Recently, a16z crypto released its annual forecast. The core argument is straightforward: privacy will become the most important moat for cryptocurrencies. I believe the understanding of the future market by top institutions is definitely worth learning from. Because top institutions often understand the market several cycles ahead of retail investors. When a16z says privacy is the moat, we need to re-examine those projects that are building up their privacy technology reserves. @0xMiden is one of them—and its chosen path precisely validates a16z's judgment. Why Miden? Most people think of performance when they hear zkVM, and scalability when they hear Rollup. However, from day one of its design, Miden VM's core capabilities have been privacy-preserving computation and client-side proofs. While other zkRollups on the market focus on throughput, Miden's technical documentation repeatedly uses the terms "private state" and "local execution." This difference in positioning is an inevitable result of its technical architecture. 0xMiden is based on the Miden VM, using a STARK proof system. The core difference between 0xMiden and a regular zkRollup is that users can generate proofs locally and then submit them to the blockchain in batches. This means transaction execution is completely independent of the sorter, and users have full control over their own state. Returning to a16z's assessment: the moat of privacy chains lies in the user migration cost. 0xMiden's design precisely reinforces this point. Users generating proofs locally means their state information does not need to go through a third party. This design creates what a16z calls the chain lock-in effect. Because, once a user has accumulated enough private interaction records on a privacy chain, the cost of switching chains will be far higher than for users on public chains. 0xMiden chose a combination of zkVM + Rollup, theoretically combining privacy and scalability, but also having the highest engineering complexity. Within the Polygon ecosystem, zkEVM and zkEVM Validium have already captured most of the attention and resources. 0xMiden is more of a technology exploration project, with the team maintaining an activity level of 200+ commits per month on GitHub. Most of the core developers come from within Polygon Labs. a16z's judgment was forward-thinking, but market reactions are often lagging. Miden has chosen the right direction, but whether it will be validated by the market remains to be seen. Author: Ice Cream God of War | A street urchin making endless progress twitter.com/Xuegaogx/status/20...

Future of finance is here 🤖

Good at playing