The Ethereum Foundation is making privacy a formal pillar of its roadmap, expanding its research efforts to a dedicated cluster that now covers private payments, proof, 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 reference points for developers across the ecosystem, giving rise to hundreds of forks and integrations.
The new “privacy cluster,” coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings these experiments under one roof alongside new initiatives, according to a blog post published Wednesday.
These include private reads and writes for payments and interactions, portable proofs for 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 crypto usable by default.
An institutional privacy working group is also part of the cluster, translating compliance and operational requirements into specifications that large companies can test.
The Foundation considered privacy essential to Ethereum’s credibility. Blockchains are transparent by design, but widespread adoption requires users and institutions to have the ability to transact, govern, and build without exposing sensitive data.
There are more than 700 privacy-focused projects in the broader crypto ecosystem, but Ethereum’s size means its primitives often set standards that others adopt. If the Foundation can provide credible tools that balance privacy with neutrality and compliance, it could define how the next round of applications will be constructed.
Meanwhile, private life remains politically charged. Regulators have targeted mixers and protected transactions, and developers are aware that features allowing confidential use can just as easily enable illicit financing.
That’s why the Foundation’s approach to open source research, institutional working groups, and tools for everyday users can be seen as careful but deliberate.
