A neobank without privacy is just a bank with a nicer app
Fintech redecorated the lobby and left the ledger exactly where it was.
Nubank, Revolut and Monzo fixed almost everything that was annoying about a bank and kept the one thing that should have gone: an institution that sees everything you do with money and remembers it forever. Haven is the first product I have used that treats privacy as the actual difference between a neobank and a bank, and this is my attempt to explain why that matters, with the numbers attached.
Open Havenhaven.hn · passkey, no seed phrase
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Ten seconds
The first time I opened Haven I logged in with a passkey, which meant that the entire process of creating an account consisted of looking at my phone for a moment. There was no password to invent and then forget, no twelve words to copy onto a piece of paper and hide in a drawer, and no confirmation email that would sit unread in a folder for years. Ten seconds after installing it, I had an account and a wallet.
What stayed with me afterwards was the gap between how little the app had asked of me and how much it was protecting, because everywhere else those two things move in opposite directions. When a login is easy it is usually because you have already handed over your phone number, your email address, your device fingerprint and a permanent record of everything you buy, and the convenience is being paid for in data, with the bill arriving later and quietly, long after the decision was made.
I have been using Haven for a few months now, and it forced me to put words to something I have been chewing on for years without ever quite writing it down.
The last decade of fintech redecorated the lobby
Nubank, Revolut, N26, Monzo. I use some of them, and they fixed things that deserved to be fixed: the branch queue, the forty-minute phone tree, the account that takes three days to open, the fee schedule written so that nobody could read it. People showed up for that work in numbers that make everything crypto has onboarded look like a rounding error.
Customers, millions, latest figure each company reported. Coinbase is monthly transacting users, the closest number it still publishes.
Sources: Nu Holdings Q2 2026 (139M) · Revolut, January 2026 (70M) · Monzo Annual Report 2026 (15M) · Chime Q2 2026 (10.4M active members) · Coinbase Q2 2026 (7.6M monthly transacting users) · N26 FY2025 (5.6M revenue-relevant customers). For scale, PIX alone is used by more than 170 million people in Brazil.
But look at what sits underneath all of it. An institution holds your money, sees every transaction you make, keeps that record indefinitely, and shares it with processors, partners, advertisers and regulators on terms you never negotiated and could not have refused. That is exactly the arrangement my grandfather had with his bank in 1974; the interface got dramatically better while the posture did not move an inch.
So when a neobank announces that it now supports crypto, my first question is not which chains it added but whether anything structural changed, or whether we are looking at the same machine running on different assets.
Usually it is the same machine, and often it is worse, for a reason specific to crypto: the ledger is public. When you connect a wallet to a KYC'd card issuer you are not disclosing one purchase, you are attaching your legal name to an address, and through that address to every transaction the wallet ever made and every one it will make from now on. Coinbase Card and the products built like it work this way by design, and you can see what that means for yourself:
What one KYC link does to a wallet. Nothing here is sent anywhere; the wallet is pretend.
- Current balance
- Every transaction this wallet ever made
- Every transaction it will make from now on
- Every counterparty, and their history too
- NFTs, ENS names, DAO votes, donations
- Bridged activity on other chains
Right now the wallet is an address. Nobody knows whose.
Pseudonymity does not degrade gradually; it collapses at a single point of contact, retroactively, and there is no undo. Haven's own line for this is the sharpest I have seen: stop leaving breadcrumbs to your identity.
The identity side of that link is no safer than the chain side, because the KYC file a card issuer keeps on you is a target, and the record of the last few years says the target gets hit with some regularity:
This is the whole argument, and I will state it plainly. If the difference between a bank and a neobank does not live in privacy, there is no difference worth the word, because what you have built is the surveillance ledger with a dark mode toggle and better onboarding copy.
Money was the original privacy technology
Georg Simmel wrote a thousand pages on this in 1900 and people still skip it. His argument in The Philosophy of Money is that money is what allowed strangers to deal with strangers, because before it existed an exchange dragged your whole self along with it, your family and your standing and your obligations and your village, and money let a transaction be about the transaction and nothing else. Simmel called this a genuine expansion of personal freedom, and he was right about that: cash is not a loophole in the financial system, cash is the thing the financial system was invented to be.
What we built over the last forty years runs in the opposite direction, so that every payment now carries identity with it, permanently and by default. Warren and Brandeis saw the shape of this as early as 1890, writing in the Harvard Law Review about the right to be let alone at a moment when instant photography had suddenly made observation cheap, and their point generalizes well beyond cameras: whenever watching gets cheap it tends to get total, and the law arrives late.
Bentham designed the panopticon so that inmates could never tell when they were being observed, which meant they had to behave as though they always were, and Foucault's argument in Discipline and Punish is that this kind of arrangement does not merely constrain what you do but reaches into who you become. That is not an abstraction once you apply it to money. People donate differently, read differently, seek treatment differently and organize differently when the record is legible to someone with power over them. Hannah Arendt put the constructive version of the same idea in The Human Condition, where the private realm is not the enemy of public life but its precondition, since a person with no place to be unobserved has no self to bring into the open.
The economics is not soft either
Akerlof's 1970 paper on the market for lemons showed that information asymmetry degrades a market until the good products leave it, and we now live inside an inverted version of his example, in which the institution knows everything about you, you know effectively nothing about it, and that gap is the business model rather than a defect in it.
The most useful work here is Alessandro Acquisti's. In a 2013 study with Leslie John and George Loewenstein, published in the Journal of Legal Studies, shoppers at a mall were handed a gift card and offered a swap, and the result depended almost entirely on which card they had been handed first. Before you read the numbers, pick for yourself:
You are handed one of these two cards at a mall. Which one do you keep?
People demanded far more money to give up privacy they already held than they were willing to pay to get the same privacy back, which tells you something practical about product design: privacy cannot be a paid upgrade or a toggle buried in settings. It has to be the default state, because once it is gone people will not buy it back, and their failure to buy it back then gets misread as proof that they never wanted it in the first place. Acquisti, Taylor and Wagman lay out the broader economics in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2016, and it is worth the afternoon.
David Chaum had the engineering answer in 1985, in a paper he titled Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete, and forty years later we are finally shipping it.
What Haven actually does differently
Haven describes itself as the privacy neobank for the on-chain economy, and the sentence that convinced me was this one: compliant off-chain, never linked on-chain.
That is an architectural claim rather than a marketing posture. Compliance happens where it has to happen, at the licensed providers doing the fiat legs, and it does not happen by publishing your identity to a permanent ledger. Haven's own framing is that privacy and compliance share the same architecture, designed in from the start and never bolted on afterwards, and bolted on is an accurate description of every competitor I have used.
How a deposit travels, as Haven describes it. Click a step.
Pick a step to see what is visible there, and to whom.
Descriptions are Haven's own, from haven.hn. The pool design follows Privacy Pools: Buterin, Illum, Nadler, Schär & Soleimani, "Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance: Towards a Practical Equilibrium" (2023), where you prove your funds are not from known bad sources without revealing which deposit is yours.
The practical pieces are these. Withdrawals go to temporary addresses so there is no standing trail back to you, the pool design follows Privacy Pools, and you can send and receive without exposing balances, counterparties or history. There is a Visa debit card that works with Apple Pay and Google Pay, coverage across 184 countries, and 54 on and off ramp methods, PIX included, which matters more to me than it will to most people reading this.
Two details are easy to skim past. The first is that Haven is self-custodial software, not a bank and not a money transmitter, with the financial services provided by licensed third parties, which means you hold the keys. The second is that if compliance screening does not pass, you can still withdraw your funds permissionlessly, so your money never becomes a hostage to a review queue. I have had funds frozen by a platform before, for reasons nobody would ever explain to me, and I will take that guarantee over any interest rate.
Default behaviour of each model. The Haven column is what Haven says about itself; I am an ambassador and have not audited the code.
| Bank | Neobank Nubank, Revolut, Monzo |
KYC'd crypto card Coinbase Card and similar |
Haven | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Login | Password, SMS code, sometimes a token | Password plus phone, biometrics on top | Exchange account: password, 2FA | Passkey (Face ID / Touch ID). No password, no seed phrase |
| Who sees your transactions | ×Bank, processors, partners, regulators | ×Same set, plus product analytics | ×Same set, plus anyone reading the chain | ✓Licensed provider sees the fiat leg onlyOn-chain: balances, counterparties and history not exposed |
| Legal name on a public ledger | –No public ledger | –No public ledger | ×Yes: name ↔ address, permanently | ✓Never linked. Fresh addresses under your own key |
| Who holds the money | ×The bank | ×The bank or e-money institution | ×The exchange (custodial) | ✓You. Self-custodial |
| If a review flags you | ×Account frozen pending review | ×Account frozen pending review | ×Account frozen pending review | ✓Withdraw permissionlessly to your original wallet |
| History retention | ×Indefinite, at the bank | ×Indefinite, at the bank | ×Indefinite, and immutable on-chain | ✓Temporary addresses; the link ends at the pool |
| Card | Yes | Yes | Visa, from the exchange balance | Visa debit, Apple Pay and Google Pay, 184 countries |
| On / off ramps | Wire, local rails | Bank transfer, PIX, cards | Through the exchange | 54 methods, PIX included |
Haven claims from haven.hn. Custody and freeze behaviour for the other columns is how those products work by default; corrections welcome at @danimimm.
And the login is still just a passkey. The industry spent a decade teaching us that privacy means friction, that the secure option is the one with the hardware key and the seed phrase ceremony and the six-step recovery flow, and Haven is the counterexample sitting on my phone: I look at it, I am in, and the privacy underneath is stronger than anything my actual bank offers.
Breadcrumb audit
Before the ending, one quick exercise. These are seven yes-or-no questions about the wallet you actually use, and nothing is stored or sent anywhere; the count is computed in your browser and disappears when you close the tab.
Each "yes" is a breadcrumb between an address and your legal name.
Answer the questions to scan.
New assets, nicer fonts
I should say plainly that I am an ambassador for Haven, that the product is early, and that I will judge it by whether these commitments survive contact with scale and with regulators. Ask me again in a year.
But the argument stands on its own, whatever happens to this particular company. Crypto did not set out to build a better interface for surveillance, and if we are going to rebuild banking, the thing worth rebuilding is the part Simmel identified in 1900 and we spent the last forty years dismantling, which is the ability to transact without handing over who you are.
Anything short of that is the same bank, with new assets and nicer fonts.
Open it, log in with a passkey, and time it. Then run the breadcrumb audit above on the wallet you use today.
A neobank without privacy is just a bank with a nicer app
An essay by danimim on why privacy is the only difference between a bank and a neobank that deserves the name, and on Haven, the first product I have used that builds it in from the start rather than offering it as a setting.
I am a Haven ambassador. Nothing here was reviewed by Haven before publishing, and every claim about the product is either my own experience or a description Haven publishes itself, linked where it appears. The widgets on this page run entirely in your browser: nothing you click is sent anywhere.
Icons are original Windows 95 and Windows 98 system icons, collected by old windows icons. The Haven icon is Haven's wordmark redrawn as a Windows 95 icon, with my pixels, not an official asset.
