The Ethereum Foundation is making privacy a formal pillar of its roadmap, expanding research efforts to a dedicated group that now covers private payments, testing, identity, and enterprise use cases.
Ethereum has supported privacy research through its Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team since 2018, with experiments such as Semaphore for anonymous signaling, MACI for private voting, zkEmail and zkTLS, and the Anon Aadhaar project.
These have become benchmarks for developers across the ecosystem, spawning hundreds of forks and integrations.
The new “privacy cluster,” coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings these experiments under one umbrella along with new initiatives, according to a Wednesday blog post.
These include private reads and writes for payments and interactions, portable proofs of identity and asset ownership, zkID systems for selective disclosure, UX work to standardize privacy tools, and Kohaku, an SDK and wallet designed to make strong cryptography usable by default.
An institutional privacy working group is also part of the group, translating operational and compliance requirements into specifications that larger companies can test.
The Foundation framed privacy as essential to Ethereum’s credibility. Blockchains are transparent by design, but widespread adoption requires that users and institutions have the option to transact, govern, and build without exposing sensitive data.
There are more than 700 privacy-focused projects across the broader crypto ecosystem, but Ethereum’s size means its primitives often set standards that others adopt. If the Foundation can offer credible tools that balance privacy with neutrality and compliance, it could define how the next cycle of applications is built.
Meanwhile, privacy remains politically charged. Regulators have focused on mixers and protected transactions, and developers are aware that features that allow confidential use can just as easily facilitate illicit financing.
That’s why the Foundation’s approach to open source research, institutional working groups, and tools aimed at everyday users can be considered cautious but deliberate.
