ALan Scott: The Unseen Support for Crypto Privacy Among U.S. Leaders

That would mean, for example, that senators and intelligence agencies might actually not be as adversarial towards privacy-focused crypto protocols as some claim, per Scott.

Speaking to Cointelegraph at the ETHGlobal in Sydney on May 2, Scott, a contributor and public advocate for Railgun, said he has not seen any hints of a crypto privacy crusade on Capitol Hill based on conversations he's had with senators and the FBI in Washington D.C.

"In those higher levels of government," he continued, "there are lots of people that are smart, want to generally do right, and protect people.".

Railgun is a privacy-focused protocol that delivers private transactions for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) users across the Ethereum network and several of its layer-2 networks, including Polygon and Arbitrum.

Railgun, on the other hand, gets tarred with the same brush as other crypto privacy protocols that have seen the long arm of the law in recent years, such as Tornado Cash.

On the 17th of April, an X account posting itself as "official for Railgun" issued a denial that North Korea or another sanctioned entity was using it to launder ill-gotten crypto, particularly having its source from an FBI statement.

Railgun said its zk-proof tech, combined with their "Private Proofs of Innocence" systems, deters bad actors from using its protocol.

Scott said it was important for crypto users to remember that the FBI is a big multifaceted organization and that the people he'd spoken with at the bureau were more concerned with bad actors looking to commit financial crimes than they were about protocols around privacy.

They're worried about how that might cause issues in not being able to catch the bad guys. "That's a real positive thing for them to be part of," Scott said, earlier noting that other privacy technologies, such as an email provider that doesn't look into people's email or sell information, are open to everyone.

Scott said most of the discussion he had with politicians and regulators in the U.S. had been largely positive, with many apparently genuinely trying to do their best in understanding the new developments in crypto more broadly.

"When we talk about crypto or we talk about DeFi, they ask informed questions and really try to understand what the tech is all about, how it works, and why we like it that much," he told Decrypt.

On April 24, co-founders of the crypto mixer and Bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet were arrested, accused of money laundering by the Department of Justice (DOJ), which alleged that the platform had handled $2 billion in dirty money transactions and money-laundered $100 million.

Scott added that despite these actions against mixers like Samourai Wallet and the ongoing persecution of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, there didn't seem to be a crusade against the concept of privacy in crypto more broadly.

"What the Railgun team is doing is disintermediation in finance, and DeFi really is quite a beautiful and very important thing to be doing.".

"Privacy is a cornerstone element of that. So while we're advocating for it, and being loud, and talking about privacy as an important thing—it's completely normal, actually quite boring," Scott said. "It's already part of the traditional finance that exists today.".

He added that it would really be sad, even disastrous, if the concept and application of privacy in crypto were outlawed.

"It just means we've built a really hyper-accurate surveillance machine that can be monitored in real-time."