Ethereum Foundation Team Unveils Privacy Roadmap, Rebrands as PSE

The Ethereum Foundation has rebranded its “Privacy & Scaling Explorations” program to “Privacy Stewards of Ethereum” (PSE) and published a roadmap to bring privacy protections across the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Foundation said on Friday that PSE will coordinate work on protocol, infrastructure, networking, application, and wallet layers. Its short-term objectives include private transfers through the PlasmaFold layer-2 network, confidential voting systems, privacy tools for decentralised finance (DeFi), and safeguards against data exposure in remote procedure call services.

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“Our vision is to make privacy on Ethereum the norm rather than the exception. Ethereum will have comprehensive end-to-end privacy embedded across the technical stack (protocol, infrastructure, networking, applications, wallets). Privacy solutions will be widely adopted across core use cases (e.g. finance, identity, governance), seamless in user experience, performant, cost-effective, and compliant with global regulations”, reads the roadmap.

The Ethereum Foundation

Making Ethereum Private

The roadmap which was compiled by team member Sam Richards and published on September 12, states that Ethereum must integrate privacy or risk becoming “the backbone of global surveillance rather than global freedom.” 

The plan is organised around three tracks: private writes, private reads, and private proving. To make things simpler, here’s what they basically mean: 

• Private writes: Make private transactions as simple and cheap as normal ones. This includes PlasmaFold, a layer-2 system for private transfers, plus research into confidential DeFi and private voting.
• Private reads: Focus on fixing data leaks from blockchain queries. Standard RPC calls can reveal a user’s IP address or wallet activity, so PSE is testing privacy-preserving alternatives.
• Private Proving: More leaned towards making zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) easier to generate. The goal is faster, cheaper proofs that can be created on everyday devices instead of specialised hardware.

Moving on, Richards said the roadmap reflects the on-going “contributions from across the ecosystem”, citing Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the Silviculture Society, other PSE members, and researcher Oskar Thorén. Finally, the team made it clear that while specific priorities will shift, these three focus areas will define Ethereum’s privacy work for the coming years.

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