Introducing Private Reads

We are a team within the Ethereum Foundation focused on making privacy-preserving reads of Ethereum data practical and accessible.

The Problem

When you query Ethereum data from a remote server — checking your balance, looking up a transaction, reading contract state — your access patterns leak information. Servers learn which accounts you monitor, which tokens you hold, and how your on-chain and off-chain identities correlate.

This leakage undermines other privacy measures (like shielding) and exposes users to frontrunning, MEV extraction, and identity correlation.

Focus

We tackle privacy along two axes:

1. Privacy of “what” — Using Private Information Retrieval (PIR), we ensure servers cannot learn what data clients are reading. We are currently pursuing a sharded design aiming to blanket the entire Ethereum data — hot state and cold archival state.

2. Privacy of “who” — Through TorJS and network-level anonymization, we ensure servers cannot learn who is making the request.