StarkWare launched STRK20 on Starknet this week, and Sui introduced a feature called Confidential Transfers — two separate moves that aim to square crypto privacy with the compliance demands of institutional investors. Both projects are betting that the next wave of adoption will require privacy that isn’t anonymous, but controlled.
Inside StarkWare’s STRK20
STRK20 is a protocol upgrade on Starknet, Ethereum’s leading zero-knowledge rollup. StarkWare says it improves the network’s ability to handle private transactions without sacrificing the audit trails regulators expect. The upgrade went live on Thursday.
The timing isn’t accidental. Institutional clients have been pressing for privacy features that let them shield trading strategies or wallet balances while still proving compliance to watchdogs. STRK20 builds on Starknet’s existing STARK proofs to give users that option.
How Sui’s Confidential Transfers Work
Sui, the Layer 1 blockchain from the former Meta team, took a different approach. Its Confidential Transfers use a cryptographic scheme that hides transaction amounts from the public ledger but allows authorized parties — say, a compliance officer or a regulator — to view them on request.
The feature is live on Sui’s mainnet as of this week. The project described it as a “middle ground” between full transparency and full anonymity. Sui has been chasing DeFi and gaming use cases, but this move is squarely aimed at tokenized real-world assets and institutional custody.
Why compliance-driven privacy matters now
Both projects are responding to the same tension: regulators want visibility into on-chain activity, but institutions don’t want competitors or bad actors seeing their positions. Privacy solutions that can be toggled off for authorized viewers are becoming table stakes.
StarkWare’s approach ties into its broader ZK roadmap — the company has long argued that zero-knowledge proofs can satisfy both privacy and compliance. Sui, meanwhile, is leaning into the idea of “controllable” privacy, where the user decides who sees what.
Neither project has released a timeline for wider institutional adoption, but both are releasing technical documentation in the coming weeks. The industry will be watching to see whether regulators buy the argument that selective transparency is enough.
