Programmable privacy

Programmable privacy is the ability to define when, how, and to whom information is revealed — directly within the logic of a smart contract or protocol.

In traditional blockchains, all transaction data (amounts, addresses, states) are public by default. With programmable privacy, privacy becomes a controllable feature rather than a binary shield: developers can write code that enforces selective disclosure, conditional transparency, or compliance logic — all under cryptographic guarantees.

For example, a confidential payment contract could keep amounts private from the public, but automatically reveal them to a regulator, auditor, or counterparty under predefined conditions (e.g., threshold signatures, time locks, or legal triggers).

In the context of gcEVM, programmable privacy is achieved through garbled-circuit-based confidential compute, which allows encrypted smart contracts to execute deterministically and verifiably. This means every on-chain computation can remain private by default, yet still interoperable, auditable, and composable across existing EVM ecosystems — effectively bridging privacy, compliance, and transparency within one programmable framework.