Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem Report

This Research will cover comprehensive & up to date report on the state of privacy in Ethereum.

Details

Ethereum ecosystem lacks detailed & actual report covering all the projects contributing to Ethereum privacy stack. This creates missunderstanding & shallow view on the state of privacy in Ethereum - when people can name several hyped projects, but can’t see a bigger “towards the full-stack privacy” picture.

Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem will structure activities around privacy covering:

project diversity: featuring not just well-known projects like Aztec, but newcomers like Nocturne
dev-friendly: analyze privacy-centric hackathons from ETHRome to ETHBerlin (events, projects)
innovation: emerging concepts from stealth-addresses to EIP-7503
tech breakdown: specify underliying tech/approaches from ZK to PP
funding: provide approach to privacy funding in Ethereum (sources from Gitcoin to VCs; practical examples from 2023)
challenges: map areas to be tackled by the next generation of devs on the way to Vitalik’s cypherphunk vision (like Nocturne’s privacy policy)

Important purpose:

create privacy-centric vocabulary that will help builders, researchers, startupers speak common language & empower existing privacy stack.
visualise complex Privacy Ecosystem in infographics

Homework

Privacy services DB. We have the majority of the Ethereum-related projects in our database (need to actualize the data).
Extensive Privacy project profile. Currently we are building platform that will feature detailed privacy project profile from on-chain data to funding. It will be used a source of data inputs to the research.
Hackathon use-cases DB

Milestones

1. Preliminary research

Purpose: assemble raw market data (authonomously & through one-on-one interviews with experts) + create separate Ethereum-centric DD.md based on our Privacy projects DB: Ethereum Privacy DB repo

Result	Description
Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem DB on Git	Separate MD for external collaborators to contribute with PRs covering projects, hackathon solions, labs, DAOs, coins, papers etc

EIPs database
Cryptography ePrint archive db
privacy-centric projects via hackathons
Funding in Ethereum: Gitcoin

2. Deep research

Purpose: collect detailed data on every project from the links to the product-readiness.

Active research, collaboration with PSE team, one-on-one interviews from Railgun_ to Aztec, feedback loop from Ethereum protocol team to ETH pro-privacy hackathons teams.

Tasks

Result	Description
Data aggregation	public data
Interviewing	20 one-on-one interviews
Community engagement	Web3privacy community engagement: public call to contribution, the latest data sharing etc

3. Design, copy & publishing

Result	Description
Tables, Infographics	Ecosystem map design (general map + caregories)
Copy	Final copy
Publishing	Mirror article + Git repo (DB + PDF-report) + X