These past couple of days, people have been debating the boundary between privacy and compliance on-chain. Put simply, ordinary users shouldn’t fantasize about “being fully invisible the whole time and freely coming and going with fiat currency.” On-chain is, in essence, like a transparent ledger—you can do more like “expose less,” for example not linking all your assets and identity clues into a single thread. And if you truly end up being targeted, bridges, exchanges, and even certain front-end parts that need to cooperate will still cooperate.

My expectation is this: privacy tools will probably become more and more like “raincoats with a threshold”—they can block the rain, but they can’t guarantee they won’t be checked. Especially now that the whole “re-staking” and “shared security” model—those yield stacks—has been criticized as a kind of nesting, I’m more worried about risks being layered on top of each other, and that if something goes wrong, the chain of accountability will be even longer.

Cross-chain is even more realistic: bridges aren’t magic doors; they’re like puzzle pieces being fitted together—when the “weather” turns bad, they’re prone to letting leaks through. A few days ago, when I went through a bridge, I got stuck there; I had to refresh and retry several times. My mindset went straight from “optimizing the experience” to “as long as nothing gets lost”… For now, it’s better to take fewer steps—if you can avoid going one more step, do so.