Bringing Privacy to Bitcoin | Bitcoin 2026

Bringing privacy to Bitcoin. The glass door. Bitcoin is the most sovereign money ever created. And yet, it's the least private money most people have ever used. For the last 15 years, I thought this contradiction was worth it. I told myself the transparency was why Bitcoin was so trustworthy. That it was a feature, not a bug. But then people started showing up at the real front door, and my mind changed. Last month in France, a man was woken up at 7:00 a.m. by four assailants in ski masks. It was a Monday morning. They tied him up. They beat him. They abducted his wife. And they took his 11-year-old son. They also demanded 400,000 euros worth of Bitcoin. He's okay. The police found his family. But what stuck with me from this story wasn't the violence. It was the precision. They knew exactly where he lived. They knew exactly what his home layout was like. They knew about his family. They knew how much Bitcoin he had. And they knew which wallet addresses he held those Bitcoin in. I wish I could say this is rare, but it's not. Two months ago, CertiK published this report. An increase in wrench attacks, a term specifically created to describe attacks against crypto holders by 75% in 2025. This year, there has been 41 crypto-linked kidnappings in France since January. That's one every two and a half days. This trend is only going to continue. And you see stories like the Ledger co-founder being abducted and his finger being severed. Stories like the 28-year-old man in New York City who was held in a basement as his abductors threw parties and threatened to chop off his limbs with chainsaws. To parents being kidnapped and being used as leverage. To associates and friends being taken and tortured. All of these are symptomatic of a broader trend. And that trend is going up and to the right. And it's an increase in physical attacks. An increase in targeted physical attacks against crypto holders. Now, why am I telling you this? I'm not just trying to fear-monger. I still believe in Bitcoin's transparency. But the world has changed since 2008. And what was built as a feature has now become a map. And that map is getting easier to read every single day. You are not as private as you think you are. A decade ago, connecting pseudo-anonymous activity to a real person took a team of specialists. And it took this team of specialists time, money, and expertise. And even then, there was no guarantee. Today, an LLM can connect a pseudo-anonymous online profile with a real identity within a few seconds. And they can do so at 90% precision. And they can do it for less than a few dollars. And it has all the data it needs to be able to do this. There's over 18 million crypto user data available for sale on the dark web today. There are corrupt government officials selling tax filing information to criminal organizations. And almost every major company in our industry has faced some sort of data breach. Ledger, Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, FTX, BlockFi, Robinhood. All of these leaks contain personal information. Information that can hurt you. Names, emails, addresses, dates of birth, withdrawal transaction history. Everything someone who's looking for you can use against you. And it's all happening against the backdrop of the tools getting better. Of the attackers becoming more motivated. The income inequality gap in the US is the largest it's ever been in history. And while the stakes have gotten bigger, Bitcoin hit its all-time high in October last year. And so, what I'm trying to tell you is this is what it looks like today. What's it going to look like tomorrow? You are not as private as you think you are. And your options for privacy, all of your options for privacy are broken. I'll walk through it. If you want privacy for your Bitcoin today, and you want to break that on-chain link between your known address and who you are, what do you have? You have privacy coins. You have centralized exchanges. And you have mixers. Privacy coins are like Zcash or Monero. They're great technology, but they require you to sell your Bitcoin and hold a different asset. It's not really privacy. It's selling your Bitcoin. And you have centralized exchanges. I'm sure everyone's familiar with this flow. You have Bitcoin, you send it to an exchange, you wait, you withdraw it to a new wallet. That new wallet has no transaction history, and to you, you think it's private. But is it really private? In the course of doing that, you gave them your KYC. You gave them custody. And they have records of all of your internal transactions. It's really just obfuscation with additional counterparty risk. And finally, you have mixers. Mixers, I wouldn't endorse them. They may give you privacy, but they also put your hand up for surveillance. Your funds get flagged. And so, you may be private, but you're marked. And so, just to recap, you have sell your Bitcoin as an option. You have trust an exchange as an option. And you have use a sanctioned mixer as an option. Or you have do nothing. And in which case, you stay exposed. These options aren't good enough. And they're not good enough in the era that we're in. So, what's the answer? The answer is math. It's bringing it back to what Bitcoin's roots are. In 2013, Eli Ben-Sasson gave this talk at the first Bitcoin conference in San Jose. He talked about proving something as true without revealing the thing itself. That thing became the foundation of what you and I know as zero knowledge in our industry. It became Zcash, where he was a co-founding scientist. It became StarkWare, where he's the CEO and founder. And it became StarkNet, the public network. And now that work is coming back to Bitcoin. This is the moment that I've been building towards. This is the solution that we're bringing to the market to break the on-chain link between you and your Bitcoin. And I'm excited to announce StarkBTC. StarkBTC's private Bitcoin on StarkNet, available in two weeks. I'll tell you a little bit about what what this is. StarkBTC is wrapped Bitcoin on StarkNet that's fully backed one-to-one by Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network. You bridge it in to StarkNet, and the bridge is governed by a federation multi-sig of some of the highest integrity actors within our space. UTXO, TwinStake, Nia, Lugano Nodes, and Xverse. All StarkBTC that arrives on StarkNet enters what we're calling the privacy pool. Any activity in this within this privacy pool is fully private from the public blockchain. This includes transactions, transfers, and transactions. And so, once you're ready, you can bridge your StarkBTC back to Bitcoin. And you can bridge it to one address or 100 addresses. It's up to you. On Bitcoin, if someone is monitoring your address, the only thing they see is a transaction into the bridge. On StarkNet, the everyone else sees nothing. And when you bridge it back to Bitcoin, the only thing that shows in your new Bitcoin wallet is the receiving transaction from the bridge into the new wallet. Welcome to Predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. [music] Call the moves. Bet on your instinct. Your prediction. Your edge. Dual bets. Predict, where everything is a market. [music] And all of this is powered by cryptography. As a user, when you deposit assets into the privacy pool, we're calling assets in the privacy pool Stark20s, you generate a cryptographic note. That note tells the pool, "Hey, I've put these assets in this pool, and I can verify it." When you want to use your assets in this pool, you produce that same note. The pool verifies that you do indeed have access to those assets. And it fulfills those transactions. And on withdrawal, the same thing happens. Either you or the person you sent the assets to, they produce a cryptographic note. That cryptographic note gets verified by the privacy pool. And the privacy pool fulfills the withdrawal to the address you nominate. As a user, you see the entire journey. But from the outside, they see nothing. And the best part about this is that it's fully verified and backed by math. There's no trust. There's no intermediary. And it's also fully compliant. We have third-party screening going into the pool, which means no assets will be commingled with proceeds of crime or sanctioned assets. And the user at all times holds a viewing key that can decrypt their transactions. They can produce this viewing key to tax authorities, to law enforcement, to whoever they want. And that viewing key can be used to decrypt the transactions that they've made. And now, I know what you're thinking, right? You're thinking, "Damian, this isn't real Bitcoin. It's a trusted Bitcoin asset. And you'd be right. In an industry where trust assumptions are hidden behind marketing and things are hidden in terms and conditions, I'll be the first to tell you that this is a trusted Bitcoin wrapper. But before I tell you how we're planning to make this no longer trusted, I want to first remind you of the industry we're in. I want to zoom out and remind you about the Ledger co-founder. About the New York City 28-year-old man who was abducted. About the parents that are being taken. About the friends and associates that are being targeted for leverage. I want to remind you of the speed of AI. I want to remind you of the corrupt officials putting you and your family at risk. And I want to remind you of the scale of the data leaks within our industry that expose you. And I will say you're right. Start BTC is a trusted Bitcoin wrapper. But you know what else it is? It's real. It works today. And it gives Bitcoiners real privacy. A real functional way to compliantly break the on-chain link between who you are and what you hold. And it gives it to you in an era where having that could be the difference between life or death. Now, the job's not finished. Start BTC has two explicit goals. We want to make it trustless. And so, while it starts off with a federation today, tomorrow, when it's commercially feasible, it'll be a one-of-n BitVM implementation. And then the end goal is Bitcoin native verification, a fully trustless bridge enabled by Stark verification after OP_CAT is enabled. But I'm actually much more excited to tell you about our second goal. We want Start BTC to be the solution for all of the problems facing Bitcoin, not just privacy. And Bitcoin's biggest threat is quantum. Three weeks ago, our head of research published this paper that got 1.8 million views. In this paper, he details an in-production ready usable method for having safe post-quantum Bitcoin transactions today without any soft forks, without any core protocol upgrades. And so, what I want to leave you with is this. Start BTC is your new best way to anonymize your Bitcoin, to break that link on-chain between your identity and what you hold. But tomorrow, Start BTC could also be your safe haven against a quantum attack. I can't say more about this at the moment, but it's exciting, and it's what we're actively working towards as the immediate next thing. And okay, in closing, we'll wrap this up. 15 years ago, someone asked Satoshi. He They asked him what his thoughts on zero-knowledge proofs were. And Satoshi actually replied. He said, "This is a very interesting topic. If a solution was found, a much better implementation of Bitcoin would be possible." That took a while, but that solution is here. And it's Start BTC. It's private Bitcoin. It's on StarkNet. And it's live on May 12th. That's it. Thank you very much for listening. I'm Damian. I'm the VP of growth at the StarkNet Foundation. If you're doing anything on Bitcoin today, the one thing I'll ask you is, see if you can do it better with Start BTC. You don't need to swap your asset, but you can replace it or add it as part of your workflow. Give your clients, give your loved ones, give yourselves an anonymous Bitcoin alternative. These are all the places that you can reach me. I'm SNDamian on Telegram, the demo with three Os on X, and you can email me at [email protected] by email as well. Thank you very much, and uh I hope you guys have a great rest of the evening. >> [music] >> Every year, this community comes together [music] to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. >> [music] >> And every year, the stage [music] gets bigger. Sound money, >> [music] >> center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? >> [music] >> You come home. Nashville, July 2027. [music]