The Ethereum Foundation makes privacy a formal pillar in its roadmap and is expanding research efforts to a dedicated cluster that now covers private payments, proof, identity and business cases.
Ethereum has supported Privacy Research through its privacy and scaling of Explorations (PSE) -team since 2018, with experiments as a semaphore for anonymous signaling, Maci for private polls, Zkemail and Zktls and Anon Aadhaar project.
These have become reference points for developers across the ecosystem that spawn hundreds of forks and integrations.
The new “Privacy Cluster”, coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings these experiments during a single umbrella together with new initiatives per year. Wednesday blog posts.
These include private readings and writing for payments and interactions, laptops of identity and asset ownership, ZKID systems for selective disclosure, UX work to normalize privacy and kohaku, an SDK and wallet designed to make strong cryptography as standard.
An institutional assignment for privacy is also part of the cluster that translates compliance and operational requirements for specifications that larger companies can test.
The fund framed privacy as important to Ethereum’s credibility. Blockchains are transparent by design, but widespread adoption requires users and institutions to have the opportunity to implement, manage and build without revealing sensitive data.
More than 700 privacy-focused projects are found across the wider crypto ecosystem, but Ethereum’s size means its primitives often set standards that others adopt. If the foundation can provide credible tools that balance privacy with neutrality and compliance, it can define how the next cycle of applications is built.
Meanwhile, privacy remains politically accused. Supervisory authorities have targeted mixers and shielded transactions, and developers are aware that functions that enable confidential use can just as easily enable illegal financing.
Therefore, the foundation’s approach to open source research, institutional tasks and tools aimed at everyday users can be considered cautious but conscious.
