Developer Aryeh Greenberg has proposed an Ethereum token interface that would add compliance checks and issuer enforcement powers to confidential tokens representing real-world assets.
The submission, pull request #2034, opened Thursday evening ET, remains an unmerged draft. It extends ERC-7984, a draft interface that represents balances and transfer amounts as confidential pointers—references to protected values rather than publicly readable numbers.
The change targets a gap between confidentiality and issuer control. The finalized ERC-7943 RWA interface already defines eligibility checks, freezing and forced transfers for conventional tokens. Greenberg’s draft adapts that approach so amount-dependent compliance decisions can remain confidential too.
Applications could check publicly whether an address is eligible to send or receive, while checking a particular transfer and the spendable balance through confidential results. Spendable balances must account for restrictions such as freezes, lockups and vesting.
An authorized party could also force a transfer without the holder’s consent. That function bypasses the normal confidential transfer check but must reject an ineligible recipient. The draft does not prescribe separate interfaces for minting, burning, halting or freezing, leaving those mechanisms to implementers.
Privacy remains implementation-dependent: the proposal does not mandate one cryptographic system or determine who is allowed to resolve the pointers.
Another open proposal, PR #1850, takes a different route. Its Notary-Backed Confidential Token draft keeps ownership and amounts offchain and relies on a designated notary to validate private transactions. The public contract records commitments and prevents reused inputs. That makes the trust trade-off explicit: the draft warns that a compromised notary could submit invalid transactions or inflate private supply.
Why Institutions Look to Permissioned Chains
The same privacy requirement helps explain institutional interest in Canton. In a June 4 announcement, Visa and Brale outlined a proof of concept using Brale’s SBC stablecoin on Canton, a project previously covered by The Defiant. Visa said control over sensitive settlement data was a central focus.
Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, said the work targets settlement requiring “both programmability and privacy controls.”
Canton describes itself as a public Layer 1 blockchain. Its privacy model distributes only the relevant parts of a transaction to entitled participants, while its Daml contracts define who can act and see data. The Ethereum draft instead standardizes token functions while leaving the underlying privacy system to each implementation.
For developers integrating the new interface, confidentiality changes how failure works. The draft recommends moving zero tokens rather than reverting a transfer that fails its rules, because a public failure can leak balance information. Applications must check the amount actually moved rather than treating a successful transaction as proof of payment.
