# privacy & Manta Network By [niku](https://paragraph.com/@niku) ยท 2023-05-16 --- Privacy means different things to different people, depending on individual perspectives and experiences. However, most would agree that privacy involves the protection of personal information, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and activities from unwanted intrusion, scrutiny, surveillance, monitoring or collection. As a blockchain developer and crypto investor, I believe privacy is essential to ensure individual freedom, autonomy, dignity, equality, trustworthiness, security, safety, innovation, diversity and growth. It serves as a cornerstone of democracy, promoting free speech, open dialogue and diverse viewpoints critical in shaping societal values. In the realm of blockchain technology, on-chain privacy refers to ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of sensitive transaction data stored in blockchain nodes without compromising overall transparency and security standards set by cryptocurrency systems. This challenge arises when balancing between maintaining a tamper-proof, transparent ledger necessary for trust building purposes while protecting participant identities and associated assets involved in complex trading scenarios on various levels of involvement (peer-to-peer trade matching, cross platform swaps & conversions, aggregators and stablecoin minting). The complexity of this problem multiplies for projects attempting to provide multi-blockchain services where each underlying chain operates differently regarding privacy features or lacks them entirely, requiring an extra layer of abstraction translating between diverse formats seamlessly in near real time to avoid losing efficiency in trading operations. Manta Network represents one possible solution tackling multiple aspects of the aforementioned problems, aiming to enable secure, efficient and trusted global exchange of liquidity between disparate chains lacking native supportive tools to reach high level capabilities found more commonly in interoperable systems like Polkadot or Cosmos with built-in connectors between hubs supporting ZKRollups (zero knowledge range proofs). Their stated goal consists in developing novel hybrid zero-knowledge proof methods optimized to increase scalabil --- *Originally published on [niku](https://paragraph.com/@niku/privacy-manta-network)*