CZ: Lack of Transaction Privacy is the Final Major Hurdle for Cryptocurrency to Become a Mainstream Payment Method

BlockBeats News, February 16th, Binance founder CZ stated at the 2026 World Economic Forum that the lack of transaction privacy is the final major barrier to cryptocurrency becoming a mainstream payment method. Despite significant improvements in issues such as high fees and slow speeds over the past decade through technologies like Layer 2, the feature of fully transparent and permanently traceable transactions on public blockchains makes it difficult for ordinary consumers and businesses to accept it for daily payments. If a company were to pay employee salaries using cryptocurrency on-chain, simply by clicking the send address, one could easily see the salary level of everyone in the company. When a company pays a supplier, it also inadvertently exposes its entire balance, a list of other suppliers, and cash flow details to competitors, which is commercially unacceptable.

The solution proposed by CZ is the concept of "invisible rails," using blockchain as the underlying infrastructure to provide faster and cheaper settlement for existing payment providers, where users do not need to directly interact with wallet addresses or private keys. Develop privacy protection technology to hide sensitive data while maintaining compliance and verifiability.