Article

Ethereum's New Privacy Roadmap

The 'Privacy Stewards of Ethereum' showcase their plans, which include private writes, reads, and proving.

Sep 15, 2025 • 2 min read

If Ethereum can’t solve privacy, it risks becoming surveillance infrastructure at scale.

That’s the challenge the newly rebranded Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE) are taking head-on, with a fresh roadmap and focused mission.

The researchers are shifting from exploring cryptography experiments to actualizing privacy solutions, and they've just published a new roadmap for their work.

The roadmap centers on three main tracks:

Private writes → Make private onchain actions (transfers, DeFi, voting, etc.) as easy as public ones
Private reads → Prevent metadata leaks when authenticating or querying on Ethereum
Private proving → Make zero-knowledge proofs cheaper and easier to run on mobile devices

As PSE digs into these tracks, they plan to maintain a problem radar to map privacy gaps, an execution map to decide where to build, collaborate, or just monitor, and a culture of public communication to keep the Ethereum community involved.

All that said, the team already has a series of initiatives going that they're kicking off or continuing to support. These include:

Plasma Fold (writes) — An experimental Layer 2 design that uses "zero-knowledge folding" for scaling. PSE plans to add private transfers to the architecture.
Kohaku (writes) — A wallet proof-of-concept. It's been built to natively support private sends via privacy pools
Private Governance (writes) — PSE plans to release a "State of Private Voting 2025" report and to continue working with Aragon and other private voting protocols
Confidential DeFi (writes) — PSE intends to launch an Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation's EcoDev Enterprise group
Network Privacy (reads) — PSE plans to form a Private RPC working group, support Oblivious RAM solutions in wallets, experiment with mixnet-style transaction routing, and more
Private Identity (proving) — The team is working on miscellaneous efforts around standards for privacy-preserving credentials, modular zk-snark wallets, and unlinkable credential revocations
Client-side Proving (proving) — The team is also researching efficient proving systems that can run directly on mobile devices and power new kinds of privacy apps

With improved privacy, Ethereum can prove that public chains can be both transparent and protective of its users.

And now PSE is a full-blown privacy hub centered around bringing this vision to reality without trying to monopolize anything. That’s exactly the kind of neutral convening role the Ethereum Foundation is uniquely suited to play.

Ultimately, a network that secures trillions of dollars while exposing every transaction detail is incomplete. Privacy across writes, reads, and proving is how Ethereum can remain a credible foundation for the internet of value.

Fortunately, this new roadmap shows the EF is doubling down here and treating privacy like the first-class problem that it is. Bravo to that.

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

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