EF Tomasz K. Stańczak on “The State of Privacy in Ethereum”

During his keynote, Tomasz K. Stańczak highlighted Ethereum’s growing collaboration with institutions and regulators on privacy standards and real-world applications. He explained why institutional privacy has become a key topic — and introduced the role of the Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) under the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team.

“Why we talking about the privacy on Ethereum, nowadays much more. Also in the context of talking to institutions. So this year I had countless conversations with institutions from the world. Following the changes in regulatory environment, in the United States, many institutions start to adopt the Real World Assets (RWA), tokenization and stablecoins. They look at the chains and wonder about how to implement that by also providing solutions for their customers to ensure the privacy of their trades when they participate in the competitive market.

So institutions are asking Ethereum Foundation what are the privacy standards that they can apply when they use the EVM technology, when they use the ETH chain, when they build their L2 solutions and so on. And at the same time, the same questions are coming from regulators around the world — those are questions from regulators in Hong Kong, from regulators in US, in Switzerland and so on. They are asking how we can ensure the customers of the bank, of the institutions, of the enterprise solutions can ensure that all their handling on blockchain are on one side transparent for the regulators but on the other side ensuring the privacy for the customer, so protecting the customers.

So here regulators are asking about the two or three aspects: making sure there is **compliance for KYC and AML** processes, but also there is protection from privacy of the enterprise customers. So regulators care about both sides of the equation.

Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) is a group underneath the privacy team, PSE team at the Ethereum Foundation. It was established specifically to address questions about standardizations of privacy for institutions, which means that when we talk about privacy for institutions, we do talk about privacy with the compliance built in. So it’s privacy between the institutions but with the viewing keys very often for the compliance purposes.

And IPTF is already collaborating with multiple institutions around the world, asking them questions about what types of standards, use cases, real world solutions they need to handle, what type of answers to deliver and how to compose the cryptographical primitive of Ethereum to address those challenges of institutions. And there is a repository called IPTF Map; it shows the mapping between real world use cases and the existing solutions and cryptographical primitives on Ethereum."

As Tomasz mentioned, the IPTF Map serves as an open repository showing how existing Ethereum privacy solutions and cryptographic mechanisms can be applied to real-world institutional use cases across different jurisdictions. The repository lists technical patterns, vendor evaluations, and successful deployment examples, affirming Ethereum’s commitment to standardized, regulator-ready privacy architectures.