I'll be honest — The practical question isn’t philosophical. It’s simple: how is a regulated institution supposed to use a public blockchain without exposing everything it does?
A fund can’t broadcast its trading strategy in real time. A bank can’t reveal counterparties on every transfer. A market maker can’t show inventory movements before settlement. That’s not secrecy for the sake of it. That’s basic market function.
Most crypto systems treat privacy as an add-on. You build in public, then later try to patch over transparency with mixers, selective disclosures, or special compliance layers. It always feels backward. Regulators get nervous. Institutions hesitate. Builders end up maintaining two versions of reality — one public, one private — stitched together awkwardly.
The friction isn’t ideological. It’s operational. Compliance teams need auditability. Regulators need lawful access. Firms need confidentiality. Users expect fairness. If privacy only appears in “exception cases,” then every normal transaction leaks signal. Over time, that leakage becomes risk. Risk becomes cost. Cost becomes avoidance.
So privacy by design starts earlier. It assumes that not all data should be universally visible, but still accountable under law. It assumes settlement can be verifiable without being fully exposed. It treats confidentiality as infrastructure — like clearing, custody, or reporting — not as a feature toggle.
Something like @Fogo Official , built on the Solana Virtual Machine, only matters if it can handle that tension at scale. Fast execution is useful. But regulated finance will use it only if privacy and compliance are structurally embedded, not negotiated after deployment.
It might work for institutions that need performance without public leakage. It will fail if privacy remains cosmetic — or if regulators can’t trust what they can’t easily see.
