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1-pager for EF leadership on PSE’s strategy proposal - comments & questions welcome!

Last updated: June 4, 2025

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What we’re trying to achieve

PSE is accelerating the capabilities and adoption of privacy-preserving digital public infrastructure — starting with Ethereum, and eventually extending far beyond.

Ethereum has the potential to become core infrastructure for global digital commerce, identity, and collaboration. But this future vision is impossible without data privacy, portability, and verifiability. PSE exists to make that vision real.

Without privacy, Ethereum fails.

Without adoption, privacy doesn’t matter.

Unlike in many settings where privacy is seen as a UX tradeoff, for Ethereum, it’s often a prerequisite for secure and resilient applications, and it’s a blocker for many real-world users. PSE’s mission is to define and deliver EF’s privacy objectives by embedding programmable cryptography into Ethereum’s application layer and making it accessible to developers.

We focus on three core areas:

1. Privacy as a core feature of Ethereum’s application layer
   • Data provenance tools for portable, verifiable, and privacy-preserving self-sovereign identity and credentials (TLSNotary, zkID, Anon Aadhaar, vOPRF)
   • Primitives and protocols for private identity, voting, membership, data retrieval, and eventually smart contracts (Semaphore, PIR, MACI, MachinaIO)
2. New use cases, standards, and UX to drive adoption onchain and beyond
   • Shared specifications (zkspecs) and standards (zkID) for interoperability and adoption
   • MPC for multiplayer privacy, interactive proofs, and collaborative compute (MPC Framework, MPZ, Trinity)
3. ZK developer superpowers through cryptographic tooling
   • More performant technology (client-side proving, private delegated proving, quantum resistance, folding schemes)
   • Accessible tooling for developer productivity (Mopro, zk-kit)

Why it’s urgent