetic to cypherpunk ideas, regularly citing and conversing with others in the community.

Back was also behind HashCash, another cryptographically based digital cash technology that was cited by Satoshi.

Notably, there exist emails that Back has shared in court cases which seem to show Satoshi reaching out to Back to make sure that he appropriately cites the HashCash paper. This has led Carreyrou to ask us to consider if “Mr. Back…sent those emails to himself as a cover story.”

🔍 Reading Satoshi’s entrails

Carreyrou’s reporting also emphasized the fact that Back shared certain stylistic markers with Satoshi.

Among these similarities were certain phrases like “backup” and “human friendly” as well as inconsistent hyphenation in words like e-mail/email.

Despite these stylistic similarities, there are still differences, with Carreyrou noting, “Mr. Back made a lot of typos and had a rambling style when he posted to mailing lists, while Satoshi’s writing was crisp and mostly typo-free.”

Others, like YouTuber BarelySociable, have also suggested that Back is the most likely Satoshi candidate.

Back strongly denies being Satoshi.

He was also briefly considered as a candidate by Finding Satoshi; however, it concluded he didn’t post at the appropriate times to be Satoshi.

Hal Finney

Hal Finney was a cryptographer who was the first person to receive bitcoin (BTC) from Satoshi.

Like Back, he seems to have many of the necessary skills, even working on a previous digital cash, Reusable Proofs of Work.

Finney was the first person to participate in a BTC transaction with Satoshi.

Russia moved closer to formal crypto regulation after lawmakers advanced a key digital currency bill in its first reading. The proposal sets a timeline for licensed trading and stricter controls. It outlines phased enforcement starting in 2026 and extending into 2027.

Russia Advances Licensed Crypto Framework

The State Duma approved draft bill No. 1194918-8 during its first reading this week. The legislation defines a core structure for digital currency operations across Russia. It places crypto trading under the supervision of the Bank of Russia.

The proposal allows residents to buy and sell crypto through approved intermediaries starting July 2026. However, it bans unlicensed platforms from operating by July 2027. Authorities aim to shift activity into regulated channels and reduce informal trading networks.

Lawmakers also introduced related bills alongside the main framework. Another draft, No. 1194929-8, passed its first reading during the same session. Together, these measures outline a broader plan to reshape the domestic crypto market.

Key Rules Target Retail Access and Market Limits

The bill sets strict eligibility rules for digital assets available to retail users. Authorities limit access to highly liquid cryptocurrencies meeting defined thresholds. These thresholds include market capitalization, trading volume, and operational history.

Assets must maintain an average capitalization above five trillion rubles over two years. They must also show daily trading volume above one trillion rubles during that period. Additionally, each asset must have at least five years of trading history.

Retail participants must pass a qualification test before accessing crypto markets. Moreover, the bill caps annual purchases at 300,000 rubles through a single intermediary. These rules aim to control exposure while maintaining supervised participation.

The legislation also permits residents to use foreign accounts for crypto purchases. However, users must report all such transactions to tax authorities. At the same time, the law continues to ban crypto payments inside Russia.

Enforcement Plans Face Legal and Industry Concerns

Lawmakers introduced separate drafts to define penalties for violations under the new system. Draft No. 1209607-8 proposes criminal liability for unlicensed crypto services. It also mandates registration with the central bank for all operators.

However, the Supreme Court of Russia reviewed the proposal and declined support in its current form. The court stated that enforcement rules depend on the main framework. It noted that penalties cannot function without a finalized regulatory base.

This response signals delays in implementing strict enforcement mechanisms. Authorities must first finalize the core digital currency legislation. Only then can supporting measures take full effect across the system.

Meanwhile, industry participants continue to assess the proposed structure. Some local stakeholders warn that strict controls could shift activity outside regulated platforms. They argue that excessive limits may push trading into informal channels instead of formal markets.

Russia has maintained a cautious stance toward crypto since its 2021 digital assets law. That framework allowed ownership but banned payments using digital currencies. The new legislative package builds on that approach while tightening oversight and market access.

Consequently, the current bill represents a significant step toward centralized control of crypto activity. It reflects a policy direction focused on supervision, compliance, and restricted participation. Further readings and amendments will determine the final shape of Russia’s crypto market structure.