Ethereum Foundation releases privacy roadmap with PSE

The Ethereum Foundation published a roadmap for implementing on-chain privacy features, a layer-1 (L1) smart contract blockchain, throughout the Ethereum network. It restructured “Privacy & Scaling Explorations” as the “Privacy Stewards of Ethereum” (PSE).

In Friday’s announcement, PSE said it hopes to add privacy solutions across the protocol, infrastructure, networking, application, and wallet layers and outlined several goals for the next 3-6 months.

These included private transfers with the development of the PlasmaFold layer-2 network, confidential voting, and privacy for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

The roadmap further suggested developing safeguards to protect personal data from exposure through remote procedure call (RPC) services and private identity solutions using zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs—verifying information without disclosing its specific contents. PSE defined its mission:

“Ethereum deserves to become core infrastructure for global digital commerce, identity, collaboration, and the internet of value. But this potential is impossible without private data, transactions, and identity. We take responsibility within the Ethereum Foundation for ensuring privacy goals at the application layer are reached.”

The announcement noted they would work with protocol teams to ensure that any L1 changes were needed to support strong, censorship-resistant, intermediary-free privacy.

PSE pushes private transfers, confidential voting, and DeFi safeguards

Privacy has always been at the core of the cypherpunk ethos that spawned cryptocurrencies. As crypto gains widespread adoption and the attention of governments, the crypto community is increasingly concerned about evolving digital financial surveillance methods.

U.S. officials are weighing new regulations for the crypto industry and markets, including potential surveillance measures to monitor participant activity. The Department of the Treasury, led by Secretary Scott Bessent, is considering proposals to require government identity checks in smart contracts, an idea that has sparked pushback from the crypto community. 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has long argued that privacy is a fundamental human right. In April, he cautioned that transparency functions more as a flaw than a feature in the digital age, stressing that privacy is essential to safeguard individuals amid the rise of state power and centralized corporations.

Interoperability and intent-based architecture set as near-term priorities

Recently, Ethereum Foundation researchers noted that interoperability is the top near-term priority for Ethereum development.

In a blog post, the researchers wrote, “We see interoperability, and related projects presented in this note, as the highest leverage opportunity” within the user experience domain in the next six to 12 months. The near-term strategy focuses on intent-based architecture and general message-passing.

Essentially, the focus is on approving users to express outcomes (or “intents”). At the same time, the network takes care of the low-level transactions and upgrades the crosschain “pipes” (message-passing infrastructure) so that those intents execute without delay across layer-1 and rollups. The Ethereum Foundation notes it will focus on optimizing for specific metrics, including time-to-inclusion, confirmation/finality, layer-2 settlement, and signatures per operation.

The researchers indicated that interoperability is key since the Ethereum ecosystem is segmented into many layer-2 protocols that advance its functionality and scalability, while bringing “their own challenges, chief among them the pressures of fragmentation.” The post cites a significant pain point:

“At its simplified core, the key ingredients to accelerate interop boil down to unlocking fast crosschain message-passing and standardisation. Currently, message-passing is partially bottlenecked by slow settlement times.

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