Privacy and accountability can coexist onchain, say panelists at Consensus Miami
Key takeaways
- Traditional compliance systems often address accountability by identifying people, but that can undermine one of crypto's original promises: the ability to transact without exposing personal identity by default.
- Rajeev Bamra, global head of strategy for digital economy at Moody's Ratings, said the conventional intelligence layer answers three questions: "Who is it?
- Blockchain architecture, he predicted, will not be uniformly public or private but a hybrid.
Speakers from Moody’s Ratings and Change NOW said that hybrid blockchain architecture and address-level monitoring can help solve both problems simultaneously.By Jeffrey Albus|Edited by Aoyon Ashraf May 7, 2026, 9:14 p.m. 2 min read Make preferred on Onchain Privacy and Identity at Consensus Miami (CoinDesk)What to know: Crypto can support both user privacy and institutional accountability, speakers explained in a panel on the onchain “intelligence layer.”Moody’s strategist Rajeev Bamra said institutional digital finance has grown by “over 100 or 150%” in the past 18 months but, at roughly $35 billion, remains a fraction of the $200-trillion-plus in traditional clearing flows.ChangeNOW’s Pauline Shangett said the company maps wallet addresses rather than identities to respond to compliance and law-enforcement needs.Public blockchains make transactions transparent enough to trace, audit and police, but that visibility can come at the expense of user privacy. Traditional compliance systems often address accountability by identifying people, but that can undermine one of crypto's original promises: the ability to transact without exposing personal identity by default.
According to panelists at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference earlier this week, those tensions are increasingly solvable through an onchain “intelligence layer” that combines hybrid blockchain architecture with wallet-address-level monitoring.The idea is to split the work across different parts of the system. Private permissioned networks can give institutions the accountability and credibility they need, while public permissionless chains can provide liquidity, and blockchain-forensics tools can help platforms screen transactions at the wallet-address level without automatically tying every user to a real-world identity.
Rajeev Bamra, global head of strategy for digital economy at Moody's Ratings, said the conventional intelligence layer answers three questions: "Who is it? What are they doing? And can I trust the record?" Those have been addressed in traditional finance by banks, custodians, clearinghouses and credit-rating agencies, he said.