Merkle Science brings confidential transfers to Sui with regulatory compliance
In brief
- Merkle Science partners with Mysten Labs to deploy confidential transfers on Sui blockchain
- Confidential transfers keep account balances private while providing compliance teams structured access
- Partnerships with Aleo, Finoa, and Stablecoin Standard expand the privacy-compliance model
Flipping the Privacy Model
Merkle Science is working with Mysten Labs to deploy what it calls confidential transfers on Sui. Rather than publishing every transaction to the public ledger and asking compliance teams to analyze it retroactively, the new model inverts the assumption. Privacy becomes the default. Compliance access becomes a permission layer.
"Rather than treating every transaction as a publicly visible event that compliance teams retroactively analyze, the new model assumes privacy as the default state," Justus Delp, VP of Business Solutions at Merkle Science, said in a statement. Account balances stay private. Compliance teams still get the access they need to do their jobs.
This isn't Merkle Science's first swing at the privacy-compliance problem. Founded in 2018, the firm has spent years building tools for transaction monitoring and risk detection. The company raised $5.75M in a Series A round in 2021 to scale those capabilities. Its product suite includes Compass for transaction monitoring and Tracker for investigations, both used by law enforcement and financial institutions.
Expanding the Footprint
Merkle Science has formed partnerships with Aleo, Finoa, and Stablecoin Standard as part of a broader push to standardize the confidential transfers approach across multiple blockchains. The idea is simple: if privacy and compliance can coexist by design, regulators lose their excuse to ban privacy-preserving tech.
That's the bet. Whether it sticks depends on whether regulators actually adopt the framework. But the move signals a shift. Privacy advocates have long argued that surveillance and control shouldn't be the price of using a blockchain. Compliance officers have long argued that blindness isn't an option. Merkle Science is betting that structured access—not total transparency and not total opacity—can split the difference.
