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Private DeFi is also about market efficiency
GameFi Guides

Private DeFi is also about market efficiency

by admin



Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial.

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.



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How Private Equity Killed the American Dream
Gaming Gear

How Private Equity Killed the American Dream

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In her new book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, journalist and WIRED alum Megan Greenwell chronicles the devastating impacts of one of the most powerful yet poorly understood forces in modern American capitalism. Flush with cash, largely unregulated, and relentlessly focused on profit, private equity firms have quietly reshaped the US economy, taking over large chunks of industries ranging from health care to retail—often leaving financial ruin in their wake.

Twelve million people in the US now work for companies owned by private equity, Greenwell writes, or about 8 percent of the total employed population. Her book focuses on the stories of four of these individuals, including a Toys “R” Us supervisor who loses the best job she ever had and a Wyoming doctor who watches his rural hospital cut essential services. Their collective experiences are a damning account of how innovation is being replaced by financial engineering and the ways that shift is being paid for by everyone except those at the top.

In a review of Bad Company for Bloomberg, a longtime private equity executive accused Greenwell of seeking out sad stories with inevitably “sad endings.” But the characters Greenwell selected don’t just sit back and watch as private equity devastates their communities. The book is a portrait of not only how the American dream is being eroded but also the creative tactics people are using to fight back.

Greenwell spoke to WIRED late last month about what private equity is and isn’t, how it has transformed different industries, and what workers are doing to reclaim their power.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: What is private equity? How is the business model different from, say, venture capital?

Megan Greenwell: People confuse private equity and venture capital all the time, but it’s totally reasonable that normal people don’t understand the difference. Basically, the easiest way to explain the difference is that venture capital firms invest money, usually in startups. They’re essentially taking a stake in the company and expecting some sort of returns over time. They’re also generally playing a significantly longer game than private equity.

But the way private equity works, especially with leveraged buyouts, which is what I focus on in the book, is they’re buying companies outright. In venture capital, you put your money in, you’re entrusting it to a CEO, and you probably have a board seat. But in the leveraged buyout model, the private equity firm really is the owner and controlling decider of the portfolio company.

How do private equity firms define success? What kinds of companies or businesses are attractive to them?

In venture capital, VCs are evaluating whether to make a deal based solely on whether they think that company is going to become successful. They are looking for unicorns. Is this company going to be the next Uber? Private equity is looking to make money off of companies in ways that don’t actually require the company itself to make money. That is like the biggest thing.

So it’s less of a gamble.

It is very hard for private equity firms to lose money on deals. They’re getting a 2 percent management fee, even if they’re running the company into the ground. They’re also able to pull off all these tricks, like selling off the company’s real estate and then charging the company rent on the same land it used to own. When private equity firms take out loans to buy companies, the debt from those loans is assigned not to the private equity firm but to the portfolio company.



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Spaceship crashing on Arrakis while players drive toward it
Product Reviews

Dune: Awakening will have private servers at launch where players can disable taxes and enable ‘free for all’ PvP

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Dune: Awakening is out in three days (for deluxe and ultimate edition pre-purchasers) but here’s a last minute surprise: the survival MMO will support private servers. Funcom announced today that for Dune: Awakening “rentable private servers will be available from head start launch on June 5th!”

It’s worth noting you won’t be able to go hog wild with your private server settings as you might in a survival game like Ark, where you can change things like XP multipliers or item durability—though one feature, according to Funcom, will allow private servers to enable “free-for-all PvP.” More on that below.

In Dune: Awakening, each server is part of a “world” that contains other servers and shares common areas like trading posts, settlements, and the endgame “deep desert” zone. “This allows us to retain a neighborhood-like feel to the Hagga Basin and provide persistent, freeform building, and other server-demanding mechanics you typically see in survival games,” says Funcom.


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“We combine this with the large-scale multiplayer mechanics you would expect to find in MMOs where hundreds of players meet each other in social hubs and the Deep Desert to engage in social activities, trade, conflict, and more.”

Rather than wall off private servers completely from the rest of the community, “each private server in Dune: Awakening also belongs to a World consisting of several other private servers rented by other players,” Funcom says.

Each private server can support “40+ players” and a single world can contain “several hundred concurrent players, all who “share the same social hubs and a massive, constantly changing Deep Desert where players will meet to both explore and engage in conflict over spice.”

So, to be clear, private server players won’t mix with official server players at all, only players on other private servers.

Still, to prevent players on a private server from having a massive advantage when mingling and fighting with other private server players in the same world, that limits the customization options to a few features like PvP, taxes, and sandstorms.

Here are the features Funcom says private servers will be able to adjust.

  • Security Zones: you can disable security zones entirely, making all parts of Hagga Basin PvP enabled, or you can choose to have pockets of PvP like on official servers
  • Taxation: you can disable taxation on your server
  • Sandstorms: you can disable sandstorms, making them not appear on your server.

That’s not a whole lot to get excited about, but it’s good news for people who want to be able to fight other players right from the get-go in Hagga Basin, and the idea of not paying your Dune taxes to the Emperor is a nice one. Sandstorms, at least in the early game, aren’t that big of a deal: you just have to take cover for about 30 seconds as they pass through the server.

There won’t be an admin control panel or the ability to transfer characters between servers, though Funcom says it “will evaluate this functionality post-launch.” However, you can visit other private servers and even claim land on them (if you have the server password), something you can’t do while visiting official servers.

If you’re interested in renting a Dune: Awakening private server, Funcom says they’re available through Gportal, Nitrado, and xRealm. Pricing and amount of player slots varies pretty widely between all three services.



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Tokenized private credit breaks the $13 billion barrier
NFT Gaming

Tokenized private credit breaks the $13 billion barrier

by admin



The tokenized private credit market is quietly emerging as one of the fastest-growing sectors in real-world assets (RWA), with over $13.3 billion in assets under management.

Once the domain of institutions, private credit is now moving on-chain, driven by platforms like Figure and Tradable, and attracting backing from heavyweights like Apollo, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton.

As asset managers race to bring traditionally illiquid debt markets onto blockchain rails, tokenization is reshaping how credit is accessed, managed, and traded—offering both retail and institutional investors a new gateway into the $3 trillion private credit universe.

Figure and Tradable

Figure, a company that has received investment from Morgan Creek Capital, Apollo, and Ribbit Capital, has over $12 billion in assets. It also runs a marketplace for Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) and helps clients borrow against their homes. 

Tradable is the second-biggest player in the tokenized private credit industry. It boasts over $1.8 billion in on-chain assets. Backed by Parafi, Matter Labs, and Victory Park Capital, Tradable helps asset managers to tokenize their assets. 

Tradable also helps individuals to participate in the private credit industry that has long been reserved to institutions. Other top players in the tokenized private credit industry are Maple (SYRUP), Pact, Mercado Bitcoin, and Centrifuge (CFG).

Tokenizaed Private credit assets | Source: RWA

Large companies in the private equity industry are getting interested in the tokenized private credit sector. Apollo Global, which has over $641 billion in private credit assets, has already launched the Apollo Diversified Credit Securitize Fund or ACRED in January. 

Similarly, companies like VanEck, Franklin Templeton, and BlackRock have all launched tokenized assets. BlackRock’s BUIDL has crossed over $3 billion in assets, while Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX fund has over $706 million in assets.

Private credit industry is growing

The private credit industry is one of the fastest-growing areas in finance. A report by the Alternative Investment Management Association estimated that the market crossed the $3 trillion asset, a figure that is continuing to grow.

The sector has grown mostly in the United States where many companies have turned to private credit specialists for financing. These firms are seeking to diversify their borrowing away from banks. 

Subsequently, some of the biggest banks have launched their private credit funds. Goldman Sachs created the Capital Solutions Group, a business that will provide direct lending solutions. Most recently, State Street partnered with Apolo to launch a new private credit solution.

Tokenized private credit is one of the fastest-growing areas in the RWA industry, which collectively holds $23.10 billion in assets. Over 113,350 investors hold RWA assets.

The other top fields in the RWA industry are stablecoins, US Treasuries, commodities, and institutional funds. Tokenized stocks could be the next big thing after Kraken tokenized over 50 stocks in May. 



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rollerskating battle
Gaming Gear

OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome are back on Steam after being delisted 4 months ago when 2K sold off Private Division

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Four months after they were unceremoniously delisted, Roll7’s stylish skate games Rollerdrome and OlliOlli World are both back on Steam.

Rollerdrome and OlliOlli World were removed from Steam in February, a move we assumed at the time was the result of the Private Division drama at Take-Two Interactive: After some extended cuteness and difficulty following May 2024 reports that Roll7 and the Private Division publishing label were being closed, Take-Two finally confirmed in November 2024 that Roll7, along with Kerbal Space Program 2 studio Intercept Games, had been closed, and that Private Division was sold off.

The sale of Private Division included “substantially all of Private Division’s live and unreleased titles,” Take-Two said at the time. But it turns out the sale did not include OlliOlli World or Rollerdrome, as both have returned to Steam and are now listed as being published by 2K, a subsidiary of Take-Two.


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The delisting of both games seems a little odd in that light. It makes sense, I suppose, if you’re transferring ownership from one company to another—lawyers have to do what they do and all that—but Private Division and 2K are both Take-Two companies. Why remove them from sale for nearly four solid months if you’re just going to smash ’em back up under a different name?

This I do not know—”business stuff” is probably at the root of it somehow—but it’s not a mistake or misprint: 2K confirmed that neither Rollerdrome nor OlliOlli World were included in the Private Division sale, and that it is now the publisher of both games.

Neither OlliOlli World nor Rollerdrome were major sales successes, but both are excellent: OlliOlli World earned an 87% review score as an “unmissable skate ’em up” in 2022, while Rollerdrome drew an even more impressive 94% score the same year. They’re games worth playing, in other words, and if you missed them the first time around, here’s your second chance.



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Decrypt logo
Crypto Trends

Bank of Korea Exploring Using ‘Stablecoins Issued by the Private Sector’

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In brief

  • The Bank of Korea is considering issuing deposit tokens on a public blockchain to coexist with private stablecoins.
  • $19.5 billion worth of stablecoins left South Korea in Q1 2025, prompting calls for a won-backed alternative.
  • Tech design isn’t enough to safeguard sovereignty, pointing to the need for sound fiscal policy, according to industry experts.

The Bank of Korea is considering linking its deposit tokens to a public blockchain, a move that would position its state-backed digital currency alongside private-sector stablecoins operating on open networks.

The tokens will be “a type of stablecoin issued within the digital currency system built and operated by the Bank of Korea,” the bank’s Deputy Governor Lee Jong-ryeol said in a statement Decrypt has confirmed with local sources.

“We are considering a direction in which it will coexist within the entire digital currency system in conjunction with stablecoins issued by the private sector,” the Deputy Governor said at the 8th Blockchain Leaders Club held at the Lotte Hotel in Jung-gu, Seoul on Monday.

Lee said the initiative is being pursued from “a national perspective” and falls under the Bank of Korea’s responsibility as a monetary and foreign exchange authority, according to local news outlet News1 Korea.

The proposal has raised questions about how such a hybrid system might function across jurisdictions.

“It’s not clear how the hybrid model of tokenized deposit plus private-sector stablecoin will necessarily achieve the stated purpose of protecting monetary sovereignty,” Peter Chung, head of research at Singapore-based algorithmic crypto trading firm Presto Labs, told Decrypt.

“Stablecoins on public blockchains will be free to cross borders,” Chung said, noting that “the way to protect monetary sovereignty is not by tinkering with token design or network architecture, but through sound monetary and fiscal policies.”

Meanwhile, the Deputy Governor also raised concerns over the growing use of global stablecoins in South Korea, calling their influx “the most concerning part.”

The official warned that using them as currency substitutes could lead to violations of monetary sovereignty, weakened policy controls, financial instability, and increased money laundering risks.

In the first quarter of 2025, South Korea’s crypto exchanges transferred around $40.6 billion (56.8 trillion won) worth of digital assets abroad.

Nearly half, $19.5 billion (26.87 trillion won), was in stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, according to Maeil Business Newspaper, a local news outlet.

The issue is gaining traction among South Korean political leaders as well. Democratic Party of Korea presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung has proposed launching a won-backed stablecoin to reduce capital outflows and reliance on dollar-denominated tokens.



The Bank of Korea is also part of the Agora Project, a cross-border settlement system with central banks from seven countries.

“It is designed so that a country’s deposit token cannot be used directly in another country,” Lee said.

Globally, stablecoin usage continues to rise. The total market cap now stands at $249.6 billion, up 0.3% in the last 24 hours, per CoinGecko data.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

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Ethereum Needs to Be Resilient and Private
GameFi Guides

Ethereum Needs to Be Resilient and Private

by admin


Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin has taken to the X social media network to stress that Ethereum should stay resilient and private in order to be able to continue competing with cash. 

Buterin pointed to a recent report, which shows that Nordic countries are currently pivoting back to cash due to fragility in centralized digital payments. 

It is worth noting that Norway and Sweden spearheaded the futuristic push toward cashless societies. Cash usage saw a substantial decline in Sweden in the 2010s. In the early 2020s, only a very small percentage of purchases were made with cash due to apps like Swish gaining widespread adoption. Sweden was expected to become completely cashless by 2025. 

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This was supposed to be the model for the future of finance. However, the Swedes now have second thoughts about cash, with the authorities even urging citizens to use cash more frequently for civil defense purposes. Popular payment apps, for instance, can become inaccessible in the case of cyberattacks.

In Norway, which was also at the forefront of the cashless revolution, retailers can be fined if they do not accept cash. 

Now that the two Nordic countries have recognized cash as the necessary backup, Buterin believes that Ethereum has to be private and resilient enough in order to be able to play the same role. 

Centralized digital payment systems clearly remain vulnerable, and it is challenging even for the most progressive and technologically advanced societies to go truly cashless. That said, it remains to be seen whether crypto can actually act as an alternative to cash. 



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Krisztian Sandor
Crypto Trends

Private Equity Giant Apollo Global Private Credit Fund Set for Tokenization on Solana (SOL)

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A tokenized version of a major private credit fund managed by Apollo will arrive on Solana’s

decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, bringing traditional financial instruments closer to the fast-growing network.

The launch, orchestrated by lending platform Kamino Finance with support from tokenization specialist Securitize and DeFi risk advisor Steakhouse Financial, aims to make the Apollo’s Diversified Credit Securitize Fund (ACRED) token the first of its kind to be available for on-chain borrowing and leverage on Solana. The token’s debut is pending on completing an audit, Kamino said.

The ACRED token, launched in January, offers exposure to Apollo’s private credit strategies and is issued under Securitize’s regulated token framework. ACRED will also be the first token on Solana using Securitize’s sToken standard, with more assets expected to follow later, Securitize said.

The product underscores a growing appetite in crypto for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. RWAs—traditional instruments such as funds, bonds or real estate—are being brought onto blockchain rails to reduce friction in investing, improve access and transparency, and allow for programmable use in DeFi protocols. In practice, this means investors can use RWAs as collateral to borrow against, yield farming, or plug into automated investment strategies.

“The value of tokenization really comes into play when these assets are integrated into DeFi, and new products and strategies are developed around them,” says Reid Simon, head of DeFi and credit solutions at Securitize.

Despite Solana’s fast-growing DeFi market, RWAs are yet to take off on the chain. According to RWA.xyz, Solana hosts $330 million worth of RWAs, small compared to the network’s nearly $9 billion DeFi market size. It’s also trailing rival layer-1 network Ethereum’s $7 billion real-world asset market. But with large players in tokenization stepping in, backers of the launch see this as a tipping point.

“Solana has experienced explosive consumer growth in recent years, but below the surface we are seeing enormous interest from institutions and asset issuers,” said Marius Ciubotariu, co-founder at Kamino, “Finally, the industry is in a position to not only bring these assets on-chain, but to provide genuine use-cases.”

Through Kamino’s Multiply product, users will be able to leverage ACRED for yield strategies—automatically looping the asset to increase exposure while managing collateral and borrow levels through Solana-native smart contracts. That’s a similar offering to what Gauntlet introduced on Polygon in late April.

“Building on off-chain credit assets in a composable way is the sort of long-term investment we believe can help catalyze further growth of DeFi in Solana,” said adcv, co-founder of Steakhouse Financial.



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