Fairblock, a programmable privacy infrastructure project building within the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem, published an argument in September 2025 on the Cosmos Ecosystem Blog that confidentiality in blockchain transactions is not a niche ideological concern but a basic requirement for commercial adoption. The piece, authored by Fairblock itself and republished by the Cosmos blog rather than issued as an official Interchain Foundation position, frames public blockchains' default transparency as a structural liability for any business that competes on price, timing, or deal flow.

The core claim is straightforward. When a company executes a transaction on a public blockchain, it broadcasts the amount, the counterparty, and the timing to every competitor, data broker, and automated trading bot that monitors the network. Fairblock's research cites figures from Shoal Research showing that DeFi (decentralized finance, meaning financial applications running on public blockchains) lost more than one billion dollars to hacks and roughly two billion dollars to frontrunning and market manipulation in a single twelve-month period. Frontrunning refers to the practice of detecting a pending large trade and inserting a competing transaction ahead of it to profit from the price movement it will cause. The analogy Fairblock draws to traditional markets is concrete: approximately half of U.S. equity trading volume executes off public exchanges in Alternative Trading Systems (ATS/dark pools) specifically to limit information leakage. The argument is that crypto will eventually reach the same conclusion.

Fairblock's technical solution is FairyRing, a Cosmos SDK-based network (a blockchain built using Cosmos's modular development toolkit) that functions as a decentralized key-generation layer. FairyRing uses a combination of Twisted ElGamal homomorphic encryption, which allows arithmetic on encrypted numbers without decrypting them, light zero-knowledge proofs, and threshold identity-based encryption to enable what the company calls confidential stablecoins. In practice, this means transaction amounts are encrypted while wallet addresses remain visible, preserving the composability that lets decentralized applications interact with each other. The system connects to other Cosmos chains via IBC (the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol, the standard messaging layer between Cosmos chains) and to Ethereum-compatible chains via FairyKit, an integration layer that extends support to EVM-compatible chains. FairyRing has processed more than one million transactions on its test network, though the project has not yet launched on mainnet.

For institutional clients, Fairblock has built a separate product called SettleX, which the company positions as the first confidential clearing and settlement layer for institutional stablecoin flows. This is the piece most relevant to the compliance concerns raised by large stablecoin issuers including Circle and PayPal. A Fireblocks survey of 295 financial executives found that 36 percent cited security as the top barrier to stablecoin adoption at their firms. Fairblock has also integrated with Noble, the primary USDC issuance chain in the Cosmos ecosystem, to bring selective disclosure features to Noble's EVM application layer. Selective disclosure means a counterparty or regulator can be given a key to verify a specific transaction without the full transaction history becoming public. Jelena Djuric, co-founder of Noble, stated: "To unlock their full potential, stablecoins need an environment where sensitive financial activity isn't exposed by default."

The regional implications are significant, particularly for markets where stablecoin usage is growing fastest. South Asia became the fastest-growing crypto adoption region globally in 2025, with India and Pakistan ranking among the top five countries by adoption rate. The Philippines, a Southeast Asian nation, also ranked in that global top five for the same period. The UAE-to-Pakistan remittance corridor alone moves roughly 24 billion dollars per year. Informal crypto remittance users in that corridor already demonstrate a revealed preference for confidential transfers. A parallel trend has emerged in Sub-Saharan Africa, where privacy coin usage grew 37 percent year over year. Fairblock's selective disclosure architecture is also structurally compatible with emerging regulatory frameworks. Pakistan launched a regulatory sandbox for stablecoin remittance providers in late 2025, with three providers approved for pilots, and Kenya's National Treasury introduced a draft Virtual Asset Service Providers bill in March 2025. Both frameworks require some form of AML (anti-money laundering) reporting access. Fairblock contends that neither mandates full public transparency, placing both within the design space the company is building for; the characterization of Kenya's draft bill in particular reflects Fairblock's own reading of that framework rather than a confirmed regulatory position.

Fairblock has raised 2.5 million dollars in funding from backers including Anagram, Robot Ventures, the Arbitrum Foundation, Axelar, and Reverie. The Cosmos ecosystem it operates within currently has more than 200 companies building on its infrastructure, including Polygon, Hyperliquid, Noble, Ripple, and Binance, and the ATOM token (the native asset of the Cosmos Hub) carried a market capitalization of roughly one billion dollars as of September 2025. The 2026 Cosmos Stack Roadmap explicitly lists programmable privacy as a key enterprise requirement. The Cosmos core team is pursuing ZK-based UTXO models for the base protocol layer, while Fairblock operates as interchain middleware that other chains plug into as a layer above that base stack. The two approaches target different levels of the architecture and are more plausibly complementary than competing. Fairblock contends with other confidential computing projects including Zama and Fhenix (which pursue fully homomorphic encryption), Nillion, Arcium, and Aztec, each taking a different cryptographic path to the same commercial problem. The stablecoin market, currently around 239 billion dollars in total supply and projected to approach two trillion dollars by 2028, gives all of them room to run if the technical and regulatory pieces fall into place.