Ethereum developers strive to ensure that the second largest blockchain exists to end-to-end privacy, one of the fundamental tenets of the crypto community.
In a post on Friday, the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy and Scaling Exploration team has been rebranded as “Privacy Stewards of Ethereum” (PSE). The team laid out the roadmap to “make Ethereum privacy the norm rather than an exception.”
The team aims to ensure comprehensive end-to-end privacy is embedded throughout Ethereum’s technology stack, from protocols and infrastructure to applications and wallets. Privacy will become part of Ethereum’s major use cases, including finance, identity and governance, the team said.
At the same time, the team noted that Ethereum’s privacy features remained compliant with global regulations.
Why Ethereum Privacy Is Important
According to the PSE team, ensuring Ethereum’s privacy is key to protecting users who rely on blockchain. The PSE team said:
“Ethereum is on the path to becoming the global reconciliation layer, but without strong privacy there is a risk that it will become the backbone of global surveillance rather than global freedom.”
Furthermore, without the privacy guardrail, users and institutions will move elsewhere, making the blockchain redundant.
Private reads, writes, and proves
The PSE team focuses on three core areas: private reading, private writing, and private proof.
Private leads allow users to read from Ethereum without revealing their identity or intentions. In other words, network-level privacy ensures that there are no monitoring or metadata leaks when users query, view or authenticate Ethereum apps.
Under the private reading, the team is working on a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service that provides privacy. Typically, RPCs can leak private data such as IP addresses and IP addresses of interest to users. Therefore, the PSE team created a private RPC working group consisting of internal researchers, engineers, and external advisors.
The PSE team will also focus on making writing for Ethereum personally viable and affordable. This means that it will be easier to send private forwarding, cast votes, or interact with the app.
For private writing, the team continues working on PlasmaFold, an experimental layer 2 chain that adds a private transfer function.
Finally, the team works to ensure that proofing Ethereum data is private and accessible. The roadmap also includes goals such as improving the portability of data and the private identity of private proofs.
The team will focus on these areas for a foreseeable future, but added:
“Although specific priorities and initiatives within (these) tracks will vary based on investment timelines and deliverables and evolve with the ecosystem, we expect these general focus areas to last for the next few years.”