A team of former Ethereum Foundation researchers focused on institutional privacy has launched EthSystems, a new for-profit company that aims to build privacy infrastructure for financial institutions using Ethereum.
The startup emerged from the Ethereum Foundation, which spent the past year developing privacy technologies for enterprise use while working with central banks, regulators, global banks and asset managers.
The spinout comes amid one of the biggest organizational shakeups at the Ethereum Foundation in years. After months of criticism over management, strategy and the foundation’s role in supporting Ethereum’s increasingly institutional user base, several teams have recently been spun off into independent organizations.
Among them are EthLabs, a nonprofit focused on advancing research and scaling of the Ethereum protocol, and Ethereum Institutional, a separate nonprofit designed to coordinate institutional adoption and engagement with large financial firms. Together, the organizations represent an effort to distribute areas of responsibility that were previously housed in the foundation, across more specialized units.
EthSystems said it plans to commercialize the work it began inside the fund, including confidential stablecoin transfers, private bond issuance, cross-chain settlement systems and open source protocol specifications.
