Cryptography is close to losing the stablecoin privacy race. We’ve spoken to a lot of teams in the stablecoin space over the last weeks, and the pattern is clear. Every single one of them confirmed that privacy is needed. Most interestingly, this demand doesn’t come from a feeling of privacy as a moral obligation but from crisp customer demand. That kind of commercial pull is rare and is what creates this momentum for privacy tech. So far so good, but cryptography based solutions are losing ground right now because of today’s performance limits. Why? Payments are brutal. You’re talking 10k sustained TPS on the low end and up to 250k if things scale. Nobody sees how MPC, FHE, or ZK can handle this today, so they fall back to centralized TEEs. And I get it. They need to ship. From a user perspective, even a centralized TEE is a privacy upgrade compared to the zero privacy blockchains offer today. But long term this is risky. We finally have a chance to go beyond web2 levels of privacy and user sovereignty. If we punt now, the entire direction of the ecosystem could get locked in. The hard truth: there’s no solution out there today that matches the performance they need. And they can’t wait two years for the promised improvements or for specialized hardware to arrive. They need something that works next year, meaning real solutions need to be production ready after Q1 or Q2. Our goal is to give these teams a real choice between TEEs and cryptography. That won’t come from generic encrypted EVMs. The generality tax is too high and the window shaped by real commercial deployments will be closed by the time they reach sufficient performance (if they ever do). It needs dedicated, highly optimized constructions that max out what is mathematically possible.