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
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Privacy of “what” — Using Private Information Retrieval (PIR) to protect what Ethereum users are reading from RPC servers. We are currently specc’ing multiple schemes (one in-house and others from recent literature) towards a sharded design aiming to cover all Ethereum data — hot state and cold archival state.
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Privacy of “who” — Through TorJS, which at its core uses Arti adapted to WASM, we ensure servers cannot learn who is making the request (network-level anonymization).
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Infra — Productionizing tooling to boost privacy work: a binary-trie-enabled EL client as the source of data for our PIR work — and as a side benefit — a resource for wallets and light clients to begin migrating to binary tries ahead of the protocol’s upgrade. We also run a Snowflake instance to bridge from browser context to Tor (for development and testing purposes only).
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Acceleration — Ideas we lack the bandwidth to pursue but want to see realized; we accelerate them through targeted grants.