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Ethereum’s push toward enterprise-grade privacy came into focus after Paul Brody, Global Blockchain Leader at EY and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Chairman, said he expects 2026 to be the “golden year” for Ethereum privacy.

In a detailed breakdown shared on X, Brody emphasized that privacy has always been a foundational value of Ethereum. Yet, the urgency surrounding it has never been greater.

“Since inception, Ethereum has put privacy at the heart of what it does—it’s baked into the values. But now that enterprises are bringing real assets, contracts, and payments on-chain, the need for private transactions has only increased.”

Brody also explained that privacy is critical for payment and transfer activities, as well as the terms embedded within smart contracts. Both contain sensitive commercial intelligence that companies cannot expose publicly. Yet, blockchains must remain transparent enough for anyone to verify state changes, creating what he described as a “paradox” Ethereum is now solving.

The breakthrough, he said, comes from zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). This cryptographic technique allows transactions to be verified without revealing the underlying data. He also highlighted the practicality of enterprise-grade privacy, as “Ethereum has become a global center of ZK innovation, with researchers, rollups, and enterprises all contributing to real-world applications.”

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Several privacy-focused networks, including Aztec Network, COTI Foundation, Miden, and EY’s Nightfall, are already running in testnet environments. Nightfall is even expanding into a Layer-3 solution designed to sit on top of existing rollups.

Moving on, the executive acknowledged that robust privacy transactions still cost more and take longer to process than standard Ethereum transactions, primarily because of the heavy computational requirements for generating proofs. However, EY’s privacy computations are now over 1,000x more efficient than in 2018, reducing gas fees for some transactions from $100 to just $0.05.

He added that this progress isn’t limited to one organization, as the entire ZK field has accelerated. “I’m confident that within 18-24 months, even relatively complex transactions will be cost-efficient in high volumes for business users and consumers,” he wrote.