StarkWare has announced the integration of Ernst & Young's (EY) Nightfall privacy layer into its L2 network, Starknet.

1/ The Starknet stack now enables confidential payments & DeFi for institutions.

Today, we’re bringing Nightfall, EY’s ZK privacy layer, to Starknet.

Ethereum-secured rails, now ready for enterprise scale 🧵 pic.twitter.com/irme37L276

— StarkWare (BTCFi arc) 🥷 (@StarkWareLtd) February 17, 2026

“For major players, the issue is clear: public blockchains provide scalability, liquidity, and global reach, but complete transparency exposes balances, counterparties, and strategies. This is not feasible for institutions,” the developers noted.

According to the announcement, Nightfall “bridges this gap.” The protocol utilizes zero-knowledge proofs and operates as a third layer on top of Starknet. The network serves as a layer for verification and settlement.

Nightfall aims to retain the benefits of public blockchains while providing capabilities such as:

  • transaction privacy;
  • auditability;
  • compliance with regulations, including KYC procedures.

The StarkWare team believes that the integration of the protocol allows institutional players to selectively disclose information about their on-chain financial activities. This opens up numerous use cases for corporations on Starknet, including:

  • private B2B payments and cross-border transfers;
  • treasury management with confidential balances;
  • round-the-clock transactions with tokenized assets;
  • non-public DeFi operations.

“With Starknet, you get all this with Ethereum's security, high throughput, composability, and access to extensive liquidity in the ecosystem,” the developers emphasized.

EY first introduced Nightfall in 2018. Later, the company released the source code of the solution.

It’s worth noting that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao linked the slow adoption of crypto payments to the lack of privacy.