Ethereum's Privacy Challenges Addressed with New Roadmap

According to PANews, Ethereum faces potential risks of becoming a 'surveillance infrastructure' if it fails to address privacy issues, especially as it scales for mass adoption. The team, now known as the Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE), is tackling these challenges head-on with a newly released roadmap and focused objectives. Researchers are shifting from cryptographic experiments to implementing practical privacy solutions. The new roadmap is structured around three main directions: Private Writes, Private Reads, and Private Proving. Private Writes aim to make on-chain privacy operations as straightforward as public ones, including transactions, DeFi, and voting. Private Reads focus on preventing metadata leaks during authentication or queries on Ethereum. Private Proving seeks to make zero-knowledge proofs more affordable and simpler to run on mobile devices. As PSE delves into these areas, they plan to maintain a 'problem radar' to map privacy vulnerabilities, an 'execution map' to decide where to build, collaborate, or monitor, and foster a culture of 'public communication' to keep the Ethereum community engaged. The team has several ongoing or upcoming initiatives, including Plasma Fold, an experimental Layer 2 design using 'zero-knowledge folding' for scalability, with plans to add privacy transaction features. Kohaku is a wallet proof-of-concept designed to natively support privacy sending through privacy pools. Privacy Governance involves releasing a '2025 Privacy Voting Status' report and continuing collaboration with Aragon and other privacy voting protocols. Confidential DeFi sees PSE collaborating with the Ethereum Foundation's EcoDev enterprise group to establish an Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF). For Network Privacy, PSE plans to form a privacy RPC working group to support Oblivious RAM solutions in wallets and experiment with mixnet-style transaction routing. In Privacy Identity, efforts are underway to develop privacy-preserving credential standards, modular zk-snark wallets, and unlinkable credential revocation. Client Proving involves researching efficient proving systems that can run directly on mobile devices to support new privacy applications. By enhancing privacy, Ethereum can demonstrate that public blockchains can be both transparent and protective of user privacy. PSE has evolved into a mature privacy hub, committed to realizing this vision without monopolizing efforts, aligning with the Ethereum Foundation's role as a neutral coordinator. Ultimately, a network capable of securing trillions of dollars in assets yet exposing every transaction detail is incomplete. Achieving privacy in writes, reads, and proving is essential for Ethereum to remain a trusted foundation for the 'Internet of Value.' The new roadmap indicates the Ethereum Foundation's intensified focus on privacy as a core issue, a development that is commendable.