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Jade and Stefan speak to Robert de Groot, a core contributor to Web3Privacy Now, the research collective and think tank behind the Cypherpunk Congress, and CFO at Gain.
Robert starts from an unexpected place: privacy isn't really about hiding; it's about autonomy, the ability to choose what you reveal, to whom, when, and in what form. He connects it to something bigger than data leakage, the loss of the room to experiment and to fail, and the quiet self-censorship that creeps in when everything is recorded. From there the conversation opens onto the spectrum of privacy, from the journalist in a conflict zone who will work from a terminal if it keeps them alive, to the rest of us who just want a group chat that isn't intercepted and won't tolerate bad UX to get it.
A big thread is the gap between personal privacy and business compliance, and why the two still don't align. Robert explains how Web3Privacy Now evaluates the 800-plus projects in its Explorer (the "hard variables," verifiable code over marketing claims), why "zero knowledge" and "private" have become marketing terms, and why privacy adoption lags even when the tooling is ready, the preventive-measure problem, the group effect, and cookie-banner fatigue. On the compliance side, he maps the middle ground: opt-in reporting, viewing keys, and selective disclosure (picking up the thread from our Jordi Baylina episode), including a one-time key you could hand your tax auditor and be notified when it's used.
He argues privacy will increasingly become a market-integrity feature, not just a civil-liberties one, shielding transaction amounts from competitors and MEV bots while keeping endpoints verifiable, and he closes on RWAs, why so many tokenisation projects quietly died on double-accounting overhead, and what "compliant by default" finally changes.
Key Topics
Privacy as autonomy, and the spectrum from uncompromisable to everyday
The gap between personal privacy and business compliance, and the middle-ground tools that bridge it
Privacy as a market-integrity feature for RWAs and institutional adoption
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:06 Why He Started Worrying About Privacy: Autonomy and Self-Censorship
04:58 Surveillance, Society, and the Loss of Room to Fail
06:01 What the Ethereum Community Really Thinks About Privacy
08:36 The Gap Between Personal Privacy and Business Compliance
10:54 What Web3Privacy Now Actually Does
13:45 Evaluating Projects: Hard Variables and Verifiable Code
17:01 When "Zero Knowledge" and "Private" Are Just Marketing
19:39 The Cypherpunk Congress and Why Privacy Matters Now
24:00 Tooling Is Ready, So Why Does Adoption Lag?
28:49 Compartmentalization, Intent, and Privacy by Default
34:38 GDPR, Cookie Fatigue, and Whether Regulation Backfires
39:49 Privacy vs Compliance: Does Privacy Make Regulators Nervous?
42:14 The Middle Ground: Opt-In Reporting, Viewing Keys, Selective Disclosure
45:31 Selective Disclosure and the Jordi Baylina Thread
46:10 RWAs, Institutions, and Why Tokenisation Projects Kept Dying
53:03 Privacy as a Market-Integrity Feature: MEV, Front-Running, and Competition Law
55:43 The Most Useful Thing an Ordinary Person Can Do
58:30 Where to Find Robert
Resources and Links
Robert on X: https://x.com/robdotrego
Web3Privacy Now: https://web3privacy.info
Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web3privacy.info/
Event: https://luma.com/spsnos9t
Oak Security's Research: https://research.oaksecurity.io/
