"The Network State" author Balaji: 2025-2030 will be the era of global privacy infrastructure reconstruction.

During a recent guest appearance on a podcast, Balaji, the author of “The Network State” and former CTO of Coinbase, proposed a division of the development of the encryption industry into “three eight-year cycles”:

• From 2009 to 2017, the industry took eight years to prove the viability of Bitcoin;
• 2017–2025, the rise of Ethereum, people prove that on-chain programmability and scalability routes are feasible;
• From 2025 to 2030, we will enter the third phase - the era of privacy.

Balaji believes that in the next five years, the core narrative of encryption will no longer be assets or programmability, but rather the reconstruction of all financial and identity processes using Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZK): ZKYC, ZK DEX, ZK smart contracts… The entire system will only expose “the minimum necessary information.”

He pointed out that the depth of ZK technology is no less than that of AI. Relying on different mathematical systems, it will attract a large number of top talents and may reshape traditional finance, regulation, and digital identity infrastructure. The encryption community, on-chain identity systems such as ENS/SNS, and even the concept of “network states” will also ferment together during this cycle.

Balaji bluntly stated: Privacy is not a supplementary narrative, but the underlying answer for the next generation of the encryption world.