Stop taking the piss.
When they started, Masternodes and anon was a big thing, which it isn't anymore. It may even become a felony to use stuff like that, under rising regulation. Vendors could be obliged to provide backdoors for law enforcement. This might not fit in with the delusional points of view of most of your team members and cheer leaders, but its the truth, and you better face it, since you were starting as a strictly commercial project. Bad decisions, kind of a failure, but Chris probably has no choice without losing his main poster boys.
Anonymity is still going to be a huge thing for any business using blockchain technology, which is why JP Morgan were researching ZCash.
Do you really think there wont be a deal struck?
Do you really think blockchains will be used with no anonymity going forward?
This why Stratis explored this so they could provide this service to businesses who want to use this kind of distributed ledger.
Businesses will in the future be able to hide what they do from you and I, but not from the government...or are you imagining something else? If so what are you imagining?
Chris Trew realised this. He realised that he would would need to provide that. Think about this from the point of view of a business.
Now this doesn't mean that Stratis will succeed or that the price will go up, but it explains what they are doing
Sure, privacy is a vital feature, but probably not on public chains. There's a crackdown on encryption coming, already in the making. Look at Russia outlawing the use of VPNs. Any such tech in that realm could be outlawed, people using it would risk jail time.
JP Morgan won't run anything on the ZEC chain, they may use the tech and run it private on their own infrastructure, keeping full control over the keys.
Enterprise customers don't want their data out in the wild, even if its encrypted. As I said, the solution Microsoft announced is amazing, it fits seamless into existing forests, building on already existing trusts and policies, on an infrastructure/machine level which is already scaled to the needs of the particular customer. Integrating the advantages of blockchain storage wherever applicable, mostly under aspects of immutability and automatic replication. Its much more BaaS as Stratis or any other platform alone could ever become. Its a game changer. Whether Stratis' core chain software is of any use in that environment is to be seen. Of course, its totally against what Bitcoin's main idea stands for, decentralisation. But commercial customers couldn't care less. So shouldn't Stratis, but they do.