EP. 109 | Building Institutional Rails On-chain — A Conversation with Canton Co-Founder Shaul Kfir

About this episode

Ari interviews Shaul Kfir about building institutional blockchain infrastructure with a focus on privacy and compliance.

When the Bitcoin white paper landed in 2008, most people saw a payment system. Shaul Kfir saw a privacy problem — because he had spent years working on the zero-knowledge proof technology that would eventually make private transactions possible on blockchains. That instinct shaped everything that followed, including the Canton Network, the blockchain he co-founded that now moves trillions of dollars a month for some of the world's largest financial institutions. Shaul's path is unlike most in this space. He co-authored libsnark, the seminal zkSNARK library that helped bring zero-knowledge proofs to blockchains, studied under Turing Award winner Ron Rivest at MIT, and built one of Israel's first Bitcoin brokerages before turning his attention to the infrastructure problem that would define his career: how do you build a blockchain that institutions can actually use? In this episode, Ari sits down with Shaul to explore why privacy was a non-negotiable design principle from day one, why the industry is now at a genuine inflection point as institutions move from private to public blockchain environments, and what the beginning of institutional DeFi actually looks like in practice…

People in this episode

Host: Ari

Guest: Shaul Kfir

Topics covered

• blockchain technology
• institutional finance
• privacy in transactions
• zero-knowledge proofs
• DeFi
• regulatory compliance

Keywords

• Canton Network
• zero-knowledge proofs
• institutional DeFi
• privacy
• blockchain
• financial institutions
• compliance

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Canton Network, MIT, libsnark

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