What happened: StarkWare today announced an integration of EY’s Nightfall (open-source ZK privacy layer) with Starknet to enable private-by-default on-chain activity with selective disclosure for compliance.
Why does it matter? The integration aims to let institutions run private B2B payments, manage treasury positions with confidential balances, and move tokenized assets while retaining “selective disclosure” controls for audits and compliance checks.
EY has positioned Nightfall as public-domain code designed to enable private token transfers on Ethereum-compatible networks while supporting AML/KYC gating mechanisms.
“Blockchains can offer every institution the equivalent of a private superhighway for stablecoins and tokenized deposits. With Nightfall, Starknet will show how that future actually works,” Eli Ben-Sasson, StarkWare’s Co-founder and CEO, said in a statement shared with AlexaBlockchain.
Paul Brody, EY’s Global Blockchain Leader, framed the move as an attempt to solve what has held back large enterprises from using shared ledgers for everyday financial activity. “Privacy is the missing ingredient for large-scale enterprise payments on-chain,” Brody said. “The only scalable way to achieve it is on a public, shared blockchain built on open standards. This integration gets us there.”
Why enterprises have cared about privacy — and why this pairing is different
Public blockchains can reduce reconciliation friction and enable near-real-time settlement, but their default transparency can reveal balances, counterparties and trading strategies—attributes corporates typically treat as confidential. StarkWare is betting that combining Starknet’s scaling layer with Nightfall’s privacy design can narrow that gap, while still enabling compliance workflows such as audit trails and controlled transparency.
Nightfall has been developed in multiple iterations over the last several years, including updates disclosed by EY and prior collaborations in the Ethereum ecosystem. EY has described newer versions as moving toward a zero-knowledge rollup approach that provides faster finality than optimistic constructions, while keeping transactions private.
The Nightfall codebase has also been published openly, with EY’s repositories describing functionality for private transfers of token standards such as ERC-20 and NFTs under zero knowledge.
StarkWare’s announcement also emphasizes “identity-bound” or certificate-linked controls—an approach EY has described as binding addresses to enterprise credentials to enable privacy with audit and compliance features.
The stablecoin backdrop: big volumes, limited “real payments” penetration
The timing also tracks a broader push to industrialize stablecoins as a payments and settlement tool. StarkWare mentioned stablecoin activity surpassing $10 trillion in “adjusted” settlement volume in 2025. This figure was recently cited by Visa’s crypto cheif.
Of $47 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume recorded on blockchain, “adjusted” stablecoin transaction volume was about $10.4 trillion, according to a data website run by Visa and blockchain analysts Allium Labs.
Even so, mainstream payment adoption remains early. Visa has said its own stablecoin settlement volumes are still a small fraction of its total payments footprint, showing why infrastructure providers are focused on bridging compliance and operational requirements rather than simply adding another blockchain rail.
What StarkWare says the integration enables
According to the announcement, institutions using Starknet with Nightfall would be able to:
- run private B2B and cross-border payments,
- keep treasury balances confidential,
- hold and transfer tokenized assets around the clock, and
- execute “confidential DeFi” workflows such as lending, swaps and yield strategies with on-chain settlement.
StarkWare said transactions are private by default, while allowing selective disclosure for audits and KYC-aligned controls. These are the features that privacy-focused crypto tooling has struggled to reconcile cleanly with regulated enterprise operations.
Competitive and regulatory context
Privacy on public chains has long been a contested design space, spanning everything from application-level mixers to purpose-built privacy networks and enterprise-focused zero-knowledge tooling. The corporate market, however, tends to prioritize controlled disclosure and governance over blanket anonymity—an orientation reflected in how EY describes Nightfall’s AML/KYC gating and compliance posture.
Ben-Sasson also pointed to a personal arc in privacy technology: he previously co-founded Zcash, one of the earliest privacy-centric public blockchains, before launching StarkWare. In the announcement, he characterized the collaboration with EY—one of the largest global professional services firms—as evidence that privacy has moved from an ideological fringe to a mainstream enterprise requirement.
StarkWare did not provide a timeline in today’s announcement for when Nightfall-enabled transactions will be generally available on Starknet, but said it plans to support adoption through in-person educational events with institutions and developers.
The article “Starknet Taps EY’s Nightfall to Make Enterprise Payments Private on Public Rails” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/Starknet-Nightfall-Make-Enterprise-Payments-Private-on-Public-Rails/
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