Ethereum Foundation sets end-to-end privacy roadmap, with private writes, reads and proving

An Ethereum Foundation team has released a roadmap outlining current progress and future plans towards building comprehensive end-to-end privacy into the world's second-largest blockchain. 

The Ethereum Foundation's Privacy & Scaling Explorations team has rebranded itself to Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE), changing its focus from pursuing speculative exploration of new tech to solving concrete problems and improving ecosystem outcomes. The new PSE team released a roadmap on Friday, Sept. 12, outlining its current work and future goals for privacy on Ethereum, compiled by team member Sam Richards. 

"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," Richards' roadmap states. "If Ethereum fails to build privacy, it fails to protect the people who rely on it."

The roadmap centers around three areas of focus: private writes, making private onchain actions as cheap and seamless as public ones, private reads, enabling reading from the blockchain without revealing identity or intent, and private proving, making proof generation and verification fast, private, and accessible. 

"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," the PSE team wrote. 

Under the private writes umbrella, the team plans to continue work on PlasmaFold, an experimental Layer 2 design, to add support for privacy transfer features. The team is working on a proof of concept for the feature, and hopes to debut it by Devconnect, the Ethereum developer-focused conference that will start on Nov. 17 in Argentina. 

The team is also planning to release a "state of private voting 2025" report to summarize efforts on private voting, according to the roadmap. Finally, the team is making efforts in confidential DeFi, likely designing protocols that ensure privacy while maintaining compliance for institutional clients, and continuing work on private computation projects.

For private reads, the team is working towards privacy-preserving RPC (Remote Procedure Call) services. Typical RPC calls can leak personal information, like an IP address or which accounts a user is interested in, so PSE convened a private RPC working group to evaluate solutions. And for private proving, dubbed "prove anywhere" in the roadmap, the team is working on a number of projects, such as making it easier and cheaper to generate zero-knowledge proofs on everyday devices. 

The roadmap reflects ideas and contributions from across the Ethereum ecosystem, Richards wrote, crediting "inspiration and input from [Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin], Silviculture Society, PSE team & particularly [independent researcher Oskar Thorén]."