Bankless: "Write, Read, Prove" — Interpreting Ethereum's New Privacy Roadmap

Source: Bankless

Author: William M. Peaster

Compiled and organized by: BitpushNews

If Ethereum cannot solve its privacy issues, it risks becoming “surveillance infrastructure” when adopted at scale.

This is precisely the challenge that the team recently renamed “Privacy Stewards of Ethereum” (PSE) is directly addressing. They have released a brand new roadmap and a clearly focused mission.

The researchers are shifting from exploring cryptographic experiments to implementing privacy solutions in practice. They have just released a new working roadmap.

This roadmap revolves around three main directions:

• Private writes → Making on-chain privacy operations (such as transfers, DeFi, voting, etc.) as simple as public operations.

• Private reads → Preventing metadata leakage when authenticating or querying on Ethereum.

• Private proving → Making zero-knowledge proofs cheaper and simpler to run on mobile devices.

As PSE delves deeper into these directions, they plan to maintain a “problem radar” to map privacy vulnerabilities, an “execution map” to decide where to build, collaborate, or simply monitor, and a culture of “public communication” to keep the Ethereum community engaged.

In addition, the team already has a series of initiatives that are being launched or continuously supported. These initiatives include:

• Plasma Fold (writes) — An experimental Layer 2 design using “zero-knowledge folding” for scaling. PSE plans to add private transfer functionality to this architecture.

• Kohaku (writes) — A wallet proof of concept. It is designed to natively support private sending through privacy pools.

• Privacy governance (writes) — PSE plans to release a “2025 Privacy Voting Status” report and continue collaborating with Aragon and other privacy voting protocols.

• Confidential DeFi (writes) — PSE intends to collaborate with the Ethereum Foundation’s EcoDev enterprise group to establish an Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF).

• Network privacy (reads) — PSE plans to form a privacy RPC working group, support Oblivious RAM solutions in wallets, experiment with mixnet-style transaction routing, and more.

• Privacy identity (proving) — The team is making various efforts around privacy-preserving credential standards, modular zk-snark wallets, and unlinkable credential revocation.

• Client proving (proving) — The team is also researching efficient proving systems that can run directly on mobile devices and support new types of privacy applications.

By improving privacy, Ethereum can demonstrate that a public blockchain can be both transparent and protective of its users.

Now, PSE has become a mature privacy hub, dedicated to making this vision a reality without attempting to monopolize anything. This is exactly the uniquely advantageous and neutral coordinating role of the Ethereum Foundation.

Ultimately, a network that can safeguard trillions of dollars in assets but exposes every transaction detail is incomplete. Only by achieving privacy in writing, reading, and proving can Ethereum continue to serve as the trusted foundation of the “Internet of Value.”

Fortunately, this new roadmap shows that the Ethereum Foundation is doubling down and treating privacy as a core issue. For this, we applaud them.