Business Privacy, Harder & More Valuable Than You Think
summary
Business privacy proves far harder than consumer privacy and becomes essential to unlock cross‑company tokenized workflows that claim 99% less cycle time, 20–30% less inventory, and ~50% lower admin cost. EY builds open‑source solutions — Nightfall (ZK rollup payments) and Starlight (private Solidity→ZK circuits) — funded ~$30M over eight years, using X.509 certificate identities for compliance. ZKPs are chosen over TEEs; performance has improved ~10,000× since 2018, current throughput ≈1 txn/s, now practical for financial use cases (DEXs, securities) but not yet for millions of NFTs/day.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction to Paul Brody and business privacy
- 0:49Why business privacy is harder than consumer privacy
- 1:15The value of privacy in enterprise coordination
- 2:12How modern supply chains complicate coordination
- 3:12Tokenization and smart contracts for business processes
- 4:17Two types of privacy: Money vs. agreement terms
- 5:14EY’s Nightfall (ZK rollup) and Starlight (private smart contracts)
- 6:18Five challenges in enterprise privacy solutions
- 7:56Regulatory compliance and confidentiality in privacy tech
- 9:25Key requirements for enterprise privacy solutions
- 10:33Privacy challenges in supply chain traceability
- 11:06Four major privacy tech choices (ZKPs, MPC, HE, TEEs)
- 12:10Why EY chose zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs)
- 13:25Evolution of Nightfall from prototype to production
- 14:03Early high-value use cases for private transactions
- 14:33Smart contracts for enforcing business agreements
- 15:31Future of scalable, general-purpose privacy solutions
- 16:11Performance improvements in ZKP technology
- 17:15Why EY is an Ethereum maxi firm
- 18:25Q&A: Other Big Four firms entering blockchain
related talks
24mInstitutions want onchain privacy, too
20mImportance of Data Protection & ZK for Scaling Web3 Adoption
17mZK for the Enterprise - Quod Erit Demonstrandum (What Will Need to be Proven)
17mZK Identity With No Compromises
20mDeep Dive into Privacy Enhancing Technologies
20mPrivacy, the Missing Link
29mWhy Privacy Is the Missing Link to Web3 Adoption
22mHow Zero Knowledge Proofs Change the Narrative Around Privacy