Railgun enables private and confidential payments through zero-knowledge proofs and symmetric encryption, hiding various transaction details.
Multiple protocols like EncryptedERC, Privacy Pools, Zether, Nocturne, Panther protocol, cWETH, and Zeto offer different approaches to confidential transactions and privacy in the DeFi space.
Efforts are being made to formalize privacy standards on Ethereum through proposals like EIP-7945 for confidential token ERC and ERC-5564 for implementing stealth addresses.
The current landscape highlights the necessity of confidentiality on Ethereum, with different cryptographic models providing varying levels of privacy, usability, and performance.