Traditional financial transactions emphasize speed, but existing mainstream public blockchains are somewhat inconvenient. Bitcoin requires 10 minutes for confirmation, and Ethereum's probabilistic finality still falls short of the requirements for securities trading — this is a technical bottleneck.

A new consensus mechanism called Succinct Attestation is an improved version of proof of stake. Its most impressive feature is the integration of zero-knowledge proof technology, which hides the identity of validators (preventing DDoS attacks), while achieving instant finality — once a transaction is packaged, it becomes completely irreversible in about 15 seconds. It sounds like mimicking traditional finance's T+0 settlement, but the key difference is that it eliminates counterparty risk and paves the way for on-chain high-frequency matching engines.

Regarding RWA, the core issue is quite sensitive: how to complete identity verification within a decentralized system without exposing users' personal information to the entire network?

One approach is to use the Citadel protocol, a decentralized identity system based on zero-knowledge proofs. The process is quite interesting: users complete KYC verification locally, then generate a zero-knowledge proof and submit it on-chain. The smart contract on the chain only needs to verify this "proof" to confirm whether the user is an adult or not on a sanctions list — but no node on the chain can ever see your real identity.

What makes this solution elegant is that it not only solves the privacy dilemma in Web3 but also complies with regulations like GDPR. Most importantly, users can truly control their own data.