Ethereum's New Privacy Roadmap

gm Bankless Nation,
If Ethereum can’t solve privacy, it risks becoming surveillance infrastructure at scale. Enter the Privacy Stewards of Ethereum.

Today's Issue ⬇️

1. ☀️ Need to Know: $BASE Exploration
   Jesse Pollak drops major hints of a Base token.
2. 🗣️ Analysis: New Privacy Roadmap
   The 'Privacy Stewards of Ethereum' are here.

p.s. Thanks to 0G. Build together with Google or Optimism on the first scalable, verifiable AI L1. Testnet v3 is here. Mainnet + token coming in Q3 2025.

Sponsor: Frax — Fraxtal Ecosystem: Where DeFi Meets AI.

1. 🔵 Base 'Exploring' Network Token, Jesse Pollak Says. The Coinbase-backed L2 is weighing a token launch amid record growth.
2. 💰 Tom Lee's BitMine Crosses $10B in Holdings. Tom Lee is more than 1/3 of the way to his goal of owning 5% of ETH's circulating supply.
3. 🦾 Ethereum Foundation Forms New AI Team. The new full-time unit aims to accelerate the push for decentralized AI infrastructure.
   

	Crypto $4.00T	↘ 0.5%	↗ 3.4%
	BTC $115,342	↘ 0.4%	↗ 3.0%
	ETH $4,506	↘ 2.6%	↗ 4.8%

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 their 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.

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