Privacy is the freedom to choose what to share, when to share it, and with whom. Closing the door to a room, voting secretly, and talking privately with friends are things we all take for granted in our daily lives. However, online and on-chain, these protections are often lacking.
Ethereum was created to be the foundation of digital trust worthy of civilizational scale. For that trust to remain reliable, privacy must be part of its core. EF is proud to support this cause, along with dozens of privacy-focused Ethereum teams.
Who is privacy important to?
Short answer: everyone.
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For people: Online privacy protects dignity and agency in your digital life. This allows people to choose what to share, with whom, and when.
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For developers: Privacy expands builders’ design space and can enable more secure apps and entirely new product categories while reducing builders’ responsibilities (such as data storage).
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For institutions: Privacy is essential to how companies operate and make decisions. This gives you the ability to choose who you collaborate with, how you reward your team, and how you structure your internal processes while meeting the security and compliance standards required for public blockchain adoption.
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For society: Privacy protects democratic processes and collective trust, and preserves the credibility of open systems by protecting the freedom to think, communicate, and trade without surveillance or coercion.
Ethereum is now trusted to secure billions of assets and millions of daily transactions. Privacy is necessary to ensure that this infrastructure is usable, reliable, and consistent with human freedom.
our efforts
The Ethereum Foundation’s commitment to privacy is based on simple principles. In other words, trusted neutrality, security, and openness become more valuable to humanity when combined with privacy.
The Foundation has been supporting privacy research and development through its PSE team since 2018 and has already:
- build over 50+ An open source research and development project experimenting with privacy tools.
- Released core primitives such as: semaphore (anonymous signaling), Gusset (secret voting), zk mail, TLS Notary (pioneering zkTLS) and Anon Adar (Civilian National ID) etc.
- It created a repository that was forked thousands of times and formed the backbone of privacy research and development across the ecosystem.
Now we’re taking it a step further.
EF is expanding our commitment to privacy. PSE will continue as a team focused on early stage research and development. andy. At the same time, we are also building new projects around privacy. All these form a new privacy cluster Adjusted with EF Igor Barinov.
The Privacy Cluster is comprised of 47 top researchers, engineers, coordinators, and cryptographers in the blockchain industry.
The Privacy Cluster is not just one project; it includes key efforts from PSE and other EF projects, including:
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Private read and write (PSE): Enable actions such as private payments, votes, and interactions to be as seamless and low-cost as possible, allowing users and businesses to view, query, and authenticate without surveillance or metadata leaks/data breaches.
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Private Certificate (PSE): Portable and efficient creation of certificates allows people to verify credentials, identity, and assets without disclosing unnecessary information.
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Private Identity (PSE): Selective Disclosure and the zkID Project to protect your identity online.
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Privacy Experience (PSE): Improve the UX of privacy protocols so that privacy feels normal and accessible.
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Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF): The multidisciplinary task force will bridge institutions and Ethereum by translating regulatory and operational requirements into privacy specifications and helping institutions solve real-world use cases.
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Kohaku: be New reference implementation Combination of privacy-preserving wallet and open source Wallet SDKbuilt to make strong encryption available to everyone. Please confirm completion road map.
Privacy should be the first-class property of the Ethereum ecosystem, and we are committed to working with the ecosystem to make it a reality for both individuals and organizations.
how the pieces fit together
The Ethereum Foundation’s commitment to privacy spans the entire stack, from cutting-edge encryption and organized pilots to the everyday user experience.
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Research Frontier: PSE pioneers applied cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs, with contributions from dozens of leading researchers and engineers.
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Protocol Layer: These breakthroughs inform how scalability and confidentiality can be built into Ethereum itself.
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Application layer: Tools such as semaphores, MACI, and stealth addresses demonstrate how privacy can improve payments, governance, and identity.
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Institutional Layer: The Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) ensures that this technology also meets real-world operational and regulatory requirements in several business areas (RWA, funds and assets, payments, trading, oracles and compliance).
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Primitives of Privacy: Kohaku explores how strong encryption feels normal so that privacy is not only available, but accessible.
And we are not alone. The work being done by countless teams, leaders, and privacy advocates is moving us all further forward, and EF is here to play our part. Our work aims to complement the hundreds of privacy projects and initiatives that already exist in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. See over 700 results here.
I’m looking forward to it
Improving privacy on Ethereum is a huge responsibility for our ecosystem. By continuing to level up Ethereum’s privacy features at every level of the stack, we can protect users on-chain and enable new use cases for developers and institutions. Work in progress. The components still exist today. And the Ethereum ecosystem will continue to refine, expand, and deploy them for individuals, institutions, and the digital commons.
Privacy is normal.
Interested in working with us?
contact address privacy@ethereum.org
