Ethereum Foundation Team Unveils Privacy Roadmap To Counter Surveillance

An Ethereum team has released a roadmap to ensure privacy on its blockchain, warning that without stronger protections it risks becoming a tool for global surveillance.

The Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE), a group within the Ethereum Foundation formerly known as Privacy & Scaling Explorations, said its roadmap highlights three priorities.

Private wires to make private on-chain actions as cheap and seamless as public ones, private reads to make it possible to access blockchain data without revealing identity, and private proving to speed up proof generation and verification while keeping it confidential.

The push comes as regulators in the US are weighing measures that could impose surveillance requirements on decentralized finance, heightening concerns over privacy erosion. The privacy roadmap could help Ethereum further cement its position as the leading dApp blockchain, with nearly 60% of total value locked and a dominant 60% share in stablecoin issuance.

TVL by blockchain (Source: DefiLlama)

Ethereum Risks Becoming ”Backbone Of Global Surveillance”

“Ethereum is on the path to becoming the settlement layer for the world, but without strong privacy it risks becoming the backbone of global surveillance rather than global freedom,” the PSE team said in the roadmap.  “If Ethereum fails to build privacy, it fails to protect the people who rely on it.”

In order to prevent the Ethereum blockchain from becoming a global surveillance tool, the PSE team said that it will work with various protocol teams “to ensure that any L1 changes needed to enable strong, censorship-resistant intermediary-free privacy takes place. 

Some of the features the PSE team will work on (Source: X)

“Specific priorities and initiatives within 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,” the team wrote.

US Proposes DeFi Government Identity Checks

The roadmap to strengthen privacy on the Ethereum blockchain comes as US government officials consider regulations for the crypto industry. The US Department of the Treasury is already exploring proposals to add government identity checks to smart contracts, which has drawn a backlash from the pro-privacy crypto community. 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly advocated for privacy, and says that it is an essential human right. In April, he warned that transparency could be more of a bug, rather than a feature, in the digital age. 

Buterin also said that privacy was needed to protect people in a time of growing state power and large, centralized corporations.