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

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.