Great article @nikshepsvn! I think you’ve captured the opportunity well. Markets and agents are moving on-chain, which means that privacy needs to cover the orders, conditions, and strategies behind a trade. Transaction privacy is not enough. I also like that you see stops as the first use case, and then auctions, vaults, and agents opening up a much bigger market opportunity. Thanks also for covering the limitations of the initial release, which were introduced by design. We chose to ship the core Covenant flow early, and then iterate quickly on (mostly) non-functional requirements, like richer triggers, better condition privacy, cross-chain reach, speed and cost. The strategy behind this is to validate Covenants against real market needs and adapt as we go, instead of waiting years to ship a (supposedly) final version. Security-wise, this will also enable a better security and hardening strategy by incrementally shipping more and more complex versions. I’d push back on “threw out the old platform.” Our blind/private compute technology works and is being used by companies today. Covenants are an evolution of that work, focused on crypto use cases where privacy and decentralization can have a bigger impact. We’re willing to make bets and explore new directions to move privacy forward. That work doesn’t disappear when our focus sharpens. The adoption angle you cover is especially exciting to me. Most privacy projects ask users to move to a particular asset or execution environment (a privacy coin, an encrypted EVM). You don’t have to come to Covenants; they’ll come to you, wherever you’re transacting. This opens up a much broader adoption opportunity.

Transaction privacy hides what moved. But in automated markets, your real edge lives in how and when it moves, and today, both are broadcast in the clear. Covenants encrypt that edge until the moment it’s needed Any instruction. Any condition. Any chain.