Public blockchains may be exposing more than they protect, according to a new opinion piece, which argues that the transparency underpinning crypto networks could hand competitors valuable business intelligence.
In a recent article, Paul Brody, the Founder & CEO of Nightfall Networks, a blockchain tech firm focussed on building robust privacy systems for enterprise users, said every blockchain transaction effectively reveals operational data – from payment flows to supplier relationships – creating what amounts to an ‘open book’ for rivals.
Paul Brody at EY
Unlike traditional financial systems, where transaction data is largely private, blockchain-based systems record activity on publicly accessible ledgers. That transparency, long promoted as a trust-building feature, may instead expose sensitive commercial patterns, including
pricing strategies,
customer behavior and
treasury movements.
The piece argues that as artificial intelligence tools become more advanced, the ability to analyze on-chain data at scale will intensify these risks. Firms could increasingly use automated systems and AI agents to extract insights from competitors’ blockchain activity, potentially eroding any informational advantage.
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This is not new. It is about to get much, much faster.
Companies have always leaked intelligence. iFixit has built a business around tearing apart every major new electronics product within days of launch, exposing components, likely bill-of-materials costs, and manufacturing approaches for anyone to study. Satellite imagery firms already track everything from warehouse activity to crop yields to oil tanker movements, selling the insights to hedge funds and competitors alike. Specialized competitive intelligence firms have long mapped supply chains and reverse-engineered pricing strategies.
What’s different now is the synthesis. Each of these data streams, taken alone, tells a partial story. An agentic system can pull them all together — public filings, onchain transaction flows, satellite data, job postings, patent applications, shipping records — and deliver not just raw data about your competition but a coherent picture of their strategic road map, updated continuously.
The question this forces is not whether competitors will know more. They will. The question is: what should companies do about it?
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This dynamic presents a growing challenge for companies experimenting with blockchain-based payments, treasury management or decentralized finance. While such systems can reduce reliance on intermediaries and improve efficiency, they may also force firms to weigh those benefits against the cost of revealing strategic data.
The author notes that this trade-off is becoming more significant as blockchain adoption expands beyond crypto-native firms into mainstream commerce and financial services.
What’s genuinely left to protect?
Strip away strategy, strip away the broad strokes of execution, and what remains is operational detail. Not what components are in a product, but what the company is paying for them. Not that a company has a supply chain, but the specific terms, conditions, volume commitments, and quality management processes that make one supply chain faster or cheaper than the next. The granular, day-to-day mechanics of how the machine actually runs.
This is the data that creates a durable competitive advantage. And in an era of agentic commerce, it’s precisely the data most at risk — because it’s flowing through the same blockchain infrastructure that agents use to transact.
The article concludes that businesses may need to rethink how they use public blockchains, or adopt privacy-enhancing technologies, if they want to avoid unintentionally sharing competitive intelligence in an increasingly data-driven market.
If enterprise agents are executing procurement contracts, managing supplier relationships, and orchestrating logistics on public blockchains without privacy, those enterprises are broadcasting their operational playbook to every competitor running an analytical agent. The very system designed to drive efficiency becomes the system that strips away the competitive moat.
The answer isn’t to avoid blockchains – the efficiency and automation benefits are too significant. The answer is to demand privacy as foundational infrastructure, built in from the start, not bolted on as an afterthought.
The companies that will thrive aren’t the ones that try to hide everything — that’s a losing game. They’re the ones that will clearly distinguish between what can’t be secret (strategy, product design, market positioning) and what must be (operational mechanics, pricing terms, supplier relationships), and then invest seriously in the infrastructure to protect what matters.
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