Why

A vision-centric overview of Seismic

The traditional financial system processes over $100 trillion in sensitive payment volume annually. The scale is clear even when considering just the top three categories: payroll distributions ($57 trillion), commercial revenue ($53 trillion), and housing payments ($24 trillion). Including healthcare, insurance, and treasury management pushes the figure even higher.

Public blockchains are poorly suited to handle this sensitive volume due to their reliance on transparency for consensus. Critical details— such as account balances, transfer amounts, and participant identities— are visible to all observers.

Such transparency is commercially and socially untenable. Businesses lose competitive edge, narrative control, and bargaining power. Consumers, likewise, are exposed to reputational and interpersonal losses.

Developers have long sought to resolve this issue by creating custom protocols that encrypt payment data. These offerings tend to focus on one of two value propositions:

1. Privacy. Your financial activity cannot be monitored by any third party. Not your payment processor, not your government.

2. Efficiency. Your transactions can settle in under a second, cost less than a cent, and have global reach.

The challenge is that, for mass market users, traditional financial services are sufficiently private and efficient. While encrypted stablecoin payments offer clear advantages, they are not compelling enough on their own to overcome the network effects of legacy payment systems.

The missing piece is a broader DeFi ecosystem around these encrypted payments. A business is unlikely to become an early adopter if the benefit is a 1% cost reduction on 1% of point-of-sale volume. However, if going on-chain enables access to DeFi services— such as converting revenue into BTC, then borrowing against the position— the experience begins to approach an order-of-magnitude improvement. This is why companies that want to target sensitive payments can’t focus solely on payments. They need to build markets around them.

The shift in perspective has implications beyond payments. It reframes the role of encrypted blockchains altogether. Historically, encryption has struggled to find product-market fit. Many attribute this to timing, or argue that encryption is a feature rather than a product. These critiques hold when encryption is applied to existing crypto volume, primarily one-off stablecoin transfers or memecoin trades, which genuinely don’t need encryption.

But encryption isn’t valuable because it improves services for today’s volume. It’s valuable because it unlocks new volume, the $100 trillion in sensitive TradFi transactions that public blockchains cannot reach. To reach that volume, product development must be centered around markets that provide value to sensitive payments.

This is challenging. Developers looking to act on this insight today must build complex, custom infrastructure using technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), multi-party computation (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and trusted execution environments (TEE). Effectively leveraging these tools requires orchestrating provers, managing specialized indexers, distributing heavyweight client-side SDKs, and maintaining relayer clusters.

The technical overhead presents a significant barrier to entry. Today, only a handful of teams possess the expertise required to build encrypted DeFi protocols. And even for these teams, the need to invest months of engineering effort and tens of thousands of dollars in audits imposes meaningful friction on product development and growth.