Payment Privacy Is Not Just Another Feature

Want to “onboard the next billion Web2 users”? Yawn.

Everyone has been using this as a tagline for years.

No one understands what this actually requires.

The majority of people Web2 users are not interested in going out of their comfort zone in any way, shape, or form, when it comes to their financial transaction behaviour.

Cheaper fees and faster processing time will only move the needle for the risk takers, the truly curious, and the desperate.

What this means is that crypto rails need to provide the same level of extremely trustworthy experience as the existing established (and more cumbersome) methods out there. After all, no one likes to play with their money.

Privacy is not only a non-negotiable for this vast majority, they do not even fathom a world where this is even an issue. The idea that “someone could be monitoring/stalking their payment behaviour and history” is not a concern that registers in their nervous system because it was never an issue before.

So please tell us how the crypto industry plans to onboard billions of users with these glaring, massive, tsunami sized red flags standing in the way. They can’t. Unless everyone starts to adopt the privacy “narrative”.

But it's not just a narrative.. It's basic product roadmap common sense.

Every payment rail needs to be private. (Unless it is relevant for it to be public such as in charity or government spending use cases).

We at HandlPay commit to implementing a privacy layer in our routing system and the upgrade is in the works.

We specifically chose to build on Canton Network because their chain has a specific approach to privacy that we prefer. They appeal to institutions and not to anti-establishment utopians. On Canton, the data is available on a “need-to-know basis”. Banks and regulators have access to information to help prevent fraud and maintain compliance.

Providing institutional-grade privacy to all crypto related payment products is key to onboarding the next generation of users.

It’s just the minimum standard that they expect.