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- The Ethereum Foundation introduced a roadmap that will embed privacy protections into the application layer of ETH.
- Structured around private writes, private reads, and private proving, the plan seeks to keep ETH transactions affordable and compliant.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, has never been shy about pushing privacy to the forefront. He’s argued that pluralistic identity systems, where no single authority controls identity issuance, are the most realistic path forward.
To him, privacy is a must if Ethereum (ETH) is to support real-world financial use cases. In fact, Buterin has gone as far as to say that in today’s digital world, transparency is less of a feature and more of a bug.
Acknowledging this, the Ethereum Foundation has now made privacy a central pillar of its roadmap. The Privacy & Scaling Explorations (PSE) group has officially rebranded as the Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE), signaling a move from speculative research toward real, user-impacting privacy outcomes.
The Three Key Focus Areas
To begin with, Ethereum’s current transparency problem is that every on-chain action, whether it’s a simple token transfer, casting a DAO vote, or interacting with a dApp, is fully visible to anyone with a block explorer. The roadmap envisions making private writes just as cheap, fast, and seamless as public ones.
Projects like PlasmaFold, an experimental Layer-2 framework, are being developed to allow transfers and other interactions to be executed with built-in privacy.
These transparency issues extend beyond transactions. Whenever users interact with Ethereum through an RPC endpoint or query blockchain data, they often leak sensitive information about their intent or identity. The metadata can be harvested by infrastructure providers, opening the door to surveillance or exploitation.
This is where private reads come in. In practice, this could mean shielding a user’s wallet address, preventing front-running, or protecting institutional actors who don’t want their strategies visible.
The third pillar is private Proving. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have long been hailed as the holy grail of blockchain privacy. Today, generating or verifying a proof can be slow, expensive, and out of reach for the average user. Ethereum’s roadmap calls for improvements in private proving, making ZKPs lighter, faster, and practical on everyday hardware like laptops and smartphones.
The goal is to integrate zero-knowledge privacy into regular Ethereum workflows, rather than reserving it for niche or high-value use cases.
They said in their report,
These focus areas don’t represent everything PSE touches, but they form the backbone of what we’re committed to shipping and advancing. Specific priorities and initiatives within these tracks will vary in their investment timelines and deliverables, and will evolve with the ecosystem, but we expect these general focus areas to persist for the next few years.
Recently, we reported that Ethereum is holding steady above the $4,600 mark, currently trading at $4,514 after slipping 3.28% in the last 24 hours and an 86% increase in the past year. Trading activity remains strong, with daily volume sitting at $33 billion, up a hefty 33% from earlier levels.
On the derivatives side, ETH Open Interest, the total value of outstanding futures and options contracts, has climbed 0.66% to $63.92 billion.
