Sui co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun says confidential transfers are coming to Sui this year, bringing built-in privacy to payments on the network. The new feature will hide transaction amounts while keeping unauthorized token minting “impossible by design,” according to his recent statements.
Abiodun, who is also chief product officer at Mysten Labs, announced the update in a post on X and in interviews around Consensus 2026. He said the feature will let “the entire internet get free payments with privacy, at scale,” and described it as a capability unique to Sui’s architecture.
Confidential transfers will enable users to send funds without revealing sensitive information, such as amounts, on the public blockchain, he said. However, the network will still cryptographically validate every transaction, so balances and supplies are correct.
Sui already positions itself as a high-speed Layer 1 with sub-second finality and low-cost transactions, powered by an object-centric data model. Now the chain aims to add protocol-level privacy, so that private payments are built into the base layer rather than being an optional tool users must choose.
How Confidential Transfers on Sui Will Work
In Sui’s design, confidential transfers record that a transaction happened but shield the exact amount from public view. Instead, zero-knowledge proofs and related cryptography verify that the sender has sufficient funds and that the math balances correctly.
Abiodun stressed that “unauthorized minting [is] impossible by design,” even when amounts are hidden from regular observers. Therefore, the system protects privacy while still enforcing strict limits on token supply and preventing fraudulent balances or double-spending.
The team has also said that only the sender, receiver, and approved parties will be able to see private transaction details. Yet regulators and issuers can still gain controlled visibility when needed, thereby avoiding the “total blackout” problem of some older privacy coins.
Sui’s confidential updates arrive as more users worry that public blockchains make their “bank account look like Twitter,” in Abiodun’s words. He argued that people should not have every payment, salary, or business invoice visible to anyone who opens a block explorer.
The network has processed more than 1 trillion dollars in stablecoin volume since August 2025, according to Abiodun. Consequently, Mysten Labs now wants a large share of those transfers to become private by default, especially routine payments that do not need public exposure.
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