Institutional-Grade Blockchain Privacy: A Joint Report with Four Pillars

By 2026, blockchain has begun moving into actual financial infrastructure. BlackRock's BUIDL trades on Uniswap, JP Morgan's JPMD lives on Base, and Mastercard, Stripe, and others are all moving in the same direction. The remaining barrier is privacy.

We've co-authored a new report with Four Pillars examining what shape blockchain privacy needs to take to actually serve institutional finance.

The past decade has produced meaningful progress, but no single approach has cleared the bar for institutional use. The report traces the full arc: Monero made privacy default but stayed isolated. Zcash added selective disclosure via zk-SNARKs but lacked programmability. Tornado Cash brought privacy to EVM without compliance. Railgun added DeFi composability but couldn't track funds inside the pool. Privacy Pools separated legitimate funds at deposit, but only at deposit. More recent approaches like FHE (Zama, Inco) and institutional private chains (Canton, Prividium, Tempo Zones) trade off either performance or public-chain composability.

What institutions actually need comes down to 3 concrete requirements, distilled across MiCA, BSA, FATF Travel Rule, GDPR, EDPB Guidelines 02/2025, and equivalent frameworks across Asia:

1. Businesses must be able to see their own customers' transactions in plaintext
2. They must be able to provide records on authorized legal request
3. Onchain personal data must become unidentifiable once offchain originals are deleted

Privacy Boost is built to meet all three. It's a privacy SDK that combines ZK and TEE on a public EVM chain. ZK handles fund safety and onchain privacy. TEE accelerates proof generation to sub-500ms and serves as a scoped audit window. The user's spending key never touches the TEE, and forced withdrawal preserves self-custody even if the TEE disappears or turns malicious.

Read the full report: What is Institutional-Grade Blockchain Privacy?