Privacy and accountability can coexist onchain, say panelists at Consensus Miami

Tech Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email Privacy and accountability can coexist onchain, say panelists at Consensus Miami Public blockchains make transactions traceable, but that transparency can come at the expense of user privacy. Speakers from Moody’s Ratings and ChangeNOW said that hybrid blockchain architecture and address-level monitoring can help solve both problems simultaneously. By Jeffrey Albus | Edited by Aoyon Ashraf May 7, 2026, 9:14 p.m. 2 min read Make preferred on Onchain Privacy and Identity at Consensus Miami (CoinDesk) What to know : Crypto can support both user privacy and institutional accountability, speakers explained in a panel on the onchain “intelligence layer.” Moody’s strategist Rajeev Bamra said institutional digital finance has grown by “over 100 or 150%” in the past 18 months but, at roughly $35 billion, remains a fraction of the $200-trillion-plus in traditional clearing flows. ChangeNOW’s Pauline Shangett said the company maps wallet addresses rather than identities to respond to compliance and law-enforcement needs. Public blockchains make transactions transparent enough to trace, audit and police, but that visibility can come at the expense of user privacy. Traditional compliance systems often address accountability by identifying people, but that can undermine one of crypto's original promises: the ability to transact without exposing personal identity by default. According to panelists at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference earlier this week, those tensions are increasingly solvable through an onchain “intelligence layer” that combines hybrid blockchain architecture with wallet-address-level monitoring.The idea is to split the work across different parts of the system. Private permissioned networks can give institutions the accountability and credibility they need, while public permissionless chains can provide liquidity, and blockchain-forensics tools can help platforms screen transactions at the wallet-address level without automatically tying every user to a real-world identity. Rajeev Bamra, global head of strategy for digital economy at Moody's Ratings, said the conventional intelligence layer answers three questions: "Who is it? What are they doing? And can I trust the record?" Those have been addressed in traditional finance by banks, custodians, clearinghouses and credit-rating agencies, he said. Bamra estimated the institutional digital-finance market at roughly $35 billion today, against more than $200 trillion in annual clearing-house flows in conventional finance, with growth of "over 100 or 150%" in the past 18 months. Blockchain architecture, he predicted, will not be uniformly public or private but a hybrid. "Private permission networks are going to offer the accountability, the credibility aspect," he said, while "the public permissionless brings the liquidity which the private permissions don't." Pauline Shangett, chief strategy officer at the non-custodial exchange ChangeNOW, firmly sided with the user-side argument. “Bitcoin at its core, at its origin was a semi-anonymous digital cash,” she said. ChangeNOW, which does not enforce KYC by default, works with AML providers and blockchain forensics firms to monitor flows at the wallet-address level. “All of this blockchain forensics infrastructure allows us to not map people who are passing funds through our system, but instead map their addresses,” Shangett said. When law-enforcement agencies come to ChangeNOW, Shangett said, the company provides transaction data without doxing the person behind the transaction. She said that compromise allows the platform to provide registration-free swaps while still maintaining internal accounting systems and working with authorities when illegitimate funds move through the service. On regulation, Bamra said cross-border frameworks like the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation and the U.S. GENIUS Act ask the same fundamental questions about asset quality, segregation and liability, but diverge sharply at the specifications layer. “We think there is regulatory convergence in intention, but there’s fragmentation in reality or in execution,” he said. Shangett ended with a regulatory-liability framing, which she suggested cuts to the heart of where responsibility should actually sit. “The agents who should be held liable for the regulatory frameworks and the adoption thereof are agents who are dealing with emission and not transmission,” she said. Consensus Miami 2026 More For You 'JaredfromSubway' bot front runs Vitalik Buterin's $4 token swap with $1 million in volume By Shaurya Malwa | Edited by Jamie Crawley 7 hours ago The Ethereum co-founder, who has spent months campaigning against toxic MEV with proposals for encrypted mempools, just had one of his own swaps front-run and back-run by the network's most notorious sandwich bot. What to know : Vitalik Buterin, a leading critic of toxic maximal extractable value (MEV), was himself targeted by a sandwich attack on April 30, blockchain data show. In the incident, a bot known as jaredfromsubway.eth sandwiched Buterin’s small swap of digitalbits (XDB) for ether, using about $1.14 million in WETH to manipulate prices... Read full story Latest Crypto News AI agents and large corporates will lead the next stablecoin boom, executives say 5 minutes ago Coinbase stock drops 4% after surprise 1Q miss as crypto trading slows 24 minutes ago CZ floats Binance.US revival to give U.S. users access to global crypto liquidity 2 hours ago Tether executive warns the 2026 midterms could have 'seismic impact' on crypto industry 2 hours ago Bitmine to slow down ether purchases as it nears accumulation goal, Tom Lee says 2 hours ago 'DeFi is not dead,' it’s going mainstream with AI agents, crypto executives agree 3 hours ago Top Stories Donald Trump Jr. denies rumors World Liberty Financial is falling apart 3 hours ago Aave to overhaul collateral and listing standards after KelpDAO exploit 6 hours ago Consensus Miami Day 3: Real-time coverage and highlights from on the ground 7 hours ago Bitcoin treasury firms outline $3 trillion opportunity in BTC-backed digital credit at Consensus 8 hours ago Bitcoin tests Bollinger Bands breakout as creator flips bullish on BTC 7 hours ago Safety first: Why Adam Back says Bitcoin is winning the 'DeFi security war' 10 hours ago