Bankless · Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Nikhil Chandhok clarified that ARK's privacy features are based on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), stating that validators cannot access transaction data. While this provides true privacy, he noted that the trust assumption is currently with the TEE manufacturer, and acknowledged that future evolution to more purely cryptographic solutions is possible.
“validators are not going to be able to look at your transactions. That is not a thing that we want. That defeats the purpose of having privacy.”
“Like, the whole notion, the whole, all private transactions essentially run through TEs, which is a trusted execution layer, and nobody is able to look inside those.”
“For now, I think we're satisfied with the TEE as the trust assumption because we also have like performance constraints that we want to implement.”