PriFi
PriFi, short for private finance, is the Logos design philosophy for financial tools built on privacy-preserving, peer-to-peer infrastructure, on hardware you control.
The basics
The Logos PriFi thesis page calls PriFi "a technical design philosophy". It describes "financial primitives deployed on privacy-preserving, peer-to-peer infrastructure, on hardware you control."
PriFi starts from the idea of a transaction supply chain. A deal passes through seven links:
- Discovery: finding a counterparty
- Diligence: verifying who they are
- Negotiation: agreeing price and terms
- Contracting: committing in an enforceable form
- Ordering: putting transactions in sequence
- Settlement: the only link where value moves
- Enforcement and recourse: making outcomes stick, or proving what happened
The Logos blog argues that a blockchain gives strong guarantees at settlement and leaves the other links exposed. A transaction is only as secure as its least-protected link. "PriFi aims to secure the entire transaction supply chain." A later blog post by Nasrudin calls it "an approach to taking privacy across the whole lifecycle of a transaction".
The blog sorts the threats into two classes. Counterparty hazards come from the parties actually transacting. Predatory hazards come from "actors who are not party to the transaction at all", such as a competing bidder.
The blog also separates two kinds of credible commitment. A motivational commitment holds because the party could break it but prefers to keep it, for reasons such as reputation or collateral. An imperative commitment holds because breaking it is constrained or impossible. PriFi tries to shrink what the blog calls the "commitment surface".
The blog states that "PriFi, or private finance, is not about absolute secrecy, and it's not about evading regulations."
How it applies to Logos
PriFi is a Logos term. The PriFi thesis page maps parts of the Logos stack to the links they protect:
- Basecamp, a local desktop app: discovery and diligence
- Logos Messaging, anonymous communication: discovery, diligence and negotiation
- Logos Storage, content-addressed storage with verifiable integrity: contracting
- Logos Blockchain, Blend (private transaction and block propagation): ordering
- Logos Blockchain, Cryptarchia (private proof-of-stake consensus): settlement
- Logos Blockchain, Zones (selective disclosure for compliance and disputes): enforcement
The page names a companion paper, "Vaults of glass: why transparent blockchains are incomplete institutions". The blog post of 15 September 2026 says its research was compiled by Logos cofounder Jarrad Hope. It ties PriFi to Logos's civil society aims: "Effective parallel organising requires economic rails".
The blog post of 21 September 2026 says Testnet v0.3 advances the stack's coordination components, including Service Discovery, Mix, RLN and Chat.
Examples
These are the cases Logos sources use to explain what PriFi addresses.
- The Bybit theft (2025, $1.5 billion). The attack compromised the signing interface. The chain then executed the signed instruction.
- Address poisoning, maximal extractable value (MEV) and frontrunning, which the blog lists as threats.
- A UK merger and acquisition leak that, per the PriFi thesis page, added £42M to the cost of an acquisition.
- Physical coercion attacks in crypto, which the thesis page puts at over $100M in losses from January to April 2026.
- Bitcoin nodes, which reject any transaction that breaks the protocol's rules. The blog gives this as an imperative commitment.
- Muster, where a 2-of-3 authorisation rule means no single participant can act alone.
Add an example: edit this section.
See also
Takes on this idea
None yet. See Takes.
Sources
- PriFi: Securing the Entire Transaction Supply Chain, logos.co
- PriFi and the Incomplete Institution: Securing the Transaction Supply Chain, The Logos Blog, 15 September 2026
- Nasrudin, Building the Tools for Private and Local-First Coordination, The Logos Blog, 21 September 2026
- From Motivational to Imperative: Strengthening Commitments with PriFi, The Logos Blog, 24 September 2026
- Mitigating Hazards from Inside and Outside Transactions with Prifi, The Logos Blog, 8 October 2026