The most essential primitive in digital assets is the ability to send and receive assets.
Without this critical ability, all other utilities are rendered useless. Wallets, DeFi, trading… nothing makes sense if you can’t send and receive.
For safety, sovereignty and freedom of programmable money to exist, we MUST have privacy.
To date, there is no reasonable, scalable and regulatory-compliant method of achieving privacy in mass transact-ability.
There are 3 main methods of achieving private transactions:
Mixing and tumbling are the closest thing onchain to money laundering. These services blend user assets with others' to hide their origin, breaking the traceable link on public blockchains. Some services use methods like sending assets to centralized exchanges, and exchange tokens for popular and liquid L1 tokens, then use assets on totally different exchanges to buy the original assets and send them over.
There is a famous saying: Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck… it’s a duck. They’re essentially laundering money.
Mixing and Tumbling is a toxic and dangerous sector. Many of the founders have been arrested, or are already serving long sentences in prison.
Private blockchains are also being targeted by regulators and are extremely expensive to prop up and keep operating.
Furthermore, AI is used to monitor these services. Assets as well as wallets are tagged and tracked.