Ethereum developers are endeavoring to ensure that the second-largest blockchain lives up to one of the foundational tenets of the crypto community: end-to-end privacy.

In a post on Friday, the Ethereum Foundation’s ‘Privacy & Scaling Explorations’ team rebranded to ‘Privacy Stewards of Ethereum’ (PSE). The team laid out a roadmap to “make privacy on Ethereum the norm rather than the exception.”

The team aims to ensure that comprehensive end-to-end privacy is embedded across Ethereum’s technical stack, from protocols and infrastructure to applications and wallets. Privacy will become a part of Ethereum’s major use cases, like finance, identity, and governance, the team stated.

At the same time, the team noted that Ethereum’s privacy features will remain compliant with global regulations.

Why privacy on Ethereum matters

According to the PSE team, ensuring privacy on Ethereum is key to protecting the users who rely on the blockchain. The PSE team stated:

“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.”

Moreover, without privacy guardrails, users and institutions will move elsewhere, rendering the blockchain redundant.

Private reads, writes, and proving

The PSE team will focus on three core areas: private reads, private writes, and private proving.

Private reads will enable users to read from Ethereum without revealing their identities or intents. In other words, the network-level privacy will ensure there is no surveillance or metadata leakage when users query, browse, or authenticate with Ethereum apps.

Under the private reads umbrella, the team is working on privacy-preserving Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services. Usually, RPCs can leak private data, like IP addresses or which accounts the user is interested in. Therefore, the PSE team has created a private RPC working group consisting of internal researchers and engineers, and external advisors.

The PSE team will also focus on making writing to Ethereum privately feasible and affordable. This means sending private transfers, casting a vote, or interacting with apps will become easier.

For private writes, the team will continue working on PlasmaFold, an experimental Layer 2 chain that will add private transfer features.

Lastly, the team will work towards ensuring that proving any data on Ethereum is private and accessible. The roadmap also includes goals like improving data portability and private identity for private proving.

While the team will focus on these areas for the foreseeable future, it added:

“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 Solana Policy Institute (SPI) has pledged $500,000 to the legal defense of Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev, according to an Aug. 28 statement.

Storm and Pertsev helped create Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based privacy protocol that allows crypto transactions to be mixed and anonymized. After deployment, the developers relinquished control of the smart contracts, leaving the system to run without centralized oversight.

Developers held liable

Courts in the Netherlands and the US have held the developers liable for malicious actors’ use of the platform for their illicit activities.

Pertsev was convicted of money laundering in 2024, while Storm was found guilty earlier this month of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

These convictions have elicited strong responses from the crypto community, which argues that the Tornado Cash developers’ conviction misinterprets how blockchain protocols function.

Industry experts argue that developers cannot monitor or restrict usage of their protocols once the open-source code is published and immutable.

Notably, the SPI echoed this view, warning that holding coders responsible for third-party activity establishes a precedent that threatens innovation across the entire software industry.

Kristin Smith, the President of the Solana Policy Institute, said:

“Privacy is normal. Code is speech. And at Solana Institute, we’ll continue to defend the rights of software developers everywhere.”

Solana welcomes ‘Tornado Cash-like’ protocol

The SPI donation comes as Solana welcomes the launch of a Tornado Cash–style platform on its network.

On Aug. 27, Privacy Cash went live on the network, offering users a way to transfer digital assets into new wallets without linking prior addresses or transaction histories.

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs, said the tool’s design mirrors Tornado Cash’s but benefits from Solana’s performance and integrated block explorers.

According to him, combining the protocol with Solana’s infrastructure—and even bridging to privacy-focused assets like Zcash—gives users a pathway to near-total anonymity.

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A group of experienced Bitcoin developers has outlined a new proposal to prepare the network for the inevitable threat of quantum computing.

The initiative, led by Jameson Lopp, Christian Papathanasiou, Ian Smith, Steve Vaile, and Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, focuses on safeguarding vulnerable Bitcoin held in older address types that may be compromised by future quantum breakthroughs.

25% of Bitcoin faces quantum computing risk

The proposal noted that around 25% of all Bitcoin eventually could be at risk if a cryptographically capable quantum computer emerges.

According to the developers, these assets are held in addresses that have already exposed their public keys, making them potential targets for these sophisticated computing machines.

Due to this, the developers stressed that this is not a hypothetical issue for the distant future but a serious risk that requires proactive mitigation.

They warned that a successful quantum attack wouldn’t just impact market value; it could severely undermine trust in the network’s ability to function securely. They stressed:

“An attack on Bitcoin may not be economically motivated – an attacker may be politically or maliciously motivated and may attempt to destroy value and trust in Bitcoin rather than extract value. There is no way to know in advance how, when, or why an attack may occur. A defensive position must be taken well in advance of any attack.”

Three-phase strategy for a quantum-safe transition

To prepare for this threat, the team has laid out a three-phase plan to gradually migrate users from quantum-vulnerable addresses to post-quantum secure alternatives.

The first phase would allow Bitcoin to be sent only to new address types called P2QRH, thereby nudging the network toward quantum resilience. This transition is expected to begin three years after the implementation of BIP-360.

The second phase would invalidate all spends from legacy cryptographic signatures, effectively freezing unupdated addresses after a predetermined block height. According to the developers, this could be roughly five years after phase one begins.

The third and final phase would provide a method for users who missed the migration window to recover their legacy funds using zero-knowledge proofs tied to their seed phrases. However, this step is still under research and would be optional.

Community reaction

Jacob Youngman, a Bitcoin commentator, expressed concern that the changes might lead to the confiscation of inactive or legacy-held coins, possibly including those linked to Satoshi Nakamoto.

According to him:

“The best we can do would be to give users an opt-in solution that protects them from quantum computers.”

However, Lopp addressed the criticism, stating that inactive wallets are just as likely to be exploited by malicious quantum actors if no action is taken.

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Ethereum’s core developers are pushing for a major technical change that could reshape how quickly the network processes transactions.

On June 21, Barnabé Monnot, one of Ethereum’s core contributors, suggested a new proposal, EIP-7782, which would halve the block slot time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds.

According to him:

“Shorter slot times make Ethereum a better confirmation engine, which is arguably one of its main value propositions for apps and rollups settling on Ethereum L1. Everyone benefits directly.”

EIP-7782 benefits

He explained that the proposed changes would improve confirmation speed, reduce trading costs on decentralized platforms, and create better conditions for cross-chain protocols.

The proposal also includes adjustments to the timing of several core blockchain operations, such as attestation and aggregation windows.

Under EIP-7782, the block proposal slot would shrink from 4 seconds to 3. Attestations and aggregations would move even faster, cut from 4 seconds to 1.5 each.

Monnot has proposed that the EIP should headline Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade. He said:

“There are multiple slot restructuring proposals already made for Glamsterdam (EIPs 7732 and 7886), focused more on scaling We want to use our Glamsterdam proposal as a place to highlight the value of shorter slot times, and progress the conversation towards their implementation.”

Meanwhile, this push for faster slot times aligns with the Ethereum Foundation’s broader goal of enhancing the network’s Layer 1 performance and refining user experience.

Considering this, Storm Slivkoff, a research partner at Paradigm, supports the proposal. He noted that reducing latency could be the most valuable upgrade included in Glamsterdam, especially as transaction fees drop below $0.10.

In such an environment, increasing block size yields diminishing returns. Instead, improving block quality becomes more critical.

Ethereum’s ecosystem growth

The proposal comes as Ethereum’s activity hits new highs amid rising institutional adoption.

According to GrowThePie data, more than 20 million active addresses interacted with the network last week, setting a record. However, most of that activity happened on layer-2 networks, such as the Coinbase-backed Base.

So, as Ethereum’s Layer-1 developers now propose making the core network faster and more efficient. If successful, the proposed slot time cut could improve performance where speed, cost, and usability matter most.

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