Ethereum Foundation Unveils Ambitious Privacy Roadmap

The Ethereum Foundation's "Privacy Stewards of Ethereum" (PSE) team has launched a comprehensive roadmap aimed at integrating end-to-end privacy features into the Ethereum blockchain. This initiative seeks to make on-chain actions private, affordable, and compliant, addressing growing concerns about digital surveillance and the need for enhanced user protection in the evolving digital landscape.

Key Takeaways

• The Ethereum Foundation's "Privacy & Scaling Explorations" team has rebranded to "Privacy Stewards of Ethereum" (PSE).

• The roadmap focuses on three core areas: private writes, private reads, and private proving.

• The goal is to make private on-chain actions on Ethereum ubiquitous, cheap, and compliant.

• Initiatives include enhancing Layer 2 solutions, confidential DeFi, private voting, and privacy-preserving RPC services.

A New Era of Privacy on Ethereum

The PSE team, formerly known as "Privacy & Scaling Explorations," has shifted its focus from speculative research to addressing concrete problems and improving ecosystem outcomes. The newly released roadmap outlines current progress and future plans to embed robust privacy features across various layers of the Ethereum network, including protocol, infrastructure, networking, application, and wallet layers.

Sam Richards, a team member, emphasized the critical need for privacy, stating, "Ethereum is on the path to becoming the settlement layer for the world, but without strong privacy, it risks becoming the backbone of global surveillance rather than global freedom." The PSE team aims to ensure that Ethereum protects its users by making privacy a fundamental aspect of its design.

Pillars of the Privacy Roadmap

The roadmap is structured around three primary focus areas:

• Private Writes: This track aims to make private on-chain actions as inexpensive and seamless as public ones. Current projects include continued development on PlasmaFold, an experimental Layer 2 design, to support privacy transfer features. A proof of concept is expected by Devconnect in November. Efforts are also underway for confidential DeFi protocols, likely targeting institutional clients with compliance in mind, and ongoing private computation projects.

• Private Reads: The objective here is to enable users to read data from the blockchain without revealing their identity or intentions. The team is actively working on privacy-preserving Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services, as typical RPC calls can leak sensitive information like IP addresses. A dedicated working group is evaluating solutions to mitigate these risks.

• Private Proving: Dubbed "prove anywhere," this area focuses on making the generation and verification of zero-knowledge proofs fast, private, and accessible. Projects are in development to simplify and reduce the cost of generating ZK proofs on everyday devices.

Ecosystem Collaboration and Future Vision

The roadmap reflects extensive input and contributions from across the Ethereum ecosystem, with acknowledgments to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the Silviculture Society, and independent researcher Oskar Thorén. The PSE team plans to persist with these focus areas for the next few years, adapting initiatives as the ecosystem evolves. The ultimate vision is for Ethereum to serve as core infrastructure for global digital commerce, identity, and collaboration, underpinned by strong privacy protections.

Sources

• Ethereum Foundation sets end-to-end privacy roadmap, with private writes, reads and proving, The Block.

• Ethereum Foundation Reveals Privacy-Preserving Roadmap, Cointelegraph.