For years, transparency was blockchain’s biggest selling point for enterprises. Now it has become its biggest liability.
Those Who Have Nothing to Hide, Show Everything
In 2017, Walmart and IBM announced a partnership that became the canonical proof of what blockchains could do for enterprises. Specifically, the pilot focused on food traceability: track mangoes from Latin American farms to US store shelves, and pork all the way through the Chinese supply chain.
The average time to track the entire story of a product went from 7 days to 2.2 seconds.
The pitch was all about transparency: having a shared, immutable ledger that everyone could read meant no one company could have hidden a contaminated batch or a fraudulent certificate anymore.
The logic made sense: accountability required visibility, and blockchain offered it by design.
Most participants in the IBM Food Trust consortium — with Walmart’s exception, which made it mandatory for all its suppliers in 2020 — probably never moved beyond early pilots.
In hindsight, the enthusiasm from most businesses may have had more to do with transparency-washing than actual deployment.
But it teaches us one important thing: back then, transparency was the entire product.
Mangoes & Money
That narrative held strong as long as the thing being tracked was a physical good. But then, almost 10 years later, blockchains finally found PMF in moving tokenized money (e.g. stablecoins), and full visibility quickly turned into a serious liability.
A company that settles contractor payments in stablecoins on a public network is publishing data that is far more sensitive than the origin of some mangoes.
For example, its payroll, along with all the related information like amounts and frequency.
Competitors or talent recruiters don’t need a name attached to reconstruct how many people you employ and at what compensation level: blockchain analytical firms built profitable businesses around providing the tools that make this data easy to read.
Treasury teams are the ones having the hardest time. When they move reserves into a yield position, they’re sharing where their capital sits to a market that has every reason to use that information.
The infrastructure has remained the same, but the players have changed, and with them, their needs. Moving goods is not moving money, and the transparency that made public blockchains trustworthy for the first use case makes them dangerous for the second.
Cypherpunks Did It First
The privacy problem in crypto is deeply rooted in the cypherpunk original spirit of our industry, and it dates back many more years than stablecoins.
In 2009, for the first time, Bitcoin introduced a pseudonymous open network that no single entity controls.
But pseudonymity is not anonymity. Five years later, Monero launched with one premise: unconditional privacy for everyone.
It took Bitcoin’s ethos and technology — the UTXO model, the lack of a central authority that can be pressured — and rebuilt it with privacy at its core.
It is, in many ways, the most intellectually honest implementation of financial privacy on distributed ledgers ever built. The people behind it understood something real: financial surveillance is a form of control, and any system with a disclosure switch can have that switch flipped by someone with enough leverage, whether economic or legal.
So they removed the switch entirely.
Monero’s privacy is total because it was designed for individuals who wanted out of systems that required trust. But no legal entity can operate on infrastructure where proving anything to anyone is structurally impossible.
Once you realize that full privacy is a no-go for businesses, you’re left with one viable solution: selective disclosure.
Back to Bitcoin
The principle is simple: transaction details are private by default and visible only to the parties involved, but auditable on request to whoever has the right to see them.
It gets data ownership back to you: you pick who you share it with, by choice or by obligation.
RGB implements this on Bitcoin, the only network that has run without interruption for 15 years, and no one has ever managed to shut down. The same protocol also enables stablecoins like USDT to be run natively on Bitcoin.
No one can see who paid what to whom, or when. The data still exists, held by the parties involved, but the ledger now shows nothing.
Which, by the way, is how money has always worked until they went onchain.
Good luck out there, and catch up with me on Utexo.
