#duskPrivacy has become one of the most debated design choices in financial blockchains. Early networks prioritized transparency above all else, while newer platforms are experimenting with different levels of confidentiality. A comparative look across major financial blockchains shows that “privacy” is not a single feature, but a spectrum of guarantees shaped by trade-offs in trust, usability, and decentralization.

Bitcoin, often seen as pseudonymous, offers the weakest privacy guarantees at the base layer. Transactions are public, addresses are traceable, and once identities are linked to wallets, activity can be followed indefinitely. While techniques like coin control or off-chain tools can improve privacy, they rely heavily on user behavior rather than protocol-level enforcement. Privacy exists more as an option than a guarantee.

Ethereum improves programmability but does little to enhance privacy by default. Smart contracts, balances, and transaction logic are fully transparent. Privacy-focused tools such as mixers or layer-two solutions attempt to fill this gap, but many of them introduce trusted assumptions, regulatory pressure points, or fragmented liquidity. In Ethereum’s case, privacy is externalized rather than native.

Dedicated privacy blockchains like Monero take a very different approach. By enforcing private transactions at the protocol level, Monero ensures strong default confidentiality for senders, receivers, and amounts. This creates robust privacy guarantees, but at the cost of limited programmability and challenges around auditability and institutional adoption. The system is private by design, but inflexible for complex financial use cases.

Zcash introduces selective privacy through zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to choose between transparent and shielded transactions.$DUSK @Dusk