The Ethereum Foundation is making privacy a formal pillar of its roadmap, expanding research efforts into a dedicated cluster that now covers private payments, proofs, identity, and enterprise use cases.

Ethereum has supported privacy research through its Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team since 2018, with experiments like Semaphore for anonymous signaling, MACI for private voting, zkEmail and zkTLS, and the Anon Aadhaar project.

These have become reference points for developers across the ecosystem, spawning hundreds of forks and integrations.

The new “privacy cluster,” coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings these experiments under a single umbrella alongside new initiatives, per a Wednesday blog post.

Those include private reads and writes for payments and interactions, portable proofs for identity and asset ownership, zkID systems for selective disclosure, UX work to normalize privacy tools, and Kohaku, an SDK and wallet designed to make strong cryptography usable by default.

An Institutional Privacy Task Force is also part of the cluster, translating compliance and operational requirements into specifications that larger enterprises can test.

The Foundation framed privacy as essential to Ethereum’s credibility. Blockchains are transparent by design, but widespread adoption requires that users and institutions have the option to transact, govern, and build without exposing sensitive data.

More than 700 privacy-focused projects exist across the broader crypto ecosystem, but Ethereum’s size means its primitives often set standards that others adopt. If the Foundation can deliver credible tools that balance privacy with neutrality and compliance, it could define how the next cycle of applications is built.

Meanwhile, privacy remains politically charged. Regulators have targeted mixers and shielded transactions, and developers are aware that features enabling confidential use can just as easily enable illicit finance.

That’s why the Foundation’s approach of open-source research, institution-facing task forces, and tools aimed at everyday users can be considered cautious but deliberate.