Ethereum Foundation forms 47-member Privacy Cluster advancing privacy

The Ethereum Foundation on Wednesday announced the formation of a 47‑member Privacy Cluster to accelerate development of privacy features across the Ethereum layer‑1 network, naming Blockscout founder Igor Barinov to coordinate the effort. The cluster will bring together researchers, engineers and cryptographers to build protocol‑level privacy tools including private payments, private decentralized identity, zero‑knowledge proving infrastructure, and measures to reduce metadata leakage from nodes and relays.

The initiative expands the foundation's long‑running Privacy and Scaling Explorations work, which has produced more than 50 open‑source research projects since 2018. Those earlier experiments include Semaphore for anonymous signaling, MACI for private voting, zkEmail for encrypted communications and other primitives that developers have used and forked across the ecosystem. The Privacy Cluster is intended to fold those efforts into a single program while coordinating new and ongoing projects such as Private Reads and Private Writes for confidential interactions, Private Proving for portable verification, zkID systems for selective disclosure of identity attributes, and...