A team of former Ethereum Foundation researchers focused on institutional privacy has launched EthSystems, a new for-profit company aimed at creating privacy infrastructure for financial institutions using Ethereum.
The startup grew out of the Ethereum Foundation, which has spent the last year developing privacy technologies for enterprise use cases while collaborating with central banks, regulators, global banks and asset managers.
This split comes amid one of the Ethereum Foundation’s biggest organizational shakeups in years. After months of criticism over the foundation’s leadership, strategy, and role in supporting Ethereum’s increasingly institutional user base, several teams have recently spun off into independent organizations.
Among them are EthLabs, a nonprofit focused on advancing research and scaling of the Ethereum protocol, and Ethereum Institutional, a separate nonprofit designed to coordinate institutional adoption and engagement with major financial companies. Together, the organizations represent an effort to distribute responsibilities previously housed within the foundation among more specialized entities.
EthSystems said it plans to commercialize the work it started at the foundation, including confidential stablecoin transfers, private bond issuance, cross-chain settlement systems and open source protocol specifications.
