Privacy is the freedom to choose what you share, when you share it, and who you share it with. We all take this for granted in daily life: closing the door to a room, casting a secret ballot, or speaking privately with a friend. But online and onchain, these protections are often missing.
Ethereum was created to be the foundation of digital trust, one that is worthy of civilizational scale. For that trust to remain credible, privacy must be part of its core, the EF, along with dozens of Ethereum teams focused on privacy, are proud to support this cause..
Who does privacy matter for?
Quick answer: everyone.
-
For people: online privacy protects dignity and agency in digital life. It gives people the ability to choose what to share, with whom, and when.
-
For developers: privacy expands the builder design space, it can enable safer apps and entirely new product categories while reducing liability for builders (e.g., data custody).
-
For institutions: privacy is essential for how businesses operate and make decisions. It lets them choose who to work with, how to compensate teams, and how to structure internal processes all while meeting security and compliance standards required to adopt public blockchains.
-
For society: privacy safeguards democratic processes and collective trust, it keeps open systems credible by protecting the freedom to think, communicate, and transact without surveillance or coercion.
Today, Ethereum is trusted to secure billions in assets and millions of daily transactions. Privacy is necessary to ensure that this infrastructure remains usable, credible, and aligned with human freedom.
Our commitment
The Ethereum Foundation’s commitment to privacy rests on a simple principle: credible neutrality, security, and openness are much more valuable to humanity when paired with privacy.
The Foundation has already supported privacy research and development since 2018 through the PSE team, which has already:
- Built over 50+ open-source R&D projects experimenting with privacy tools.
- Released core primitives like Semaphore (anonymous signaling), MACI (private voting), zkEmail, TLSNotary (pioneered zkTLS) and Anon Aadhaar (private national ID) among others.
- Created repositories that have been forked thousands of times, forming the backbone of privacy R&D across the ecosystem.
Now we are taking it one step further.
The EF is expanding our privacy efforts. PSE will continue as a team focused on early R&D, led by Andy. At the same time, we are building new privacy-related projects. All of this forms the new Privacy cluster at the EF, which is coordinated by Igor Barinov.
The privacy cluster is composed of 47 of the top researchers, engineers, coordinators and cryptographers in the blockchain industry.
The Privacy cluster is not just one project, but includes key initiatives from PSE and other EF projects such as:
-
Private Reads & Writes (PSE): making actions like private payments, votes, and interactions as seamless and inexpensive as possible to enable users and enterprises to browse, query, and authenticate without surveillance or metadata leaks/data breaches.
-
Private Proving (PSE): making proofs portable and efficient so people can verify eligibility, identity, or assets without disclosing unnecessary information.
-
Private Identities (PSE): selective disclosure and zkID projects that protect your identity online.
-
Privacy Experience (PSE): improving privacy protocol UX and making privacy feel normal and accessible.
-
Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF): A multidisciplinary task force bridging institutions and Ethereum by translating regulatory and operational requirements into privacy specifications, by helping institutions solve real use cases.
-
Kohaku: a new privacy-preserving wallet/open-source SDK, built to make strong cryptography accessible for all.
Privacy deserves to be a first-class property of the Ethereum ecosystem, and we are committed to working alongside the ecosystem to make that a reality for individuals and institutions alike.
How the Work Fits Together
The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy efforts span the full stack from cutting-edge cryptography and institutional pilots to everyday user experience:
-
Research frontier: PSE pioneers applied cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs, with contributions from dozens of leading researchers and engineers.
-
Protocol layer: These breakthroughs inform how scalability and confidentiality can be embedded into Ethereum itself.
-
Application layer: Tools like Semaphore, MACI, and stealth addresses demonstrate how privacy can improve payments, governance, and identity.
-
Institutional layer: The Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) ensures this technology also meets the real operational and regulatory requirements in several business areas (RWA, Funds & Assets, Payments, Trading, Oracles & Compliance).
-
User experience: Kohaku Wallet explores how strong cryptography can feel normal, so that privacy is not just available, but accessible.
And we’re not alone. The work being done by countless teams, leaders, and privacy advocates push us all further, and the EF is here to do its part. Our work seeks to complement the hundreds of privacy projects and initiatives that already exist in the crypto ecosystem. See 700+ of them here.
Looking forward
Improving privacy on Ethereum is a great responsibility for our ecosystem. By continuing to level up the privacy features of Ethereum at every level of the stack, we can protect users onchain and unlock new use cases for developers and institutions. The work is underway. The building blocks exist today. And the Ethereum ecosystem will continue to refine, scale, and deploy them: for individuals, for institutions, and for the digital commons.
Privacy is normal.
Interested in working with us?
Get in touch at pse@ethereum.org
