Crypto: Essential Guide: Privacy and accountability can coexist onchain, say panelists at Consensus Miami

Crypto: Essential Guide: Privacy and accountability can coexist onchain, say panelists at Consensus Miami

According to panelists at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference earlier this week, those tensions are increasingly solvable through an onchain “intelligence layer” that combines hybrid blockchain architecture with wallet-address-level monitoring.The idea is to split the work across different parts of the system. Private permissioned networks can give institutions the accountability and credibility they need, while public permissionless chains can provide liquidity, and blockchain-forensics tools can help platforms screen transactions at the wallet-address level without automatically tying every user to a real-world identity. Rajeev Bamra, global head of strategy for digital economy at Moody's Ratings, said the conventional intelligence layer answers three questions: "Who is it? What are they doing? And can I trust the record?" Those have been addressed in traditional finance by banks, custodians, clearinghouses and credit-rating agencies, he said. Bamra estimated the institutional digital-finance market at roughly $35 billion today, against more than $200 trillion in annual clearing-house flows in conventional finance, with growth of "over 100 or 150%" in the past 18 months. Blockchain architecture, he predicted, will not be uniformly public or private but a hybrid. "Private permission networks are going to offer the accountability, the credibility aspect," he said, while "the public permissionless brings the liquidity which the private permissions don't." Pauline Shangett, chief strategy officer at the non-custodial exchange ChangeNOW, firmly sided with the user-side argument. “Bitcoin at its core, at its origin was a semi-anonymous digital cash,” she said. ChangeNOW, which does not enforce KYC by default, works with AML providers and blockchain forensics firms to monitor flows at the wallet-address level. “All of this blockchain forensics infrastructure allows us to not map people who are passing funds through our system, but instead map their addresses,” Shan

Source: CoinDesk