Everyone who has been in finance for over ten years shares a common pain point: compliance and privacy often clash. When they clash, we end up losing hair.

Recently, I heard that some colleagues in the Netherlands have adopted a new public chain, enabling tokenized stock trading worth millions of euros to be completed in seconds, with compliant transfers and private transactions. My first reaction was: Is this really reliable? How can compliance and privacy be satisfied at the same time?

But after digging deeper, I found that this logic indeed has a way. Traditional public chains make all transactions transparent and open—what kind of institution would dare use that? Business secrets are laid bare. Pure privacy coins, on the other hand, tend to make regulators headache-inducing.

This new chain employs "selective disclosure"—imagine a transaction as a sealed bid document, where only participants and authorized regulators holding specific "keys" can see the details (for example, during audits). Others see only a well-packaged document with a compliant process. Zero-knowledge proofs and related modules handle these tasks behind the scenes.

For financial institutions, what does this mean? Cross-border securities settlement can be shortened from T+2, T+3 to just seconds. Assets are anchored on-chain natively, smart contracts automatically execute rules, and over 60% of intermediary fees can be saved. The entire process is fully automated, and compliance reports can be generated with a single click—reducing the frequency of overtime significantly.

Now, a European exchange has already partnered with this chain, planning to bring €300 million worth of real assets on-chain. This is not a small-scale effort; they are serious. They also brought in European licensed institution 21X as a partner, which means "regulatory clarity" is already assured.

Looking at this trend, for blockchain to truly tackle the tough challenge of finance, a "compliance-native" technological approach might be the only reliable way forward.