In an industry where zero-knowledge tech usage has been the go-to solution for privacy use cases, the COTI team is taking a different path with the little-known technology of garbled circuits. Huh, I guess zk may not be the endgame after all.

Historical 30-day BTC options volatility:

Today marks the largest ever BTC options expiry on Deribit — $12 billion — as bitcoin slid over -3% in parallel with US market declines.

Curiously, 30-day implied volatility (IV) continues to contract, diverging sharply from realized volatility.

“Implied volatility is pinned near annual lows, with contracts pricing just a 1.98% daily move — well below what you'd expect for true ‘event pricing’ in crypto,” said Wintermute OTC trader Jake O.

The chart above places IV at 44.1 — in the second percentile for the past year — and more than 24% below realized vol, signaling limited demand for directional exposure. Meanwhile, as March comes to a close, BTC is on track for its worst Q1 since 2020.

Deribit CEO Luuk Strijers noted that in addition to muted expectations for price swings, there are mixed sentiment signs in options skew: The 3-day put-call skew is slightly positive (implying demand for short-term downside protection), while the 30-day skew is slightly negative — a modest bullish tell that reinforces the view of a calm expiry setup.

In the bull camp is Build on Bitcoin (BOB) co-founder Dom Harz: “[T]his cooldown after last year’s all-time high isn’t a cause for concern,” he said. “It’s just noise, distracting from bitcoin’s true trajectory.” Up, presumably — though timing is another story.

— Macauley Peterson

If you’re a builder, this is your moment.

Permissionless IV is calling founders, devs, and innovators to take the stage and push the space forward. No fluff — just the people writing the next chapter of crypto.

🚀 Speaker applications are open. If you're shipping real product, take the mic.

🛠 Hackathon locked & loaded. $100K+ in bounties. No distractions — just execution.

Brooklyn. Summer. Real builders only.

📅 June 22–26 | Brooklyn, NY

COTI launches V2 mainnet

After about 16 months from when the team first announced its roadmap and more than two years of R&D later, COTI launched v2 of its mainnet yesterday.

COTI’s v2 mainnet marks a shift from its DAG (directed acyclic graph)-based protocol L1 launched in 2018 to a new EVM-compatible and privacy-focused L2 chain.

The goal is to gradually migrate user activity from the L1 to the L2 and eventually sunset the L1 down the road, COTI CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen told Blockworks.

The cornerstone of COTI’s new privacy tech on its L2 chain is the use of “garbled circuits,” a kind of cryptography commonly used in multi-party computation (MPC).

Developed in partnership with Soda Labs, garbled circuits allow parties to compute functions over private data inputs that are garbled i.e., encrypted. This works without revealing the underlying data, similar to zero-knowledge proofs. 

“The technology was impractical to implement on the existing L1 due to its lack of smart contracts and DAG structure,” Bar-Geffen said. He explained the team’s shift in focus to an EVM L2, also citing the fact that most users are also on EVM chains.

COTI’s choice not to use zero-knowledge technology may seem like an unusual one, given the prominence of zk usage in the industry for privacy use cases.

But Bar-Geffen believes garbled circuits as a technology are far more efficient than incumbent solutions. 

“Garbled circuits are multi-party computing, whereas zero-knowledge is limited to a 1-to-1 relationship. You cannot build sophisticated applications with multiple users, like for instance, a DEX with zero-knowledge.”

With its privacy tech stack, COTI also plans to target enterprises and institutions with a need for regulatory compliance, what COTI touts as “privacy-on-demand”.

This points to the crypto industry’s desire to bring trillions of real-world assets onchain.

Today, most tokenized RWAs are walled off from the composability of public blockchains. 

For instance, BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity (BUIDL) Fund uses a KYC whitelist enforced by its tokenization partner Securitize, though it exists as an ERC-20 token on a public chain like Ethereum. Only qualified investors with pre-approved wallets can hold BUIDL tokens.

Privacy chains like COTI could potentially solve this compliance pain point by allowing institutions to easily build smart contracts on top of its tokenized RWAs and then choosing how the information around these assets are revealed.

“When transactions are 100% anonymous, that is illegal. But 100% transparency is also not in compliance. What COTI’s technology offers is the selective disclosure that allows institutions to reveal or not reveal exactly what they want and decides who gets to see what,” Bar-Geffen explained.

COTI’s v2 mainnet is going live with support from ecosystem partners integrating into its chain. Partners include Bancor, Carbon DeFi, Band Protocol, MyEtherWallet and PriveX.

According to COTI’s official blog, about 15,000 wallets were airdropped COTI tokens to celebrate the launch.

COTI is not the only chain with a privacy focus. 

Other similar privacy-focused chains, like the Aztec Network L2 and Aleo L1, are building toward a similar niche with privacy, though both have opted to use zero-knowledge tech rather than garbled circuits.

— Donovan Choy

EOF moves forward despite dev friction

On Thursday’s ACD call, Ethereum core developers reaffirmed their intent to ship Full EOF (EVM object format) with the Fusaka fork alongside the PeerDAS main driver. (Ipsilon wrote up a thorough review of the options with Full EOF referred to as “Option A.”)

EOF is a major overhaul of the EVM that aims for long-term optimization, safety and modularity of Ethereum’s execution engine.

Its scope has stirred controversy. Felix (from the Geth team) backed the more moderate Option D, slightly at odds with fellow Geth college Lightclients.

From outside the client teams, Pascal Caversaccio voiced strong opposition, following up on his published critique: “EOF: When Complexity Outweighs Necessity.” His main claim: No application developers are asking for EOF and its rollout risks alienating the broader dev community.

Despite this, EF staff including Piper Merriam and Ansgar Dietrichs, as well as client teams like Besu and Erigon — stood behind Full EOF. Their reasoning: It’s a clean structural reset, demanded by compiler authors, and backward-compatible for developers preferring the legacy EVM.

Tim Beiko acknowledged the complexity, but noted it emerged from years of iterative work: “We can’t decide not to do something just because it’s complex,” he told participants on the call.

“Long live Full EOF,” cheered Merriam.

So EOF is coming. For developers, the negotiation phase seems over, and the upgrade’s next chapter will focus on implementation and testing.

— Macauley Peterson