A team of former Ethereum Foundation researchers focused on institutional privacy launched EthSystems, a for-profit startup aimed at building a confidentiality infrastructure for financial institutions using Ethereum.
The startup emerged from the Ethereum Foundation, which spent the last year developing privacy technologies for enterprise use cases while collaborating with central banks, regulators, global banks and asset managers.
The spinoff comes amid one of the Ethereum Foundation’s biggest organizational restructurings in years. Following months of criticism over the foundation’s leadership, strategy, and role in supporting Ethereum’s increasingly institutional user base, several teams have recently split into independent organizations.
These include EthLabs, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting research and scaling of the Ethereum protocol, and Ethereum Institutional, an independent nonprofit designed to coordinate institutional adoption and engagement with large financial firms. Together, the organizations represent an effort to distribute responsibilities that were previously within the foundation among more specialized entities.
EthSystems said it plans to commercialize work it started within the foundation, including confidential stablecoin transfers, private bond issuance, cross-chain settlement systems and open source protocol specifications.
