andyguzman.eth | privacy/acc

@ethereum future to strengthen privacy is bright! it's a core value and enabler for many others, and also a practical way to get adoption reachout if you haven't met @PrivacyEthereum yet and we can help in any way #eu/Y4s0UjEz_qU2YBfUIZr6_rxd0TiE96rp6Ot4lqgijcRws_z-Ai9HBaDByxy3S0GR" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">signal.me/#eu/Y4s0UjEz_q… & roadmap ethereum-magicians.org/t/pse-roadmap-…

Alice swaps privately on L1 tldr: Privacy protocol users today depend on broadcasters that can see, frontrun, and censor their transactions. In this thread we show how four future protocol upgrades can remove this dependency step by step. Native AA (EIP-8141) and 2D nonces let users self-submit with no off-chain infrastructure. Encrypted frame transactions hide swap parameters until after block ordering is committed. FOCIL guarantees inclusion as long as one honest includer can see the transaction pending in the public mempool. 👇🧵

@aerugoettinea @nicksvyaznoy @ethereumfndn @brave @torproject @NaomiAKlein @audreyt @mozilla @accessnow I think we have contact with over +100 privacy teams, lets chat @nicksvyaznoy

@nicksvyaznoy @ethereumfndn @brave @torproject @NaomiAKlein @audreyt @mozilla @accessnow We should be able to help with some of that. I would suggest talking to @AndyGuzmanEth first.

Dear, @ethereumfndn manager, Hope this message will find you 🖤 1. First-mover. We already announced Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress great lineup ahead of everyone else with people from @brave to @torproject: congress.web3privacy.info 2. Coordination challenges. But feeling lack of coordination with Foundation to make "mandate" impactful from communal side: • our previous contacts were restructured or even left; • nice @EFDevcon team is still at the beginning of programming journey & potential communal co-outreach; • there's uncertainety around event support (EPS stop supporting events like Congress, prioritizing academia or RFPs); • there's a lack of dialogue from @ethereumfndn side to support Cypherpunk Congress (from helping to convince @mer__edith from Signal to come to matching with digital rights orgs where you have good contacts); Would love to understand how to "talk to" foundation, allign & streamline impact towards same values & principles. Sincerely yours, Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress team.

I've been saying this: WASM + custom ISA is how we employ compilers to make general purpose zkVMs even faster. Now we can prove it.

This is an interest article because if Ethereum's DeFi attractiveness depends on external yield (extrinsic) then they become choke points and pressure points if instead they are internal yield (intrinsic) then we build a more resilient and censorship resistant ecosystem Props @CharlieStLouis

🏎️💨 Ethereum going fsssssttttttr single slot confirmation

The new EF mandate is not "playing to the base" We have to understand that the EF != Ethereum Ethereum should go all directions, find novel use case, invent the next DeFi, prediction markets, AI booms, high performance, PQ readiness & execution, increase gas, increase blobs, reduce latency But also the next ephemeral DAOs, hardened agent-agent flow, maximum self-soveregnty apps, full stack privacy, rethink the infra layer that powers Ethereum But the EF should focus on where others are not doing, or not incentivize to do it If we lose our cypherpunk values, this industry was captured and didn't accomplish what it was set to do

@antonttc @CharlieStLouis

Have been thinking about this all day. And honestly I still hate it. EF can talk about CROPS all day, but they are still selling ETH on Kraken. Not borrowing on Morpho, Aave, Sky, not even "dump" on DEXes. They let kraken, instead of their own VM, control their funds. How is that supporting open source or CR? There's no doubt that EF is building amazing technology with principles, but why do I feel like they just never, ever actually "use" their own chain? Am I the biggest moron to still believe in Ethereum?

@not_qz Good line

@AndyGuzmanEth I like to say Don’t try to out web2 a web2 company trying to be in web3

The think that Dankrad misses is that, *precisely* the cypherpunk values is what makes this whole industry values Take that away and you're competing with web2 infra Granted, execution NEEDS to happen with urgency and desire to make an impact. But not at the expense of scarifying what makes you relevant in the first place

@ec265 Yup and in adoption Both are needed but we need counterweights in the ecosystem

@AndyGuzmanEth We’ve seen this so many times The BD guys lose sight of what is actually important because they get caught up in product

The EF is not the ecosystem. As the EF shrinks in size and influence, it should focus where others are not Many teams should focus on broad adoption EF will focus on deep adoption The ecosystem is much larger and can expand through all the spectrum of tradeoffs The EF will be opinionated on where it will be contributing

Knowing true north. I want to be direct about this. The EF Mandate is a 180 from the direction the Foundation was heading under the recent leadership changes. A few months ago, the signal was clear -- lean into real-world adoption, support stablecoins, engage with institutions, help Ethereum win the race for relevance. Tomasz was brought in to operationalize that pivot. This document effectively undoes most of it. Some key quotes that make the shift explicit: "We are NOT Opportunists: We do not actively assist in adoption of Ethereum in ways that compromise trustlessness." "We are NOT a Casino: We do not encourage people to take life-changing, and possibly life-wrecking, amounts of risk by going into personal debt hyper-gambling." "Our priority, and the default path for decisions, in line with our mandate and the Only-EF Rule, is the CROPS-native approach." "We leave space within the Foundation for the incrementalist approach only in tightly bounded circumstances." "Right association also means we prefer to focus on individuals, teams, and projects that share our principles but operate in different domains, over those individuals, teams, and projects who are in crypto, but operate according to a very different set of standards." Translation: the EF will deprioritize supporting stablecoin infrastructure, institutional onboarding, RWA tokenization, and broadly anything where the path to adoption runs through centralized intermediaries -- which is essentially everything that has product-market fit on Ethereum today. This is a combination of d/acc philosophy and a broader leftward ideological pull within the EF. If you've been paying attention to the defense acceleration discourse, none of this is surprising. The framing is pure sanctuary tech -- Ethereum as digital refuge, not financial rails. I respect the intellectual coherence. But the thing that strikes me most is the ability to hold two contradictory views simultaneously. The entire platform -- the treasury that funds the EF, the ecosystem that gives these words weight, the network effects that make Ethereum worth writing a 38-page manifesto about -- was built on financialization, speculation, DeFi, stablecoins, and yes, things with centralized access points. Every application with real PMF on Ethereum today exists because someone made pragmatic compromises on the CROPS spectrum. It was built by people who are willing to make compromises and see the world as it is, bringing product and people to Ethereum. The very people that this mandate is trying to alienate. I will end with this quote from Lincoln: "A compass will point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp -- what's the use of knowing true north?" CROPS is true north. Nobody disputes that. The question was never the destination -- it was always whether you can get there without engaging the world as it actually is.

@BobSummerwill There we agree x.com/AndyGuzmanEth/…

Kinda, but also: "The only part I am unhappy about is where the EF believes that it can move slowly. The world is not moving slowly. Defense is not about staying in place but about hectic preparation without losing a single second when the threat is imminent."- Tomasz x.com/tkstanczak/sta…

I am sad to say that is my take as well, Dankrad. Back to the subtraction and poetry. It's all very well intentioned, but does not speak to a sense of urgency or situational awareness. 2025 was by far the best year in EF history for leadership under Tomasz. Now I don't know.

The only real risk is we stop acting with urgency x.com/AndyGuzmanEth/…

@nicnode for sure don't ostracise, but EF is not Ethereum, and EF cna be opinionated whereas Ethereum is diverse enough that good companies will pursue all types of orgs

@AndyGuzmanEth imo the approach should be to trojan horse our values, not ostracise organisations who don't have those values (yet)

@tkstanczak @0xValentinesXBT @DeanEigenmann Agreed w/ all > The only part I am unhappy about is where the EF believes that it can move slowly. The world is not moving slowly.

I am working on agentic systems now, and having access to truly private and permissionless compute, along with reliable independent infrastructure like Ethereum, will be very important. My message was that this is available for institutions, and that sooner or later large organizations will not have much choice and will need to adopt Ethereum’s guarantees to stay competitive. That is also where the store of value comes from. It is important to keep delivering censorship-resistant, privacy-oriented, secure, open-source solutions. The only part I am unhappy about is where the EF believes that it can move slowly. The world is not moving slowly. Defense is not about staying in place but about hectic preparation without losing a single second when the threat is imminent.

there is no clearer sign that @tkstanczak was ousted by the old guard at the EF for bringing in the necessary shakeup EF decided to double down and stay dumb af

This is the new EF Mandate. For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making. Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total. The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to. There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role. At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack. We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum. At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing. But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time. This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies. Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one. I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.

@LashaAntadze almost as if reality was more complicated that just writing an unstoppable smart contract :)

@LashaAntadze wasn't aware, thanks!

Let me explain it in simple terms. Since 2024, when we first launched #freedomtool with the Russian opposition, we have been boiling in hot water on the ground to solve each issue and ensure every vote of dissent was secure (there were 40,000 participants). That might look small, but it was the largest protest gathering in Russia since 2021. There are two major caveats when working with passports. First, you need to ensure uniqueness so that 1 vote = 1 passport. For this you have three options: 1. Passport support (active authentication), where you can sign and get a nullifier directly from the document. But since the 2010s, major countries have abandoned support for that standard and it won’t work at scale. 2. An external signer: you can use a TEE, OPRF, secure server, whatever everyone is discussing. It adds an additional secret, and voila, it works. This is the architecture we used for the Russian use case. 3. A third way, which in my opinion is the purest but requires network effect: so-called “shielded privacy of passport hashes,” where you junk up all the passport hashes in an on-chain registry and reuse them for different use cases, granting everyone plausible deniability. I call this pure because there is zero dependency on any vendor. You get a system like blockchain was for money. one that works outside anyone’s control and no one can switch off. When you touch reality, we forget that MPC networks halt operations for certain jurisdictions on governmental notice, that states control bandwidth and can block your traffic, and that wherever you don’t face hostility, participation isn’t a crime and you don’t need these hard setups. That’s the reality check most builders lack with voting tools. It’s not just an engineering question, it’s a political one. When you hit the ground, you learn it on your skin and the skin of others. The second problem; governments issuing fake passports can be solved in two ways: First, a similarity proof of the passport photo and the person holding a phone (we’ve built that with ZKML Bionetta). Or, the second and more elegant one: a ZK graph, where you build participation commitments over time. That can become a much more valuable foundation to reimagine digital democracy. (We’ve built that too with ERC7812) So thank you all for your contributions, but it’s still odd that after all these years we’re discussing the same topics, yet no one asks the real question: what are the true barriers to bringing these tools to the masses, and under what circumstances they actually work?