Privacy is the freedom to choose what you share, when you share it, and with whom you share it. We all take this for granted in everyday life: closing a room door, voting by secret ballot, or speaking privately with a friend. But online and on-chain, these protections are often lacking.
Ethereum was created to provide the foundation for digital trust, worthy of a civilizational scale. For this trust to remain credible, privacy must be part of its core business, the EF, along with dozens of privacy-focused Ethereum teams, are proud to support this cause.
For whom is privacy important?
Quick answer: everyone.
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For people: Online privacy protects dignity and agency in digital life. This gives people the ability to choose what to share, with whom and when.
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For developers: privacy expands manufacturers’ design space, it can enable more secure applications and entirely new product categories while reducing manufacturers’ liability (e.g., data custody).
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For establishments: Privacy is essential to how businesses operate and make decisions. It allows them to choose who to work with, how to compensate teams, and how to structure internal processes, all while meeting the security and compliance standards required to adopt public blockchains.
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For the company: Privacy protects democratic processes and collective trust, it maintains the credibility of open systems by protecting the freedom to think, communicate and transact without surveillance or coercion.
Today, Ethereum is trusted to secure billions of assets and millions of daily transactions. Privacy is necessary to ensure that this infrastructure remains usable, credible, and consistent with human freedom.
Our commitment
The Ethereum Foundation’s commitment to privacy is based on a simple principle: credible neutrality, security, and openness are of far more value to humanity when combined with privacy.
The Foundation has already been supporting privacy research and development since 2018 through the PSE team, which has already:
- Built on 50+ open source R&D projects experimenting with privacy tools.
- Posting basic primitives like Semaphore (anonymous reporting), MACI (private vote), zkEmail, TLSNotary (zkTLS pioneer) and Anon Aadhaar (private national identity card), among others.
- Creating repositories that have been duplicated thousands of times, forming the backbone of privacy R&D across the entire ecosystem.
Now we’re going even further.
EF is expanding its privacy efforts. PSE will continue as an early R&D focused team, led by Andy. At the same time, we are building new projects related to privacy. All this forms the new Privacy Group to the FE, which is coordinated by Igor Barinov.
The Privacy Cluster is made up of 47 of the blockchain industry’s top researchers, engineers, coordinators, and cryptographers.
The Privacy cluster is not a single project, but includes key initiatives from PSE and other EF projects such as:
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Private reads and writes (PSE): make actions such as private payments, voting, and interactions as transparent and inexpensive as possible to allow users and businesses to browse, query, and authenticate without surveillance or metadata leaks/data breaches.
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Private Evidence (PSE): make evidence portable and efficient so people can verify their eligibility, identity, or assets without disclosing unnecessary information.
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Private identities (PSE): selective disclosure and zkID projects that protect your online identity.
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Privacy Experience (PSE): improve the UX of the privacy protocol and make privacy normal and accessible.
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Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF): A multidisciplinary working group connecting institutions and Ethereum by translating regulatory and operational requirements into privacy specifications, helping institutions solve real-world use cases.
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Kohaku: a new open source SDK/privacy-preserving wallet designed to make strong cryptography accessible to everyone.
Privacy deserves to be a premium property of the Ethereum ecosystem, and we are committed to working alongside the ecosystem to make it a reality for individuals and institutions.
How the work is structured
The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy efforts span the entire stack, from cutting-edge cryptography and institutional drivers to everyday user experience:
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Research Frontier: PSE is a pioneer in applied cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs, with contributions from dozens of leading researchers and engineers.
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Protocol Layer: These advancements explain how scalability and privacy can be built into Ethereum itself.
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Application layer: Tools like Semaphore, 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 across multiple business areas (RWA, funds and assets, payments, trading, oracles and compliance).
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User Experience: Kohaku Wallet explores how strong crypto can feel normal, so that privacy is not only available, but accessible.
And we are not alone. The work done by countless teams, leaders, and privacy advocates pushes us all further, and FE is here to do its part. Our work aims to complement the hundreds of privacy projects and initiatives that already exist in the crypto ecosystem. See over 700 of them here.
Look forward to
Improving privacy on Ethereum is a big responsibility for our ecosystem. By continuing to improve Ethereum’s privacy features at each level of the stack, we can protect on-chain users and unlock new use cases for developers and institutions. The work is in progress. The basic elements exist today. And the Ethereum ecosystem will continue to refine, evolve and deploy them: for individuals, for institutions and for the digital commons.
Confidentiality is normal.
Interested in working with us?
Contact us at pse@ethereum.org
