Ethereum Foundation creates Privacy Cluster team to strengthen onchain privacy

The Ethereum Foundation announced the formation of the Privacy Cluster, a team of 47 researchers, engineers, and cryptographers coordinated by Blockscout and xDai founder Igor Barinov.

In a Wednesday blog post , the foundation said that it is collaborating with the broader community — complementing existing privacy projects — to establish privacy as a “first-class property” of Ethereum.

As such, the foundation has released a roadmap outlining current progress towards building comprehensive end-to-end privacy into the world's second-largest blockchain. 

“Ethereum was created to be the foundation of digital trust, one that is worthy of civilizational scale. For that trust to remain credible, privacy must be part of its core,” the foundation said in the blog post.

The development also marks an escalation of the foundation’s ongoing efforts to protect users from surveillance, data leaks, and metadata exposure in an era when blockchain transactions are increasingly under scrutiny. The Privacy Cluster is expected to address such leaks, targeting Layer 1 improvements like confidential transfers and protections against RPC node metadata leaks.

The Cluster will expand on the Foundation's Privacy & Scaling Explorations team , which has been working on privacy research and development since 2018.

It will allocate resources toward privacy-preserving research and tooling, spanning cryptography (including zero-knowledge proofs), protocol improvements for transaction confidentiality, and applications such as private payments, identities and wallets.