Blockchains are going private. The only question left is what kind of privacy the industry will build, argues Schiller.. Blockchains were built as public networks in the best tradition of open-source technology. But their future is private. And that future is arriving faster than most people realize. This month, Tempo — the Stripe-backed payment blockchain that raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation , with Visa, Mastercard, Paradigm, and UBS among its backers — published a detailed architectural proposal for private enterprise stablecoin transactions. Tempo is not a scrappy privacy-native project. It is arguably the most institutionally credentialed blockchain launch in years, built by people who deeply understand what banks, payment processors, and enterprises actually need. When a
Blockchains are going private. The only question left is what kind of privacy the industry will build, argues Schiller.. Blockchains were built as public networks in the best tradition of open-source technology. But their future is private. And that future is arriving faster than most people realize. This month, Tempo — the Stripe-backed payment blockchain that raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation , with Visa, Mastercard, Paradigm, and UBS among its backers — published a detailed architectural proposal for private enterprise stablecoin transactions. Tempo is not a scrappy privacy-native project. It is arguably the most institutionally credentialed blockchain launch in years, built by people who deeply understand what banks, payment processors, and enterprises actually need. When a n The question of whether or not institutional chains will be private has been settled. What remains is the harder one: what kind of privacy are we actually building? Bitcoin solved a problem that had stumped computer scientists and bankers for decades: how to transfer value between strangers without a trusted intermediary. Ethereum took blockchains further, offering programmable value alongside value transfer — smart contracts that could encode agreements, automate settlement, and eliminate entire categories of mi