COTI Foundation CFO Yair Lavi expects the first major wave of institutional migration to public blockchains to begin in 2026, arguing that this shift will require a new category of “programmable privacy” that zero-knowledge systems are not yet capable of supporting at scale.
Speaking in an interview with Yellow.com on the sidelines of Binance blockchain week, Lavi said enterprises, central banks and medical institutions increasingly recognise that privacy must evolve beyond anonymity.
“People realize that up until recently, privacy in blockchain meant anonymity — which doesn’t work with mainstream adoption,” he said. Instead, institutions need selective, granular privacy that conceals only specific parts of a transaction or application flow.
Lavi argued that garbled-circuit technology is better suited for emerging use cases such as encrypted AI inference and confidential medical-data processing.
He noted that COTI is piloting a medical-data project with a leading Israeli hospital, saying that medical information “cannot remain on blockchain unsecured or unprivate,” and that ZK systems “don’t handle this amount of data” or the computation needed for AI workloads.
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The foundation believes programmable privacy will be essential as AI-generated datasets and on-chain applications continue to grow. He also stressed that corporations and users will not adopt chain-specific privacy solutions.
“End users and corporations don’t want chain-focused solutions,” Lavi said, adding that privacy infrastructure will need to function across ecosystems such as Ethereum, Solana and Cardano.
COTI has already launched a beta of a universal, chain-agnostic privacy layer and integrated confidential transactions into MetaMask to align with tools institutions already use.
Lavi described today’s slow enterprise adoption as a structural bottleneck: institutions have not embraced public chains because privacy wasn’t available, and because they stayed off public chains, they never encountered the full set of privacy requirements.
He expects this standoff to break as more real-world asset programs, ETF activity and central-bank pilots push institutions into public environments.
Stablecoins will accelerate this transition, he added, noting their rapidly growing settlement volume and the need for compliant confidentiality in remittances, corporate payments and AI-driven systems. As the U.S., EU and UK advance stablecoin frameworks, Lavi said privacy-enabled settlement layers will become central to future adoption.
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