Bankless: “Write, Read, Prove”: Decoding Ethereum’s New Privacy Roadmap

Ethereum's Privacy Stewards (PSE) have released a new roadmap to address the network's critical privacy challenges, aiming to prevent it from becoming a "surveillance infrastructure." The strategy is organized around three core pillars:

Private Writes: Making private on-chain operations (transfers, DeFi, voting) as simple as public ones.
Private Reads: Preventing metadata leakage during authentication or queries on Ethereum.
Private Proving: Making zero-knowledge proofs cheaper and easier to run on mobile devices.

Key initiatives to support this vision include Plasma Fold for private Layer 2 transfers, the Kohaku wallet for private sends, efforts in confidential DeFi and privacy governance, a working group for network privacy (RPC, mixnets), and development in private identity and client-side attestation systems. By treating privacy as a core issue, the Ethereum Foundation is working to ensure the network remains a trusted, transparent, and user-protective foundation for the internet of value.

Source: Bankless

By William M. Peaster

Compiled and compiled by: BitpushNews

If Ethereum fails to resolve its privacy issues, it risks becoming a “surveillance infrastructure” when adopted on a large scale.

This is the challenge the newly renamed Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE) are tackling head-on, with a new roadmap and a clearly focused mission.

Researchers are moving from exploring cryptographic experiments to putting privacy solutions into practice, and they’ve just released a new roadmap for their work.

This roadmap is organized around three main directions:

Private writes → Make on-chain private operations (such as transfers, DeFi, voting, etc.) as simple as public operations.
Private reads → Prevent metadata leakage when authenticating or querying on Ethereum.
Private proving → Make zero-knowledge proofs cheaper and easier to run on mobile devices.

As the PSE delve deeper into these directions, they plan to maintain an “issue radar” to map privacy vulnerabilities, an “enforcement map” to decide where to build, collaborate, or simply monitor, and a culture of “open communication” to keep the ethereum community engaged.

In addition, the team has a number of initiatives that are either being launched or are being supported. These include:

Plasma Fold (Write) — An experimental Layer 2 design that uses zero-knowledge folding for scaling. PSE plans to add private transfer capabilities to this architecture.
Kohaku (Written) — A wallet proof-of-concept built to natively support private sends via privacy pools.
Privacy Governance (Write) — PSE plans to publish a “State of Privacy Voting in 2025” report and continue collaborating with Aragon and other privacy voting protocols.
Confidential DeFi (Write) — PSE intends to collaborate with the Ethereum Foundation’s EcoDev Enterprise Group to establish an Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF).
Network Privacy (Read) — PSE plans to form a privacy RPC working group, support Oblivious RAM solutions in wallets, experiment with mixnet-style transaction routing, and more.
Private Identity (Proofing) — The team is working on various efforts around privacy-preserving credential standards, modular zk-snark wallets, and unlinkable credential revocation.
Client-Side Attestation (Proof) — The team is also working on efficient attestation systems that can run directly on mobile devices and enable new types of privacy applications.

By improving privacy, Ethereum can prove that public blockchains can be both transparent and protect their users.

Now, PSE has become a mature privacy center dedicated to making this vision a reality without attempting to monopolize anything. This is precisely the neutral coordinator role that the Ethereum Foundation is uniquely positioned to play.

Ultimately, a network that secures trillions of dollars in assets but exposes the details of every transaction is incomplete. By enabling privacy in writes, reads, and proofs, Ethereum can continue to serve as the trusted foundation for the “Internet of Value.”

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