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.”

Crypto Journalist

Anas Hassan

Crypto Journalist

Anas Hassan

About Author

Anas is a crypto native journalist and SEO writer with over five years of writing experience covering blockchain, crypto, DeFi, and emerging tech.

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Last updated: 

September 14, 2025

The Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy & Scaling Explorations team rebranded as Privacy Stewards for Ethereum (PSE), unveiling an ambitious roadmap to make privacy the default rather than exception across Ethereum’s technical stack.

The transformation shifts focus from cryptography exploration to problem-first solutions addressing Ethereum’s surveillance vulnerabilities.

PSE’s new mission centers on three core tracks: private writes to make on-chain actions as cheap and seamless as public ones, private reads enabling surveillance-free blockchain queries, and private proving for accessible data verification.

The initiative follows Vitalik Buterin’s April advocacy for privacy as essential to Ethereum’s survival as a global settlement infrastructure.

The roadmap warns that without robust privacy protections, Ethereum risks becoming “the backbone of global surveillance rather than global freedom.”

PSE emphasizes that institutions and users will migrate elsewhere if private transactions, identity, and data remain compromised by public blockchain transparency.

From Cryptography Lab to Privacy Stewardship Mission

PSE abandoned its previous approach of pursuing “cool tech” for concrete problem-solving focused on ecosystem outcomes rather than internal projects.

The rebrand includes website updates to pse.dev and restructured team goals with particular emphasis on subtraction by default and problem-driven resource allocation.

The strategy involves continuous problem mapping, execution decisions across lead-support-monitor engagement levels, and public communication through newsletters, community calls, and working groups.

PSE draws inspiration from Protocol and EcoDev announcement simplicity while addressing feedback from Vitalik Buterin, Silviculture Society, and EF management.

Key initiatives include PlasmaFold development for private transfers using PCD and folding, targeting proof-of-concept by Devconnect.

The team continues to develop the Kohaku privacy wallet, focusing on zk account recovery frameworks and keystore implementation for stealth addresses.

Private governance efforts focus on a “State of private voting 2025” report while collaborating with Aragon on protocol integrations.

The Institutional Privacy Task Force launches with the EF EcoDev Enterprise team to unblock adoption through privacy specifications and proof-of-concepts.

Another key aspect of this new direct is PSE’s data portability. It tracks advances in TLSNotary development for production-ready zkTLS protocols, while building SDKs that enable seamless integration across mobile, server, and browser platforms.

Additionally, network privacy initiatives include Private RPC working groups, ORAM solution integration for privacy-preserving state reads, and sphinx mixing protocol implementation for broadcast privacy.

The team has stated that it will methodically study ORAM and PIR state-of-the-art techniques while translating research into practical wallet and browser experiences.

Industry Experts Warn Public Ledgers Threaten Mass Adoption

The privacy push addresses growing concerns from industry veterans about Ethereum’s transparency model.

In an interview with Cryptonews in August, British Gold Trust’s Petro Golovko argues public blockchains expose salaries, business deals, and balance sheets, making crypto “unusable for regular people and impossible for institutions.“

Golovko compares current blockchain transparency to the pre-SSL internet, when users refused to enter credit card numbers due to a lack of encryption.

He maintains that crypto remains stuck in this vulnerable phase, preventing the scaling that transformed e-commerce into a $6 trillion industry.

Institutional adoption concerns center on the exposure of trade secrets and the competitive disadvantage resulting from visible treasury movements.

Golovko warns that no board will approve systems exposing supply chains or financial operations globally, limiting crypto to speculation rather than serious commerce.

Vitalik Buterin’s April privacy advocacy stemmed from similar concerns about AI-driven surveillance and data misuse eroding personal autonomy.

His roadmap outlined four areas for enhancing privacy: anonymous payments, application-level privacy, secure data access, and network obfuscation.

The Ethereum co-founder advocated for wallets to integrate tools like Railgun and Privacy Pools, creating “shielded balances” that enable private-by-default transactions.

He emphasized that separate addresses per dApp would eliminate traceable links between applications while maintaining usability.

European regulatory pressure adds urgency to the development of privacy.

Community member Eugenio Reggianini outlined GDPR compliance practices that require personal data to remain off-chain, with blockchain nodes relaying only encrypted references or proofs, rather than identifiable information.

Looking forward, the team aims to accelerate ecosystem adoption through community initiatives with privacy and robust security at the center of its decentralized identity systems.

Bitcoin is the leading cryptocurrency, which introduced the world to the magic of decentralized cash. The primary strengths of Bitcoin are decentralization and its robust security infrastructure. Everything seems right about Bitcoin until you notice the limitations that it has shown as a result of growing adoption. The two biggest limitations of Bitcoin blockchain holding it back include privacy and scalability.

The introduction of Taproot upgrade improves Bitcoin privacy and also addresses the scalability concerns. Bitcoin introduced the Taproot upgrade in 2021 and it has helped in achieving significant improvements by making Bitcoin transactions more flexible, private, and efficient. Let us learn more about the Taproot upgrade and its implications for the future of Bitcoin.

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Reasons to Introduce the Taproot Upgrade

Before learning about the Taproot upgrade, you must know about the reasons that called for the upgrade. The original design of Bitcoin created a revolutionary impact by showcasing a decentralized electronic cash system. On the other hand, some of the characteristics of Bitcoin required improvement, which became clearly visible as Bitcoin gained more users. The following factors can help you understand the rationale behind introducing the Taproot upgrade on the Bitcoin blockchain. 

• Reduced Transaction Privacy 

One of the most noticeable benefits of Bitcoin transactions is the assurance of anonymity as they are linked to pseudonymous identities. However, analyzing the transactions can reveal patterns that can harm user privacy. Complex transactions like multi-signature transactions and the ones involving smart contracts leave a discernible audit trail on the Bitcoin blockchain. Anyone can differentiate simple payments from more complex agreements, thereby creating risks for user privacy. For example, anyone can identify a multi-signature transaction by checking the number of parties involved in a transaction. 

The arrival of the Bitcoin Taproot BIP upgrade also aims to address the smart contract limitations on Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin scripting provides the flexibility to incorporate simple smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. Complex smart contracts on Bitcoin will require verbose scripts that take up significant block space and reduced privacy. The Taproot upgrade aimed to facilitate the creation of sophisticated dApps directly on the Bitcoin blockchain without sacrificing its core traits.

Another notable objective behind introducing the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade revolves around addressing the threat of scalability challenges. The blockchain size limit and transaction processing speed of Bitcoin have always been considered as its limitations. No one would have thought that these issues would ultimately lead to scalability challenges in the long run. With more users adopting Bitcoin and complex transactions, the Bitcoin blockchain experiences network congestion, thereby resulting in higher transaction fees. The scalability issues affect the overall user experience as the transaction fees can be extremely high for smaller transactions.

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Design of the Taproot Upgrade

The challenges responsible for introducing the Taproot upgrade on Bitcoin don’t qualify as critical flaws. On the contrary, the challenges showed potential areas where Bitcoin can improve to meet the growing requirements of its users. The answers to “What is the Taproot upgrade for Bitcoin?” reveal that the Bitcoin network devised the upgrade to enhance the network without disrupting the fundamental architecture or introducing new risks.

While many people assume that Taproot is a single feature, it represents a combination of three different BIP or Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. The three components work in unison to achieve promising improvement in smart contract functionality, privacy and scalability. The following components of the Taproot upgrade showcase why it plays a pivotal role in addressing the privacy and scalability challenges.

The core component of the Taproot upgrade, Schnorr Signatures, is a BIP 340 improvement proposal that makes transaction verification more efficient. Prior to Taproot, Bitcoin relied on the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm to verify transactions. Irrespective of the security benefits of ECDSA, you can notice the following enhancements with Schnorr Signatures.  

• Improvement in Transaction Privacy

Schnorr Signatures make complex and multi-signature transactions completely indistinguishable from simple transactions that require single signatures, thereby improving transaction privacy. External observers cannot identify complex transactions or the number of parties involved in transactions due to Schnorr Signatures. The effect of the BIP 340 improvement in Taproot ensures that all Bitcoins are fungible and cannot be distinguished from other Bitcoins. 

The advantages of Taproot also draw attention to the facility of signature aggregation with Schnorr Signatures. It is a feature that can make a Taproot Bitcoin wallet more private by allowing the combination of multiple signatures from different parties into one compact signature. Let us think of a scenario where you need multiple people to sign a Bitcoin transaction from a shared wallet. Schnorr Signatures ensures that the three signatures are combined into one signature, thereby enhancing privacy.

• Batch Verification and Efficient Transactions

Another significant benefit of Schnorr Signatures in the Taproot upgrade is batch verification. Nodes can verify multiple Schnorr signatures, thereby reducing computational burden on nodes, which results in network efficiency and better scalability. On top of it, a single Schnorr Signature takes less block space than multiple ECDSA signatures. Therefore, complex transactions would involve lower transaction fees, which translate into scalability improvements.

• Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree or MAST

The Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree or MAST is another core component of the Taproot upgrade. As the name implies, it draws inspiration from Merkle Trees and serves the benefit of introducing private Bitcoin smart contracts. MAST helps in achieving the following benefits for the Bitcoin blockchain.

• Privacy for Complex Transactions

MAST serves a major role in ensuring that the Taproot upgrade improves privacy for complex transactions. It reveals only the path followed in a smart contract rather than all the execution paths, thereby boosting privacy. Third parties or external observers have to struggle to know the complete scope of multi-party agreements and various backups. 

The approach to reveal only the necessary details in MAST ensures significant reduction in the amount of data required for complex transactions. You can see how the Taproot upgrade improves scalability by making transaction size smaller. Reduced transaction size ensures that you can fit more transactions in a block, thereby reducing network congestion and improving overall efficiency of Bitcoin.

• Non-disclosure of Unused Spending Conditions 

The MAST component of the Taproot upgrade also addresses the problem of multiple spending conditions in some smart contracts. With the arrival of MAST, Bitcoin will ensure more privacy by revealing only the condition met before execution. The other conditions which remain unexecuted will stay hidden in a Merkle tree structure.

• Enhancing Bitcoin Script with Taproot

The third and most crucial component of the Taproot upgrade, Tapscript, serves an updated scripting language for the Bitcoin blockchain. Tapscript works along with Schnorr Signatures and MAST to offer the following advantages.

Tapscript might seem like a technical nightmare for some users. On the other hand, it ensures simplification of various aspects of Bitcoin scripting. Developers can rely on Tapscript for writing complex smart contracts and transaction logic, thereby enabling more secure and efficient smart contract deployments.

• Preparing Bitcoin for the Future

Tapscript is a Bitcoin Taproot BIP upgrade which contains a set of rules for Bitcoin scripting. Tapscript helps the Bitcoin network in understanding and processing transactions that utilize MAST and Schnorr Signatures. It provides clear guidelines for interaction between the new upgrade components and existing Bitcoin scripting capabilities. Tapscript also prepares Bitcoin for the future by providing a flexible framework to implement upgrades to Bitcoin scripting language in future.

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Real Impact of the Taproot Upgrade

The real impact of the Taproot upgrade is yet to be seen as it has not achieved full-scale adoption. However, you can notice that many Bitcoin wallets have been integrating Taproot addresses. The transition of more users to Taproot addresses will spread the word about the privacy and efficiency benefits of the upgrade. 

While the Taproot Bitcoin wallet adoption is still growing, users have pointed out promising improvements in user experience on the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network has become better with integration of Taproot-compatible features that will ensure more efficient and private off-chain transactions.

The most profound impact of the Taproot upgrade on Bitcoin is visible in the rise of new protocols and use cases on the Bitcoin blockchain. If you had said the same thing about Bitcoin 10 years ago, no one would have believed you. With the Taproot upgrade rolling out gradually, the Bitcoin blockchain enabled support for BRC-20 tokens and Bitcoin Ordinals. The innovative developments with Taproot upgrade ensure that Bitcoin will serve as the foundation for new types of applications and digital assets. 

Final Thoughts 

The Taproot upgrade is one of the notable milestones in the evolutionary journey of Bitcoin. A review of answers to “What is the Taproot upgrade for Bitcoin?” reveals that the Taproot upgrade includes three core components. Schnorr Signatures, MAST and Tapscript work in unison to ensure that Bitcoin grows beyond the identity of being only a cryptocurrency. Taproot has reduced transaction size and fees, thereby opening new avenues for improving scalability. On top of it, the Taproot upgrade ensures that external observers can only view relevant details of Bitcoin transactions. Furthermore, Tapscript governs the use of Schnorr Signatures and MAST while establishing the foundation for new use cases and protocols on Bitcoin. If you want to dive deeper into these innovations, consider earning a Bitcoin Certification to strengthen your expertise

*Disclaimer: The article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide any investment advice. Claims made in this article do not constitute investment advice and should not be taken as such. 101 Blockchains shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this article. Do your own research!

This update enables the assistant to perform tasks such as signing in to accounts, reading emails, making bookings, uploading files, and even connecting with services like Gmail, Google Drive, and GitHub.

However, OpenAI stated in a July 25 blog post that using the agent might put personal data at risk, particularly due to “prompt injection”. This type of attack happens when someone adds hidden instructions to content that the chatbot might read, like a blog post, website text, or an email.

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If the chatbot follows those instructions, it could take actions the user never intended, such as sharing private information or changing account settings.

In a blog post, OpenAI explained that once the agent is allowed to access connected websites, it may also be able to view sensitive information, such as emails, files, or login data.

The post also noted that attackers could try to trick the assistant by hiding commands in everyday text. If that works, the assistant might send data to an unauthorized user or perform actions without the user’s knowledge.

OpenAI first announced the agent on July 17. At the time, the full launch was planned for a few days later, but it ended up being released on July 24, along with an update to the ChatGPT app.

Recently, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, fixed the problems with Grok 4’s offensive responses. What did the company say? Read the full story.

Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm took to Twitter with an urgent plea for support, ahead of his high-profile trial date tomorrow. Storm, who has been battling legal charges for nearly two years, is calling on the crypto community to help raise $500,000 in the next few days and $1.5 million in the coming weeks to cover escalating legal fees, expert witnesses, and research costs as the case stretches beyond its initial two-week projection.

Who is Roman Storm, and what is Tornado Cash?

Storm, for the uninitiated, is a prominent blockchain developer and co-founder of Tornado Cash, a privacy-focused Ethereum mixing service. Tornado Cash enables users to obfuscate the origin and destination of crypto transactions, providing a layer of privacy on public blockchains.

He has been entangled in legal proceedings since his arrest in August 2023, when U.S. authorities charged him with conspiracy to commit money laundering and sanctions violations related to Tornado Cash. He has spent nearly two years under restrictive conditions, facing mounting legal and financial pressure as his trial date approaches on July 14, 2025.

In a recent urgent appeal, Storm revealed a critical funding shortfall: $500,000 needed within days and $1.5 million required in the coming weeks.

Why this case matters for crypto, privacy, and freedom

Storm’s defense centers on the principle that writing and publishing open-source code is a form of free speech protected under the First Amendment. The outcome of this case could set a precedent for how governments treat software developers and open-source contributors worldwide.

Tornado Cash and similar privacy tools are essential for safeguarding user anonymity in a financial system that is increasingly surveilled. The prosecution of Storm is seen by many as a direct challenge to the right to financial privacy and the legitimacy of privacy-preserving technologies.

The case also raises concerns about government overreach and the potential criminalization of software development. If Storm is convicted, it could have a chilling effect on innovation and deter developers from working on privacy-enhancing technologies.

Community support and how you can help

The crypto community has rallied around Storm, viewing his case as a battle for fundamental freedoms. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and a leading voice in the blockchain space, publicly donated $170,000 to Storm’s legal defense fund earlier this year, and many other prominent crypto members have also joined the cause.

Storm’s team has set up a donation portal at freeromanstorm.com to collect contributions for his legal defense. Every donation, large or small, supports the broader fight for privacy, free speech, and the right to develop open-source software.

Storm’s trial is more than a personal legal battle. It’s a referendum on the rights of developers, the future of privacy in digital finance, and the limits of government power in the age of open-source technology. The outcome will resonate far beyond the crypto world, affecting anyone who values privacy, innovation, and freedom of expression.

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