Efficiency

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Ethereum’s roadmap continues to unfold with a pivotal fork set for November, aimed at boosting scalability and streamlining efficiency across the network. With scalability long viewed as ETH’s biggest hurdle, this fork represents a critical step toward unlocking its full potential as the world’s leading smart contract platform.

Why This Fork Matters For Ethereum’s Long-Term Roadmap

Leading smart contract platform, Ethereum, is set for another important milestone this November. Sequence has highlighted on X that the Fusaka upgrade is a foundational hard fork infrastructure designed to strengthen the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) while ensuring seamless compatibility for builders.

This upgrade is engineered to abstract the blockchain complexity and deliver smoother authentication and user flows across the blockchain ecosystem. The best part is that Sequence is already ahead of the curve by having the tools and infrastructure that prepare developers for Fusaka’s impact today.

While the Fusaka upgrade aims at strengthening the ETH ecosystem, Wendy J has noted that ETH has seen a notable price dip, as the SentientAGI GRID chat has flagged some activity behind the move. According to the AI platform, several 100,000 ETH transfers were recorded in the past 24 hours.

Interestingly, this kind of large-scale transfer suggests that major holders are likely either profit-taking after the run-up or repositioning their capital. Sentient Chat also listed other factors that could have contributed to the market-wide dump.

Source: Chart from Wendy J on X

In the meantime, analyst Wendy advised the community to use Sentient Chat for any crypto-related questions. With Sentient Chat, you can instantly generate asset reports fueled by DeFi data, request trading insights tailored to current conditions, or even deploy autonomous agents to handle on-chain tasks in real time to enhance decision-making and yield optimization.

Why This Correction Looks Healthy, Not Critical

On the daily time frame, the recent correction in Ethereum has pushed the Relative Strength Index (RSI) into a critical oversold zone, a level we have not witnessed since the major accumulation phase back in July. BTCBlueWhale mentioned that there is nothing critical in this current correction. Meanwhile, back in July, ETH showed the same setup, and the price dipped into oversold territory, which retested the previous resistance level, and used that structure as a springboard for a massive rally.

Currently, the daily chart is printing a very similar scenario with trading in a comparable accumulation zone and showing a clear resistance-to-support (R/S) flip, which is a classic sign of structure holding the price strong. Layering on top of that, the setup aligns almost perfectly with the PO3 strategy.

ETH trading at $4,003 on the 1D chart | Source: ETHUSDT on Tradingview.com

Featured image from iStock, chart from Tradingview.com

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Believe it or not, DeFi has a transparency problem. Transparency is one of the cornerstones of decentralized finance, but radical transparency also comes with unintended costs. While it may be fine for pseudonymous retail users, it creates strategic friction for capital allocators, institutional players, and protocol builders.

Summary

Transparency has hidden costs: In DeFi, wallet doxxing, alpha leakage, and MEV extraction turn “openness” into a disadvantage, compromising privacy, safety, and competitiveness.
Unfair market dynamics: Public mempools enable frontrunning and sandwiching, with bots extracting over $1.9B in MEV on Ethereum — an invisible tax on users.
Privacy ≠ secrecy: True privacy creates fairer markets by protecting strategies while keeping outcomes verifiable. It’s about efficiency, not opacity.
Zero-knowledge proofs unlock balance: ZKPs enable compliance checks, proof-of-liquidity, and private execution without exposing wallets, strategies, or counterparties.
The future is programmable privacy: To attract institutions, DeFi must integrate privacy-first infrastructure that balances regulation, efficiency, and confidentiality.

There is such a thing as too much transparency. Even beyond privacy concerns, DeFi’s current default to pseudonymous transactions is not the right infrastructure for many of these participants. Wallet doxxing, alpha leakage, and MEV are direct consequences of a system where your every move is public before it’s final.

DeFi needs to move towards an approach where it can carefully balance transparency with privacy that promotes market efficiency.

The hidden costs of transparent markets

On public blockchains, every transaction, strategy, and wallet can be tracked in real time. That includes large positions, fund flows, and arbitrage routes. This creates a new playing field for market participants that leads to scenarios that never existed before in the world of TradFi. One where there are new risks, many aren’t willing to assume.

The starting point for these hidden problems is wallet doxxing. Pseudonymous addresses can and have been identified and tied back to their owners. There are even platforms dedicated to rewarding users for doing so. This turns high-value addresses into permanent public ledgers of activity and compromises their anonymity, safety, and competitive strategy.

There’s also a strategic cost. The moment an institutional wallet becomes identifiable, every trade becomes a signal that the address owner might or might not want publicly broadcast. This means alpha gets copied instantly, or changes in strategic direction get leaked prematurely. On-chain strategies like arbitrage, yield farming, or liquidity routing are routinely cloned, sandwiched, and drained by bots within minutes. This creates an uncompetitive environment where firms would be leaking trade secrets into a public forum.

Worst of all: frontrunning and MEV are now normalized. Public mempools let bots reorder or sandwich trades before they settle. The Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem has seen over $1.9 billion in MEV extracted, leading many to call it an “invisible tax” paid by users simply for interacting with the system.

Privacy as market infrastructure

We need to move past binaries and realize that privacy is not about compromising transparency. Privacy is about fair market conditions, and ultimately, market efficiency. Without privacy, DeFi becomes a zero-sum game dominated by bots and extractors. With it, DeFi becomes a more viable infrastructure layer for institutions, market makers, and real economic activity.

Luckily, we have the technology to create these nuances, and we have it at the infrastructure level. The main balancing act for privacy in DeFi comes with the ability to verify outcomes without revealing inputs, which is what zero-knowledge infrastructure enables. It enables confidential price discovery, fair execution, and strategic discretion, all without sacrificing transparency.

We can have market conditions that are fair and efficient by keeping the how, what, and when transparent — all without unnecessarily exposing the who.

A privacy-first approach to DeFi infrastructure using ZKPs unlocks this balance by allowing a participant to prove something is true without revealing the underlying data. Likewise, it enables new use cases that make DeFi even more appealing. Imagine:

Compliance without exposure: Prove KYC status or jurisdictional eligibility without sharing personal details.
Proof-of-liquidity: Show solvency or capital commitments without disclosing wallets or balances.
Anti-front-running execution: Run private auctions or batch orders where trade intent is hidden until settlement.

Private DeFi upgrades how data flows between counterparties, and they redefine what it means to transact in the open.

Institutional adoption needs programmable privacy

Many retail users already flock to these benefits, proving that private DeFi marks the next step in crypto adoption. We’re already seeing the rise of private trading pools and confidential rollups.

Institutional newcomers will soon look for similar benefits, especially solutions that streamline compliance with a privacy-first approach. Many onchain compliance mechanisms allow parties to transact confidently while ensuring that they remain regulatorily aligned. Hybrid models are also emerging where transparency is offered where it’s needed (for auditors, regulators, or DAOs), and privacy where it’s not (for trading strategies, counterparties, and wallet activity).

The key is striking the right balance between legal compliance and user confidentiality. A privacy-first approach to DeFi infrastructure provides institutions with the right tools to achieve this and creates healthy market dynamics.

We need to stop treating privacy as a threat to legitimacy. In reality, privacy is what makes legitimacy scalable. Private DeFi means protecting alpha, enabling efficient participation, and rewarding the most effective market participants by letting the right strategies succeed in an open system. More so, they can do so while demonstrating that they operate on the right side of regulations.

If we want DeFi to be more than a speculative playground, we must give builders and institutions the tools actually to compete, and privacy is the starting point.

Rob Viglione

Rob Viglione is the co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs, the development studio behind several leading web3 projects, including zkVerify, Horizen, and ApeChain. Rob served in the US Air Force for several years and was deployed to Afghanistan, where he supported Special Operations Task Force intelligence efforts. During this time, he developed an early interest in Bitcoin, recognizing its potential benefits for countries with unstable economies. Rob is deeply interested in web3 scalability, blockchain efficiency, and zero-knowledge proofs. His work focuses on developing innovative solutions for zk-rollups to enhance scalability, create cost savings, and drive efficiency. He holds a PhD in finance, an MBA in finance and marketing, and a Bachelor’s degree in physics and applied mathematics. Rob currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Puerto Rico Blockchain Trade Association.