Ethereum Foundation Unveils Privacy Roadmap to Counter Surveillance

The Ethereum Foundation has rebranded its Privacy & Scaling Explorations team as the Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE) and released a comprehensive roadmap focused on embedding end-to-end privacy across the Ethereum network. This roadmap prioritizes three core areas: private writes that enable seamless private on-chain actions, private reads to allow data access without revealing user identity or intent, and private proving to accelerate confidential proof generation and verification. The initiative aims to counter the risk of Ethereum becoming a surveillance platform, emphasizing that privacy is essential for Ethereum to fulfill its role as a global settlement layer and digital freedom enabler. The roadmap includes developing privacy-enhancing technologies such as the PlasmaFold Layer-2 for private transfers, confidential voting, and zero-knowledge proof solutions to safeguard user data against exposure via RPC leaks and other vectors. This push for privacy comes amid increasing U.S. regulatory pressures proposing identity checks and surveillance measures for decentralized finance, which Ethereum leaders like Vitalik Buterin have criticized as threats to privacy rights. The PSE team plans to collaborate with protocol developers to implement censorship-resistant, intermediary-free privacy solutions, adapting their approach as technology and ecosystem needs evolve.