Building confidential systems for institutional Ethereum

Ethereum
Joined September 2025
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: [email protected]
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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.
Oskar Thorén (@oskarth), @eth_systems co-founder, says: "privacy is really the main blocker now, especially when it comes to moving onto public blockchains like Ethereum" His team spoke to hundreds of institutions. On a public ledger, rivals see what auditors see. @EthTaipei
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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.
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That need is confidentiality. The forks give institutions more control over their keys, more room in each block and a better chance that a waiting public transaction gets included. Keeping transactions private isn't their focus, and it's where we spend our time. The full writeup, with a cheatsheet comparing both forks for each kind of firm: ethsystems.org/writeups/ethe…
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Intercompany cash on a public chain publishes the group’s structure, and that includes who funds whom, how much, how often. Competitors can read it even before your annual report. Our private payments starter kit tests the reverse: hidden on chain, visible to treasury, open to a tax authority on request. There are still two gaps remain, see threads for more 👇🏻
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1) Disclosure covers an entity’s whole history, not one transfer 2) Amounts still show where cash enters or leaves the pool If you have a design or a requirement for either, add it here. Use case: ethsystems.org/use-cases/ Starter kit: github.com/ethsystems/pocs/t…
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Our September community update starts with the specs behind our shielded pools, and it’s now public. How our pools work was defined by the code until now. The specs write it down as a standard anyone can implement or audit against, released under CC0, and our own proof of concept now conforms to them. Also this month: two new building blocks, two people joining the team, four talks, and more collaborations with @lfdecentralized and @0xMiden.
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13/ @0xMiden was also among the teams that supported our launch, and in September we signed an MOU with them on confidential infrastructure for institutions on Ethereum. xitter.cf/eth_systems/status/209…
Institutional privacy has to work in the real world: confidentiality, auditability, and policy controls all need to fit together. Excited to work with @0xMiden to explore what that looks like across payments, settlement, stablecoins, and tokenized assets on Ethereum. Looking forward to what we build together 🤝🏻
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14/ September in one line: public specs for our shielded pools, two building blocks, a spec-conformant proof of concept, a corrected and expanded map, two new team members, four talks, LF Decentralized Trust, and an MOU with Miden. The Ethereum Privacy Map is what we work from, and it takes pull requests. Six use cases on it still have no approach behind them: private oracles, registry, supply chain, messaging, procurement and read. If one of those is your area, CONTRIBUTING.md shows how to start. If you're inside an institution, use it. github.com/ethsystems/map
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