Institutions want the benefits of blockchain without exposing sensitive data. The deployment of Nightfall on Starknet marks a step toward privacy infrastructure for regulated markets.
As regulated financial institutions increasingly explore blockchain-based infrastructure, privacy remains one of the most significant barriers to real adoption. Institutions require the benefits of onchain settlement and programmability without exposing sensitive transactional or counterparty data.
Today, StarkWare is proud to announce a strategic step toward solving that challenge: the deployment of Nightfall on Starknet. Nightfall is a zero-knowledge privacy protocol developed by EY for the public domain. The deployment is being introduced today at a curated educational event hosted at EY’s Hudson Yards office in New York.
Privacy for institutions
Starknet’s performance and composability make it a strong foundation for onchain applications operating at real-world scale. With the deployment of Nightfall, Starknet adds an important capability for regulated businesses and institutions: privacy-preserving transaction flows suitable for institutional evaluation, including KYC-aligned private payments and settlement workflows on public blockchain infrastructure.
Nightfall is designed as a Layer 3 privacy layer on top of Starknet. In practice, it functions like an appchain-style environment that enterprises can deploy for privacy-preserving transaction flows, while leveraging Starknet for verification and settlement.
This model is a strong fit for TradFi institutions that want to enable users to onramp and rebalance larger amounts privately, while still accessing the broader Starknet ecosystem when they choose to interact with public liquidity. Nightfall relies on zero-knowledge proofs for privacy, with Starknet providing efficient verification and settlement on a public layer.
This allows institutions to explore use cases such as corporate treasury flows, tokenized assets, and institution-to-public liquidity workflows that keep enterprise funds productive while minimizing data leakage and protecting sensitive business information. As more financial activity moves onchain, privacy is increasingly viewed not as an optional feature, but as core infrastructure.
The role of Nightfall and EY
Nightfall is open-source and available in the public domain. While EY does not own or control Nightfall, its role in developing the protocol and supporting its deployment on Starknet provides institutions with a concrete, credible reference for how privacy-preserving workflows can operate via a dedicated Layer 3 deployment path on public blockchain infrastructure.
The deployment effort spans multiple phases, from testnet to mainnet, with a focus on integration support, technical education, and practical evaluation. StarkWare will work with EY to support technical education and practical evaluation for early institutional use cases.
What’s next
The deployment of Nightfall on Starknet reflects a broader shift across the industry: institutional privacy is moving from concept to implementation. Following today’s event, StarkWare will continue engaging institutions through education, targeted discussions, and focused exploration of near-term use cases such as payments, stablecoins, and tokenization.
As teams move beyond experimentation, privacy-capable infrastructure will be a prerequisite for production-grade onchain workflows in regulated environments.
Request an institutional privacy briefing to discuss these use cases and evaluation paths with the StarkWare team.
