IPTF

Wrapped the Mapping Institutional Privacy session and the Privacy Tools open forum at the @lfdecentralized workshop in London today. Solid conversations with FIs and builders on what Ethereum infrastructure needs to deliver for institutional privacy. Thanks to the organizers, @Howden, all speakers & participants for the candid conversations. Really productive day.

All CC0, public domain. The source: github.com/ethereum/iptf-…

Under the hood: pattern and approach schema v2 with structured CROPS and post-quantum analysis on every pattern, and a content QA audit.

IPTF Map v0.4.0 is out. This release extends institutional privacy beyond financial institutions to resilience use cases for the public sector, NGOs, and civil society: petitions, humanitarian disbursement, and identity continuity. 🧵

But PIR only solves the known-index fetch. Two problems don't reduce to that: - Finding a neighbor leaf in a nullifier tree - Finding your notes in a crowd of ciphertexts Both are private selection. That's the harder problem left. Writeup: iptf.ethereum.org/blog/exploring…

2. Private reads: before each spend, a wallet fetches an authentication path from the commitment tree. That fetch leaks which note you're about to spend. PIR (Private Information Retrieval) lets the wallet fetch a known row without the server learning which row was requested.

Shielding is the most practical primitive to achieve private transactions on Ethereum. Today's architectures come with a lot of trade-offs. New IPTF writeup: Exploring Hardened Shielded Pools. An extension to our working pool that tackles on-chain state growth and private reads.

Excited to see @motypes speaking at the Institutional and Policy Forum in Berlin. Institutional adoption of Ethereum depends on more than infrastructure. It requires privacy, compliance, policy engagement, and credible real-world use cases. This is exactly the work IPTF is focused on: helping institutions understand how privacy-preserving Ethereum infrastructure can support capital markets, payments, identity, and public-sector systems. See you in Berlin.

The map is open source and open to contributions. If your privacy work belongs in this knowledge base, open a PR. Links in the reply below.

Every approach is evaluated under CROPS: Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, and Security. Institution-to-institution and institution-to-user power dynamics are each modeled, with per-persona summaries for business, technical, and legal functions.

iptf [dot] ethereum [dot] org is live with a major update! A comprehensive, navigable guide to privacy on Ethereum: for institutions deploying private infrastructure, and for the end users protected by it.

A two-week dispute window lets anyone challenge invalid records via KZG openings. What lands on-chain: petition outcome and vote tally per eligibility group. No signer identity. No queryable roster. Eligibility uses anonymous group membership proofs, matching the same interface of our resilient identity proof of concept. Writeup: iptf.ethereum.org/resilient-civi…

Two mechanisms carry the design. Forward-secure ratchet: each signer advances a local key state that cannot regress. Seed material is overwritten after each slot. A compromised device cannot produce prior signatures. Proofs are batched and published as EIP-4844 blobs.

Public petition signer lists expose signers to retaliation. In high-stakes contexts, knowing who signed can be dangerous. New IPTF writeup: Resilient Civic Participation. Prove a petition reached quorum without ever publishing who signed. Third and final post in our resilience series.

Stack: @NoirLang circuits, Solidity/Foundry contracts, smartcards (@Keycard_). Transport: Briar (BLE) / Meshtastic (LoRa) / Reticulum. On-chain: aggregates and nullifiers only. Writeup: iptf.ethereum.org/resilient-disb… Code: github.com/ethereum/iptf-…

Each recipient's smartcard holds a private key that never leaves the device. To claim, the card signs a one-time voucher offline. A relay takes the signed voucher, generates a ZK proof, and submits it through a mesh network. The contract pays to a new address per claim. Result: enrollment, claim, and cash-out are unlinkable by design.

New writeup: Resilient Disbursement Rails. Aid organizations' beneficiary databases are an operational security risk. IPTF's PoC shows how to run a disbursement program where no participant, at any step, holds a complete list of recipients.