EthSystems

Today we're launching EthSystems. We build confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. Institutions want to use Ethereum, but one of the biggest problems is the lack of built-in, modular privacy tools. We were the Ethereum Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) for the past year. We had hundreds of conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks, and asset managers, shipping open source work the whole time. Wall Street has found crypto as an asset class, but not yet as commercial infrastructure. Institutions want to run real flows on Ethereum: stablecoins, tokenized assets, settlement. These are businesses with billions of dollars on the line, and no bank will operate in full public view. On a public ledger, confidentiality is the hard part: each party to a transaction should see what it has a right to see, and nothing more. We have a year of proof of work: private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private settlement across chains, the Ethereum Privacy Map, and more. All with protocol specs and security properties, at our website. We've spent a decade working on privacy in crypto. We know there's no silver bullet. Different use cases need different systems, each designed, specified, and hardened properly, and someone has to do that work. That's why EthSystems exists. We're an independent, for-profit company, backed by long-term Ethereum-aligned investors. This is a decade-long transition, and we aren't going anywhere. If you're an institution that wants to build on Ethereum, talk to us. We're hiring: BD in New York, protocol engineers, ops: join@ethsystems.org

Our Managing Director Kaushal (@liftlines) joins "Staking Economics and the Market for Block Space" panel on 13 November. As block space markets change where validator revenue comes from, staking yield and its risks shift too. Kaushal brings years of experience in finance and building on Ethereum. Looking forward to the exchange.

We're co-hosting a closed, invite-only session with @Nethermind in Singapore on 18 Nov, during SFF week. Looking forward to working through one question with them and a group of banks: how do you design compliant infrastructure for regulated finance on Ethereum? DMs are open.

At Hong Kong FinTech Week, @oskarth was on a panel with Euroclear, the BIS Innovation Hub, CAT Investigators and Elephants Inc about why institutional tokenization keeps getting stuck in pilots. A pilot can live with a public ledger. A portfolio can’t. And a tokenized bond can outlive the cryptography it was issued under, so issuers need to plan for quantum migration too. If you’re working on confidentiality or post-quantum migration for long-lived assets, we’d like to compare notes 📝 #HKFTW26

Each lunchbox that a dabbawala carries is routed by a code. The food stays hidden, but the package still says where it's going. On 4 Nov at ETHIndia, @_rymnc uses that to explain what privacy on Ethereum needs to get right. If you’re in Mumbai, come by!

Engineering Lead at EthSystems, @_rymnc will be presenting our open source work, as well as speaking about what we've learnt while working with institutions. Meet us at @EFDevcon and @ETHIndiaco!

Privacy is one of the main things standing between regulated institutions and Ethereum. On November 3, our CTO and co-founder @oskarth takes that on at the Devcon Hong Kong satellite venue. Our map of use cases and starter kits is open source. Come to the talk, then help us build it out.

Kaushal Vyas (@liftlines ), our Managing Director, joins the Building Ethereum panel at @LFDecentralized's Privacy for Financial Services Workshop in New York on Friday 23 October (12:00 to 12:45 pm ET), moderated by Johnna Powell of DTCC. He will bring our open map of institutional privacy use cases, each with the requirements institutions named, the approaches already ruled out, and starter kits for several of them. Looking forward to the conversation with fellow panelists, and to building on it together after 🤝🏻

Most of the conversation online is about payments from institutions to end users. In our conversations, we notice the harder problems may also sit between institutions: settlement, payment instructions, flows they can’t let competitors see. Our CTO and co-founder @oskarth covers how we approach that side in his @EthTaipei talk.

We published a writeup on Ethereum's upgrades, past and coming, read through what banks, custodians and other institutions need. Apart from the move to proof of stake, most institutions we talk to haven't followed the forks closely. Since 2021 the gas limit has doubled, and accounts and rollups can now do things they couldn't before. The next two forks have different focuses. Glamsterdam, due in December, is mostly about capacity: it prepares clients for a 200M gas limit and makes writing new storage more expensive. Hegotá, planned for 2027, is about control. Frame transactions give accounts more say over how they sign and pay fees, and FOCIL makes it harder for block producers to leave valid transactions out. We looked at each change through five needs: key control, capacity at a cost firms can plan for, speed to finality, neutral inclusion and confidentiality. Each section opens with a summary for six kinds of firms, from bank treasuries to staking providers, and a replay of mainnet transactions under the new gas rules shows where costs move. One of those needs the forks leave open. More below.

We're glad to welcome David (@david__nunez) to EthSystems as Protocol Engineer. David has spent more than 15 years in cryptography and information security, the last 8 in Ethereum and web3. Most recently he was CTO of NuCypher, leading TACo, an access control layer built on threshold cryptography, and he built the staking and governance smart contracts for Threshold Network. He holds a PhD in Cryptography from the University of Málaga, and his research has been published at CRYPTO, AsiaCCS and in the Journal of Cryptology. At EthSystems, David joins as Protocol Engineer. He'll work out which cryptographic building blocks hold up against institutional requirements, how they compose, and what they cost to run, and turn that into reference implementations institutions can test themselves. Welcome, David. Let's build confidential systems on Ethereum for institutions.

EthSystems will be at @token2049 . Our CEO Mo (@motypes) joins the Ethereum Ecosystem Summit hosted by @ethereumhkhub and @Sharplink on October 8, on tokenization, settlement and what institutions need from public rails. If you're working on privacy for regulated flows, DM us or email hello@ethsystems.org. Let's collaborate 🤝🏻