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In the summer of 2016, a flaw in Ethereum’s most prominent decentralized autonomous organization led to the theft of more than $50 million of Ethereum (ETH) —around 4.5% of all Ethereum in circulation at the time—an incident which became colloquially known as The DAO Hack. The episode marked a defining moment for blockchain security, with the industry responding with enhanced smart contract auditing, formal verification, and, in time, more secure programming frameworks. It was a crisis-driven innovation, pure and simple—but it played a key role in pushing blockchain technology on its long road toward maturity.
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Today, the industry stands at another crucial inflection point. This time, though, the crisis is not one rooted in the panic resulting from a singular, isolated incident, but instead, by a more insidious vulnerability that has become so ingrained across the crypto ecosystem that many fail to even recognize the consequences it continues to inflict.
I’m talking about transaction privacy.
The daily heist
Every day, billions of dollars in cryptocurrency transactions flow through public mempools—waiting rooms where transactions sit before being processed. In these transparent pools, sophisticated bots scan for profitable opportunities, extracting value through front-running and sandwich attacks.
This isn’t a rare occurrence, either. These attacks happen thousands of times every day, with sophisticated actors stealing billions from regular users through automated exploitation. This is organized theft, plain and simple, with powerful entrenched players systematically extracting value from normal people. This extraction, known as malicious MEV (Maximal Extractable Value), has grown from a theoretical concern into a multi-billion-dollar issue that undermines the fundamental fairness of blockchain systems.
How we arrived at that point is illustrative of the evolving challenges that the industry has had to grapple with. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work solved the fundamental problem of achieving consensus in a trustless network. Ethereum’s smart contracts enabled programmable transactions but introduced new attack vectors. Proof-of-stake improved energy efficiency while raising questions about validator centralization.
Each advancement has brought new challenges—and, in time, solutions. But transaction privacy represents a different kind of challenge altogether.
Betrayal by design
Unlike previous security issues that could be addressed through protocol patches or more robust coding practices, the privacy challenge stems from a fundamental design choice: the inherent transparency of public blockchains. Such transparency, often heralded as a feature ensuring accountability, has, in turn, become a fundamental vulnerability.
When every pending transaction is visible to all participants, those with the fastest bots and strongest connections can exploit this information asymmetry to their advantage. It’s as if privileged traders could see everyone else’s orders on a stock exchange before they’re executed and jump ahead in line.
Early recognition of this issue presented two clear but disparate paths: prevent theft through systematic changes or prioritize personal profit through exploitation. Key players predictably opted for the latter, building sophisticated infrastructure that not only facilitated the practice but accelerated it—tacitly legitimizing it in the process.
This design flaw not only undermines market efficiency but betrays blockchain’s core promise of creating a fair, accessible financial system for all participants.
The response from the industry has been—and continues to be—entirely inadequate, shifting trust from protocols to intermediaries in a misguided attempt at privacy that undermines blockchain’s foundational principles of decentralization and permissionless access.
Just as running a blockchain on a few centralized servers would solve scalability but defeat the purpose of decentralization, centralized solutions that create private transaction channels merely privatize the problem rather than solve it. They shift trust from the protocol to intermediaries—a step backward from blockchain’s core promise of trustless operation.
Leveling the playing field
The real solution lies in advanced cryptography, specifically in threshold encryption systems. Unlike traditional encryption, where a single key holds complete power, threshold encryption distributes this responsibility across multiple independent parties.
By encrypting transactions in the mempool through threshold encryption, we can create a system where no single participant can unilaterally access transaction details before execution, eliminating the information advantages that enable malicious MEV extraction while ensuring that every user’s transaction receives equal treatment regardless of their technical sophistication or financial resources.
While that might sound complex, the mechanics are actually elegant in their simplicity. When users submit transactions, they’re encrypted with a public key generated collaboratively by the network’s keyholders. These encrypted transactions sitting in the mempool are immune to front-running because their contents remain hidden. Only after a transaction’s position in a block is finalized do the keyholders release their shares of the decryption key, allowing the transaction to be processed.
Think of it as a digital vault that requires multiple independent keyholders to collaborate before any transaction details can be revealed. Just as proof-of-stake transformed consensus while maintaining security, a shift towards encrypted mempools should represent blockchain’s next major technical milestone. Both transitions require rethinking fundamental assumptions while preserving the essential properties that make blockchain technology valuable.
Restoring trust
But this is just the beginning. The industry is already exploring even more advanced solutions. Threshold Fully Homomorphic Encryption (threshold-FHE) and Indistinguishability Obfuscation (IO) promise to enable computation on encrypted data directly, potentially changing the entire paradigm of blockchain computation. Imagine smart contracts that can process sensitive data without ever decrypting it and encrypted applications where all internal details remain hidden—these are ideas that could have profound impacts on preserving privacy.
Each of these developments represents a small component of a much bigger path towards a more private future—one where privacy isn’t seen as an add-on feature but a fundamental characteristic of blockchain systems.
But let’s be clear about what we mean by privacy in this context. Privacy isn’t about hiding or obscuring—it’s about having the power to decide what information you share, when you share it, and with whom. Privacy is about protection against thieves and bad actors who exploit transparency for their own gain.
Think about that for a minute. Does any company want its trading strategies or business operations visible to competitors in real time? Of course not. It is imperative that we get this right to restore the fundamental fairness that Payment for Order Flow (PFOF) and certain forms of high-frequency trading on Wall Street and malicious MEV on Ethereum have systematically destroyed.
As a community, we now stand at a crossroads. One path maintains the status quo, allowing systematic theft to continue unchecked. The other implements proven cryptographic solutions that can restore fairness and privacy to blockchain systems.
The mathematics and cryptography to solve this exist today. The question is whether we have the vision to start using them and the will to ensure that our technology reflects the principles and values that our industry was founded on.
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Loring Harkness
Loring Harkness is the head of commercials at brainbot GmbH, where he leverages blockchain technology to confront the digital age’s most pressing ethical challenges—fairness, privacy, and trust. For Harkness, these aren’t just technical puzzles to be solved but foundational issues of safeguarding human rights in an increasingly digital world. With a background in applied ethics and law, Harkness focused on financial inclusion in emerging economies early in his career. Making the transition to technology, he quickly recognized that one of the greatest threats to financial inclusion and emerging digital ecosystems wasn’t technological complexity but the systemic vulnerabilities that enable exploitation. Chief among these is credible neutrality and information asymmetry, where power imbalances caused by critical knowledge possessed by select actors are exploited to the detriment of others.
