The XRP Ledger (XRPL) platform used by blockchain payments company Ripple has leveraged Boundless, a zero-knowledge infrastructure provider, to enable banks and asset managers to conduct confidential but compliant transactions directly on the network, according to a Tuesday announcement shared with Cointelegraph.
Boundless CEO Shiv Shankar told Cointelegraph that the project aims to hide details such as trade size, frequency and counterparties from the public, while allowing regulators to scrutinize activity through selective disclosure and role-based access control.
The Boundless integration aims to enable a range of institutional apply cases that have historically been complex to run on completely crystal clear ledgers. According to Shankar, these include cross-border business-to-business payments, treasury and capital management, over-the-counter positions, the issuance of tokenized assets, and decentralized exchange or lending activities where order flow and positions are highly sensitive.
In the case of public blockchains, the trade-off between transparency and confidentiality has become a major obstacle to institutional adoption as banks and asset managers seek to protect trading strategies and customer activities without compromising regulatory oversight.
The move puts XRPL in an increasingly competitive race to ensure bank-grade privacy on public blockchains as institutions seek to avoid what Shankar described as a “transparency tax” on fully evident activity on the network.
The race for privacy expands in the approach of ZK and FHE
In March, crypto firm Zama integrated its fully homomorphic encryption stack (FHE) into the T-REX institutional tokenization platform, showcasing its technology as a confidentiality layer for ERC-3643 securities (tokenized financial instruments that embed compliance rules in the token standard) on T-REX’s upcoming public networks.
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Other projects are betting on variations of zero-knowledge technology, including ZkSync’s Prividium framework, which aims to anchor private institutional execution on Ethereum with ZK proofs while keeping raw transaction data out of public view.
Shankar said projects like zkSync require institutions to run their own Layers 2, which involves more investment and overhead. Boundless, meanwhile, implements solutions via sharp contracts, which it says allows institutions to “stay where the liquidity is” (on Ethereum) and “gain more flexibility in where they deploy their products.”
Shankar said the project aims to replicate the selective disclosure controls of established finance in an onchain environment, rather than forcing institutions to choose between privacy and compliance.
Privacy is moving from features to core infrastructure
The implementation highlights that privacy becomes a feature of the base layer and tokenization infrastructure, rather than an optional add-on.
According to tokenized data, the asset market reached $29.25 billion in April 2026, up 7.9% over the month data from RWA.xyz.
As more real-world assets migrate online and established players experiment with tokenized funds, deposits and securities, there is increasing pressure on networks to incorporate both institutional secrecy and supervisory oversight.
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