The Much-Anticipated Major Update and New Features for Ethereum (ETH) Have Been Announced

The Ethereum Foundation has released a comprehensive roadmap aimed at bringing end-to-end privacy to the world’s second-largest blockchain.

The foundation’s privacy-focused team will now operate as Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE).

The published roadmap was compiled by team member Sam Richards. Richards said, “Ethereum is on its way to becoming the world’s consensus layer. But without strong privacy, it risks becoming the backbone of global surveillance, not global freedom. If Ethereum doesn’t build privacy, it can’t protect the people who rely on it.”

The new roadmap focuses on three main topics:

• Private writes: Making private on-chain transactions as cheap and seamless as public transactions.
• Private reads: Providing the ability to read data from the blockchain without revealing identity or intent.
• Private proving: Making evidence generation and verification fast, private, and accessible.

The PSE team is working on an experimental Layer-2 design called PlasmaFold, part of a custom script. This design aims to add confidential transfer capabilities. The first prototype of the feature is scheduled to be unveiled at Devconnect, the ETH developer conference that begins in Argentina on November 17. The team also aims to publish the “Private Voting 2025” report and work on confidential DeFi solutions that will enhance privacy while maintaining corporate compliance standards.

Privacy-focused RPC services are being developed for private reading. PSE, noting that standard RPC calls can leak personal data such as IP addresses or user account details, has formed a working group to address this issue.

The “prove anywhere” initiative stands out in the context of private proofs. Its goal is to make zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) easier and more cost-effective to produce on everyday devices.

*This is not investment advice.