Ethereum Foundation researcher: Privacy infrastructure is the core barrier to institutional access to Ethereum

Gate News message: On March 31, Oskar Thoren, technical lead of the Ethereum Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF), stated at EthCC[9] that privacy should be treated as an underlying foundational infrastructure for Ethereum, not merely as an application-layer plugin. He pointed out that the key barrier for institutions entering the Ethereum ecosystem lies in how to meet regulatory compliance requirements while protecting business strategies and transaction privacy. If Ethereum cannot deliver comprehensive end-to-end privacy protection, its development potential as a global settlement layer will be limited. The maturity of privacy technologies not only protects individual users, but will also provide institutions with an on-chain financial environment that enables them to safeguard competitive advantages while conducting compliant operations. Oskar introduced three key research and development directions of the Ethereum Privacy Enhancers (PSE) team: one, Private Writes, aiming to make the cost and convenience of private transactions comparable to ordinary transactions, enabling confidential asset transfers through technologies such as Plasma; two, Private Reads, focusing on addressing data leakage in services such as RPC, allowing institutions to interact with on-chain data without exposing their identities or query intent; three, Private Proving, by optimizing the generation and verification efficiency of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), supporting complex application scenarios such as confidential DeFi and verifiable identity.