Reimagining Consent, Data Rights & Privacy-Preserving Payments in the Age of Programmable Finance
By Thomas Feiler
Privacy by Design in Programmable Payments: A visual exploration of consent, data rights, and governance in a digitally interconnected world.
From Data Subject to Data Sovereign
The digitalization of finance has led to the mass proliferation of personal and transactional data. In traditional systems, individuals are the subjects of data capture, often without full clarity about where their information flows, how it is used, or whether they retain any rights once it leaves their control. As programmable finance gains traction, introducing smart contracts, distributed ledgers, and real-time cross-border settlement, the stakes for privacy and consent multiply. The ability to trace, link, and infer financial behaviors at scale turns previously isolated data points into high-resolution behavioral maps.
This shift brings into sharp focus a new imperative: individuals must evolve from passive data subjects to active data sovereigns. They must not only be able to grant or deny access but to do so with cryptographic confidence, programmable conditions, and real-time revocability. Privacy must be re-engineered, not as a layer of obfuscation, but as an embedded right within the financial architecture itself.
Consent by Design: Beyond Terms and Conditions
Historically, financial consent has been administrative, captured once, buried in documentation, and rarely revisited. In a world of programmable financial flows, this model is insufficient. The velocity and granularity of data interactions demand a dynamic, auditable, and enforceable model of consent.
Privacy-preserving protocols such as selective disclosure, zero-knowledge proofs, and anonymous credentials introduce new possibilities. Rather than sharing a full dataset, individuals can prove compliance with requirements, such as age, residency, or risk profile, without revealing underlying attributes. Consent becomes conditional, contextual, and codified in logic. A transaction might carry not only a monetary payload but a structured declaration: “I authorize this payment, for this use, under these constraints, revocable after this date.”
This is the shift from privacy as policy to privacy as protocol.
Programmable Rights, Not Just Programmable Money
The emergence of programmable money, assets whose behavior can be controlled through embedded logic, invites a parallel concept: programmable data rights. As with money, data can now be tokenized, access-controlled, time-bound, and jurisdictionally routed.
Imagine a payment system in which a user’s identity is verified once, but subsequent actions only reveal what is necessary, confirming they are allowed to transact without exposing their full identity again. Or a scenario where a compliance check is performed entirely off-chain, yet its result, via a zero-knowledge proof, is recorded and accepted across counterparties as valid. These mechanisms do not weaken compliance; they strengthen it through cryptographic assurance and operational integrity.
With the right frameworks, institutions can validate without surveilling, report without replicating, and reconcile without exposing. It is a reversal of the default model: privacy is preserved by default, and access is explicitly granted, no longer implicitly assumed.
Data Governance in Modular Payment Systems
In traditional architectures, data governance is centralized, procedural, and heavily reliant on manual oversight. But as the financial stack becomes modular, data governance must also become composable. Each module, identity verification, transaction screening, reporting, dispute resolution, must not only interoperate, but also respect the contextual privacy rights of the user and the obligations of each institution involved.
This requires new standards for metadata handling, for cross-institutional attestations, and for consent portability. An individual who verifies themselves via a regulated KYC provider should not need to reverify when initiating a transaction elsewhere, provided the attestation can be cryptographically validated, its provenance trusted, and its scope transparently defined.
RELEVANT, as a governance and coordination layer, offers precisely such infrastructure. It enables privacy-preserving attestations to flow between actors, banks, regulators, PSPs, without creating data duplication or unnecessary exposure. Through modular APIs, auditability is preserved while unnecessary visibility is prevented.
Trust Without Surveillance
The goal is not anonymity at all costs. It is integrity with restraint. Financial systems must retain the ability to audit, to investigate, and to enforce, but they must do so in ways that are proportional, purposeful, and verifiable. The widespread assumption that trust requires omniscience is not only flawed, it is operationally inefficient and ethically unsustainable.
Privacy-preserving financial infrastructure enables trust without surveillance. It reduces attack surfaces, aligns with global regulatory shifts like GDPR and PSD2, and opens new models of compliance that are both less invasive and more effective. For regulators, it offers a more precise view of systemic risk and behavior. For institutions, it reduces liability and increases confidence in data handling. For users, it restores agency.
This is not privacy as resistance. It is privacy as foundation.
The Path Forward: From Policy to Infrastructure
To embed privacy meaningfully into programmable finance, institutions must move beyond check-box compliance and embrace infrastructure-level commitments. This includes:
Investing in cryptographic primitives and standards (e.g., ZKPs, MPC, DID)Aligning regulatory obligations with modular architectureCreating interoperable consent frameworks across bordersSupporting attestations and proofs over raw data exchange
Privacy is not the enemy of efficiency. It is its prerequisite in a world of real-time, programmable payments.
Conclusion: Privacy as Programmable Trust
In programmable finance, every interaction, whether payment, identity check, or compliance report, is not merely a data event, but a trust event. Trust that must be earned not through opacity or centralization, but through verifiability, proportionality, and restraint.
Privacy, then, is not the antithesis of transparency. It is a new architecture of trust, one in which rights are not retrofitted, but designed from the beginning. As finance becomes faster, more composable, and more interconnected, our systems must evolve to respect not only the movement of money, but the dignity of the individuals behind every transaction.
In the architecture of tomorrow, privacy is not hidden. It is encoded, provable, and sovereign.
Privacy with Proof was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.