Championing Privacy: The Ethereum Foundation’s Pledge

Privacy is the liberty to determine what you disclose, when you disclose it, and with whom you share it. We often take this for granted in our everyday lives: shutting a door, casting a confidential ballot, or conversing intimately with a companion. However, online and onchain, these safeguards frequently lack.

Ethereum was designed to serve as the cornerstone of digital trust, one that is appropriate for a civilizational scale. For that trust to stay valid, privacy must be integral to its essence; the EF, alongside several Ethereum teams dedicated to privacy, is pleased to champion this initiative.

For whom does privacy matter?

Brief answer: everyone.

• For individuals: online privacy safeguards dignity and autonomy in digital existence. It provides individuals the choice regarding what to share, with whom, and at what time.

• For creators: privacy broadens the developer’s creative space, allowing for safer applications and entirely new categories of products while diminishing liability for developers (e.g., data stewardship).

• For organizations: privacy is crucial for how companies function and make choices. It enables them to decide whom to collaborate with, how to reward teams, and how to arrange internal processes while adhering to security and compliance standards essential for adopting public blockchains.

• For the community: privacy defends democratic functions and shared trust, ensuring that open systems maintain credibility by safeguarding the freedom to think, communicate, and transact without oversight or pressure.

At present, Ethereum is relied upon to secure billions in assets and millions of transactions daily. Privacy is essential to guarantee that this infrastructure retains its usability, credibility, and alignment with human liberty.

Our dedication

The Ethereum Foundation’s dedication to privacy is based on a fundamental principle: credible neutrality, security, and transparency are significantly more beneficial to humanity when combined with privacy.

The Foundation has been backing privacy research and development since 2018 via the PSE team, which has successfully:

• Developed over 50+ open-source R&D initiatives exploring privacy technologies.
• Launched fundamental primitives such as Semaphore (anonymous notifications), MACI (confidential voting), zkEmail, TLSNotary (pioneered zkTLS), and Anon Aadhaar (private national ID) among others.
• Established repositories that have been forked thousands of times, forming the foundation of privacy R&D within the ecosystem.

Now, we are advancing to the next level.

The EF is enhancing our privacy initiatives. PSE will persist as a team concentrating on early R&D, led by Andy. Concurrently, we are developing new privacy-focused projects. All of this constitutes the new Privacy cluster at the EF, coordinated by Igor Barinov.

The privacy cluster consists of 47 of the premier researchers, engineers, coordinators, and cryptographers in the blockchain sector.

The Privacy cluster encompasses more than just a single project; it includes significant initiatives from PSE and other EF endeavors such as:

• Private Reads & Writes (PSE): facilitating actions like confidential payments, votes, and engagements as seamless and affordable as feasible, enabling users and businesses to navigate, query, and authenticate without oversight or metadata leaks/data breaches.

• Private Proving (PSE): ensuring proofs are portable and efficient so individuals can verify eligibility, identity, or assets without revealing superfluous information.

• Private Identities (PSE): select disclosure and zkID projects.
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  that safeguard your identity on the internet.

• Privacy Experience (PSE): enhancing privacy protocol user experience and making privacy feel commonplace and attainable.

• Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF): A cross-functional task force connecting institutions and Ethereum by converting regulatory and operational necessities into privacy specifications, aiding institutions in addressing real-world use cases.

• Kohaku: a novel privacy-oriented wallet/open-source SDK, designed to render robust cryptography accessible for everyone.

Privacy ought to be a primary attribute of the Ethereum ecosystem, and we are dedicated to collaborating with the ecosystem to transform that into a reality for both individuals and organizations.

How the Work Integrates

The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy initiatives encompass the entire stack from state-of-the-art cryptography and institutional pilots to routine user experiences:

• Research frontier: PSE leads in applied cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs, with input from numerous prominent researchers and engineers.

• Protocol layer: These advancements shape how scalability and confidentiality can be integrated into Ethereum itself.

• Application layer: Instruments like Semaphore, MACI, and stealth addresses showcase how privacy can enhance payments, governance, and identity.

• Institutional layer: The Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) guarantees that this technology also satisfies real operational and regulatory demands across various sectors (RWA, Funds & Assets, Payments, Trading, Oracles & Compliance).

• User experience: Kohaku Wallet examines how robust cryptography can seem ordinary, ensuring that privacy is not merely available, but attainable.

And we are not alone. The efforts from numerous teams, leaders, and privacy advocates drive us further, and the EF is here to contribute its share. Our initiatives aim to supplement the multitude of privacy projects and undertakings that already thrive in the crypto ecosystem. Discover 700+ of them here.

Looking Ahead

Enhancing privacy on Ethereum is a significant responsibility for our ecosystem. By consistently advancing the privacy functionalities of Ethereum at every layer of the stack, we can safeguard users on-chain and unleash new opportunities for developers and organizations. The groundwork is in motion. The fundamental elements are present today. And the Ethereum ecosystem will persist in refining, scaling, and implementing them: for individuals, for organizations, and for the digital commons.

Privacy is commonplace.

Eager to collaborate with us?
Reach out at pse@ethereum.org