Although blockchain technology has revolutionized financial transactions, its transparency has also brought about privacy issues. Imagine you owe a fren 100 yuan, and the entire company's finance department knows about it. This might be trivial for individuals, but it could be disastrous for institutions.

To solve this dilemma, Plume introduced the Nightfall protocol. Nightfall is a privacy solution open-sourced by Ernst & Young (EY) in 2017, and its latest version, Nightfall_4, utilizes zero-knowledge proof technology to effectively hide transaction details while ensuring transaction verifiability. This is applicable not only to regular transfers but also to NFT and semi-fungible asset (ERC3525) transactions, providing the possibility for real-world assets (RWA) to be on-chain.

Experiencing the demo of Nightfall is quite novel. The user interface is no different from a regular Layer 2 network, but when querying on-chain, you can only see transaction proofs and not specific details. It's like checking a WeChat bill, where you can only see "transfer successful" but cannot know the specific use.

However, the generation speed of zero-knowledge proofs still needs to be improved, somewhat similar to the occasional buffering experienced when watching short videos on a 4G network. The key question is: can institutions accept this trade-off of efficiency for privacy?

Currently, hot topics in the cryptocurrency community include Restaking and AI agents. However, in my view, Plume combined with Nightfall provides another infrastructure solution—allowing institutions to confidently migrate assets onto the Blockchain.

However, this also raises a new thought: If all transactions are processed in a "privacy" manner, can we still analyze market sentiment through on-chain data? This question is worth in-depth discussion among industry professionals.