Blockchains are public databases. This poses an immediate hurdle for large institutions like banks, whose customers generally don’t want their balances and payment history exposed to prying eyes. Now, crypto giant Circle has partnered with the Aleo blockchain to launch a “private” version of its stablecoin called USDCx, which will obfuscate transaction history, said Howard Wu, co-founder of Aleo. Fortune.
“People don’t want to reveal their company’s revenue. They don’t want to reveal business intelligence,” Wu said. “But the way transparent blockchains work today unfortunately means that every time you make a transaction, you’re disclosing that data.”
The new Circle-backed token, which like other stablecoins is tied to underlying assets like the US dollar, will not be truly private. Each transaction of the token will include what Wu called a “compliance record,” which Circle can access in case law enforcement or other authorities contact specific transactions. Still, to public users viewing a blockchain log, transactions will appear unintelligible and resemble “blocks of data,” Wu said.
“This is banking-level confidentiality, as opposed to ‘confidentiality,’” he added.
The big banks are mobilizing
The launch of USDCx is part of a broader crypto industry push to persuade major banks and institutions to use blockchain technology. This effort appears to be gaining traction, particularly in the area of tokenization, or putting real-world assets like mortgages or even the US dollar into blockchain packages.
Asset management giant BlackRock launched its own tokenized money market fund BUIDL, online brokerage Robinhood moved into blockchain-based stock trading, and fintech giants like Stripe invested huge sums of capital in stablecoins. “Every stock, every bond, every fund – every asset – can be tokenized,” said Larry Fink, co-founder and CEO of BlackRock, in his 2025 investor letter.
Wu, the co-founder of Aleo, has seen interest from a number of potential customers in privacy-friendly stablecoins, including crypto payroll processors Request Finance and Toku. He also said that prediction markets, or places where players can bet on real-world events and sports, are also interested in experimenting with stablecoins like USDCx.
Aleo, which specializes in private blockchain transactions, is not the only such technology focused on crypto privacy. There are other cryptocurrencies, including Zcash, that also promise users crypto transactions. However, these cryptocurrencies are much more volatile than stablecoins which, as their name suggests, are designed to remain stable against the US dollar or other currencies.
