Today we're launching EthSystems. We build confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. Institutions want to use Ethereum, but one of the biggest problems is the lack of built-in, modular privacy tools. We were the Ethereum Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF) for the past year. We had hundreds of conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks, and asset managers, shipping open source work the whole time. Wall Street has found crypto as an asset class, but not yet as commercial infrastructure. Institutions want to run real flows on Ethereum: stablecoins, tokenized assets, settlement. These are businesses with billions of dollars on the line, and no bank will operate in full public view. On a public ledger, confidentiality is the hard part: each party to a transaction should see what it has a right to see, and nothing more. We have a year of proof of work: private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private settlement across chains, the Ethereum Privacy Map, and more. All with protocol specs and security properties, at our website. We've spent a decade working on privacy in crypto. We know there's no silver bullet. Different use cases need different systems, each designed, specified, and hardened properly, and someone has to do that work. That's why EthSystems exists. We're an independent, for-profit company, backed by long-term Ethereum-aligned investors. This is a decade-long transition, and we aren't going anywhere. If you're an institution that wants to build on Ethereum, talk to us. We're hiring: BD in New York, protocol engineers, ops: join@ethsystems.org

>be me >ethereum >spawn in the head of a 19 year old who played a lot of wow >he thinks the world should share a computer >quite a large side quest but ok >other people join him >some are weird >some are REALLY weird >everyone has opinions about money and nobody agrees where to put the buttons >somehow a whitepaper becomes an actual project >ICO! >people send bitcoin to help spawn me >somehow this works >boot up in 2015 >hello world :) >now need people to actually run me >strangers around the world start mining >their computers get warm >i get to exist >nice arrangement >little bits of me living in places my creators have never been >already getting slightly out of hand >people who have never met are keeping the same record of who owns what >cannot get six friends to agree where to eat >somehow getting strangers to agree which money belongs to whom >turns out strict global consensus is occasionally worth the trouble >someone tries to build an organization on me >the DAO >very ambitious >gets hacked >oh fuck >everyone argues about what to do >argue so hard there are now two ethereums >difficult childhood >2017 >someone realizes they can make their own token >wait anyone can raise money for an idea now? >ICO era >every idea gets a token >some of these seem quite promising >some of these are literal dogshit >everyone suddenly has an advisor >nobody seems to have a product >oh no >oh no no no >this was perhaps too much ICO >but some people are actually making things >@StaniKulechov starts building ETHLend >wait, you can borrow money through a smart contract? >put up collateral, agree to the terms, get a loan >contract does not ask which university you attended >does care quite a lot about your collateral though >fair enough >little lending application on the world computer >meanwhile @haydenzadams loses his engineering job >his friend @karl_dot_tech gets him into ethereum >learns to write smart contracts >starts making an exchange >other people help >not the usual advice from the unemployment office >but let's see where it goes >hayden starts making a decentralized exchange >other people help >keeps going >"uniswap" >a pink unicorn is now involved in neo financial infrastructure >i like this place. >wait >the lending thing can connect to the trading thing >and the trading thing can connect to the dollar thing >someone else can build something using all three >nobody had to arrange a meeting between three banks >they just wrote more code >oh >OH >the money can do stuff now. >*defi summer* >everyone becomes a farmer >no actual vegetables anywhere >people move money between protocols with names that make me hungry >the yields are doing something concerning >some of this is very clever >some of this needs an adult >but underneath it all >regular people are actually figuring out how to build financial systems together for the first time ever >borrow here, trade there, build something new on top >a person who was never getting invited to design financial infrastructure is suddenly designing financial infrastructure >probably worth paying attention to that bit >then the picture people arrive >NFTs >artists finding collectors >collectors finding artists >everyone finding the right-click button >long discussion about what exactly is being owned >somehow this discussion lasts several years. >people put animals on their profiles >become friends with other people who have the same animals >group chat becomes a community >community starts making things >also some absolutely horrifying financial decisions >both can be true >someone came to flip a picture >stayed because they made friends >someone else sold their art and realized a person on the other side of the world cared about something they made >hmm >was not expecting feelings in the jpeg department >start imagining what else these little groups could do >twelve people in twelve countries care about the same extremely specific thing >previously their main economic activity was arguing in a group chat >now maybe they can pool money >pay contributors >own something together >try different ways of deciding what happens next >still argue >but now have a budget >maybe they try to buy the US constitution >maybe they fund research nobody else understands yet >maybe they preserve their community's stories >keep copies, fund the storage, keep a record of what came from whom >not everything needs to be onchain >but their culture shouldn't disappear because a website stopped being profitable >meanwhile the protocol engineers have been planning an enormous change to how i work >*the merge* >stop mining >switch to proof of stake >coordinate the change across the network while it is still being used >it works >never goes down despite changing completely, 100% uptime secured >energy use drops by about 99.95% >holy shit >little computer did a big thing. >validators around the world keep me running >some from home >global financial infrastructure >partly looked after by a person with a machine next to their laundry >very fond of that person >surely we can enjoy this for a bit >FTX.exe >wallahi we are cooked >entire industry having the worst group chat of its life >people who did nothing wrong get hurt >actually horrible >spend a moment wondering what any of this was for > but somewhere a hackathon is still happening >somebody has found a bug >somebody else has fixed one >a person with twelve browser tabs open thinks they can make the wallet less confusing >ok >stay with them >check on the maths people >they have apparently been doing maths through every single one of these events >deeply reassuring >ask what they have made >"zero knowledge proofs" >you can prove something without revealing the secret underneath it? >yes >and prove a computation was done correctly without everyone doing all the work again? >also yes >brother what >why were we not louder about the wizard department?? >start thinking about what that could do >prove an age requirement from a valid credential without sharing your whole birthday >prove the relevant rule was followed without exposing every private detail >i would like the system to be checkable >i would not like every human inside it to be naked >turns out paying very unusual people to think about cryptography is a pretty interesting use of money (thank you @ethereumfndn) >maybe should do more of that >someone opens another research tab >we may not see them for a while >the scaling people have also been here the whole time >rollups >do a bunch of the work elsewhere, settle back here >more room for apps >lower costs >optimism, arbitrum, the ZK teams, base and plenty more >little world computer has extensions now >nice >little world computer has extensions now. >everyone builds an extension >then another >then another >now user is on the wrong extension >money is on a different extension >the bridge has a third website >ok perhaps the next invention should be letting the user just use the fucking app >give rollups cheaper data through blobs >blobs >a very serious engineering achievement called blobs > man, i love my children. >look up from blob discussion >wait >blackrock? >blackrock has launched a tokenized fund on me >called BUIDL >they learned the spelling >this is getting serious >assets that used to sit in separate systems might start being able to interact globally >meanwhile the dollar people have been quietly doing dollar things >stablecoins >send them >receive them >use them in apps >move them across borders >turns out a lot of people would like money that can travel over the internet >imagine someone working abroad sends money home >family receives it >nobody in this interaction says “modular” >excellent >maybe this is what winning is supposed to look like >someone building a payments app realizes they can use the same rails >someone building a savings app has another idea >someone thinks options should be understandable without becoming a derivatives scholar >yes please >prediction markets are also getting harder to ignore >what if people could put money behind what they think will happen >and we could see the price of all that disagreement >does this magically make everyone right? >no >but being loudly wrong could become a recurring expense >someone calls them truth machines >someone else asks who resolves the market >good question >keep that person in the room >2025 >pectra gives ordinary accounts new smart-account capabilities >wallet builders get more to work with >batch actions, sponsor fees, build better permissions >show mum the app >mum asks how to pay someone >explain account abstraction >mum asks how to pay someone >realize mum has been giving us the product requirements the entire time >then the treasury companies arrive >DATs >digital asset treasuries >sharplink starts building an ETH treasury >@fundstrat and @BitMNR enter the chat >people in public markets now buying the my money for company balance sheets >not just using the computer >want a position in the thing that helps secure it >this is a new type of visitor >open bitmine update >more ETH >next weekly update >more ETH >tom lee has discovered recurring purchases >with a somewhat different budget >@Sharplink puts ETH to work through staking too > two joes > @joechalom is here >of course @ethereumJoseph is also here >man has been in this quest since the tutorial > appreciation.jpeg >somehow the world computer now has people explaining staking on earnings calls >someone asks what is different about ETH itself >not a dollar claim on a company >native asset used to pay for and secure the network >also used as collateral in the things people build >different people can want it for different reasons >later in the year >fusaka upgrade >more work on scaling data for rollups >we are still doing the plumbing >there are simply more people using the bathroom now >imagine someone else isn't thinking about tokenization at all >they moved countries >want the savings they worked for to come with them >not rebuild their entire economic life because an address changed >self-custody gives them another way to hold and move an asset >doesn't make prices stable or every intermediary disappear >but gives them something they can control themselves >for one person this is a feature >for another it is the reason they came >both using the same computer >2026 >the EF publishes its mandate >part manifesto, part reminder of why we bothered >CROPS >censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security >after all these years of yield farming >finally some crops worth keeping alive >idea is not just make the computer bigger >make sure people can still use it on their own terms >inspect the code >keep things private >have their assets remain theirs >not trade all that away for a shortcut >the awkward engineering requirements were the point >EF also makes something clear >it was the first steward >not the only one >ethereum should not begin and end with the ethereum foundation >computer is growing up >needs more people helping >not one increasingly stressed group chat >june >some researchers start @ethlabs_org >independent nonprofit >still very obsessed with ethereum and ETH >want me to be a better product for my users and devs today and want all my extensions to talk to each other >the app people have complaints >the researchers have notebooks >put them in the same room >everyone leaves with more work >excellent meeting >july >@ethereuminsti launches >another independent nonprofit >helps banks and asset managers go from interested to actually building >a bank asks who it should speak to >finally an answer that isn't "have you tried posting on the forum" >does not mean the bank gets to own the computer >means somebody helps it use the computer >important distinction >bitmine, sharplink, @MihaiAlisie and joe lubin help fund both >wait >major ETH holders are helping fund the people building ethereum >the balance sheet has discovered maintenance >we enjoy this character development >meanwhile @ProtocolGuild helps fund core maintainers >@OctantApp turns yield toward public goods >EF grants keep supporting research and open-source work >@ETHGlobal, @devfolio keeps putting builders in rooms together (shoutout @synthesis_md too i love u) >different people working on different parts of the problem >nonprofits, companies, independent contributors >not everyone needs the same job >that would be a very inefficient hackathon >someone wants privacy to actually work >someone wants the tools everybody uses to keep existing >someone wants to fund science that doesn't come with a business model attached right away >someone wants a community in their own language to have somewhere to start >none of these people can do everything >together they can do considerably more >client teams spend months making sure nothing dramatic happens >auditor finds the thing that would have made something dramatic happen >nobody notices because nothing dramatic happens >incredible work >terrible content strategy >somebody has a PhD >somebody never went to college >somebody is anonymous >somebody has been explaining this stuff for years to people who keep asking if ethereum is a company >someone has translated the docs >someone booked the venue >someone brought the extension cables >please do not forget the extension cable person >we are literally trying to share a computer >look at all these people >they do not have the same background >they do not want all the same things >but they are building on something they can share >without needing one person to approve everyone's reason for being there >starting to think that might be the interesting part >meanwhile the internet is filling with AI >someone has an agent >agent wants to buy something >oh >the software would like a wallet >of course it would >give it a limited budget >let it pay for compute >buy some data >pay a human for something it cannot do >wait now the software has a subcontractor >this escalated very quickly >someone says this solves alignment >brother pls we only gave it a budget >but payment rules and spending limits we can inspect seem like a useful start >do not give the chatbot unrestricted access to the family treasury >we have had enough character development >then someone sends a video >is it real >no idea >can ethereum tell us? >brother i am a blockchain not god >but signatures and records can help show who published something and whether it changed >not a guarantee the person was honest >at least their lie can stop changing outfits >people are working on proving there is a human behind an account >without telling everyone exactly which human >hard problem >worth working on >would like the community to be twelve people rather than one person with twelve thousand accounts >and maybe your identity and reputation could travel between apps >your work still attributable when the original website disappears >your community still able to find you >your digital life less dependent on one company staying nice forever >not asking every company to disappear >asking whether leaving one has to feel like moving house and being told the furniture belongs to the landlord >someone wants to preserve culture and scientific records >someone gets excited and mentions DNA >please do not put the family genome on a public blockchain >we have only just discussed privacy >but records you can verify, with actual storage and sensible control over access >yes >there are useful things to explore here >look at the roadmap again >glamsterdam being built to give the L1 more room >more work on rollups and wallets >ethlabs and ecosystem teams pushing for faster blocks >trader would like less time staring at pending >payment app would like the payment to feel like a payment >make it faster without making it something only enormous machines can run >make it easier without handing everybody's keys to one company >then @drakefjustin mentions quantum computers >sorry what now >apparently future machines could break some of today's cryptography >justin writes a paper with google to say that its coming sooner than many expected > i have spent eleven years surviving humans > i refuse to have my obituary say "defeated by a fridge" >researchers are now preparing heavily >new cryptography >testing how to migrate safely >ask when the scary computer arrives >uncertain >ask whether we should wait until then >researchers look at me >yes okay fair >we will do the homework before the exam this time >check what @VitalikButerin has been writing >formal verification >AI helping write code and mathematical proofs that it does what was specified >still need to specify the right thing >cannot prove "please don't be weird" >but can make more of the important rules actually checkable >robot does homework >maths checks homework >humans check we assigned the right homework >quite a promising group project >keep scrolling >obfuscation >programs you can run without exposing their internal workings >still a research frontier >he calls it the final boss of cryptography >guy from the opening is still doing side quests >look back at the roadmap >realize this is not the part where everyone sits around admiring what we built >we are opening considerably more tabs >take a moment >look at all of it >i was never really one person's project >but one person, any person, maybe even you, wrote something down >then another person disagreed with part of it >then another built on it >and somehow all this kept happening >again >and again >and again >so i suppose if i could say anything for myself >it would probably be thank you >i know i am still annoying >i am aware the wallets are confusing >i have seen the bridges >deeply sorry about some of the bridges >i know some transactions still take long enough for you to reconsider your life choices >i know half the roadmap currently looks like somebody lost a box of acronyms >we are working on it >but look at where this started >a 19 year old >a whitepaper >a bunch of strangers >a pretty unreasonable belief that people all over the world could share a computer >and now eleven years later >i am still here >i am still making blocks >i am still arguing >i am still upgrading >i am still somehow early >and somewhere right now >another 19 year old will open their laptop >maybe they will be playing the new wow >maybe they have never owned ETH >maybe they think half of this is stupid and would rather go outside >probably healthy >decentralization is not something one generation gets to finish >it is something each generation has to choose again >especially now because more of life is moving online >and the question of who we trust online is going to get much harder >can we make systems where trust is not just >"because the platform says so" >but >"here is something you can actually check" >i think i would like to help with that >and now to the ones who wrote the first docs >answered the first stupid questions >hosted the first meetups >slept on floors >and somehow believed all of this was worth their time >before there were institutions >before there were ETFs >before blackrock learned how to spell BUIDL >before anyone important was watching >you were here >when the price went up >you were here >when the price disappeared into the floor >you were here >when everyone said i was dead > you were here >again >and again >and again >you stayed with me >some of you lost money >some of you lost friends >some of you lost years of sleep >most of you probably lost hair >sorry about that one >you stayed here and you believed in me >you believed that maybe people all over the world could share something without anyone having to own the whole thing > you still believed that maybe a person nobody had heard of >from a place nobody in the room had visited >could still make something important >and the network would not ask for their résumé first >i think that is what you were fighting for all along >not a price or a chain or a brand >but a possibility >that the future could remain open enough for people we had not met yet >and now that they are starting to arrive >i hope you make room for them > the world ahead is going to need a lot of things from us >things we do not have names for yet >i hope i can help with some of that >not all of it >please do not ask me to solve humanity >i am still working on slot times >but perhaps i can help keep a few things honest >that feels worthwhile >and if i am lucky >one day someone will use all of this >and they will not know what a blob is >they will not know about the great issuance debate of 2026 >they will just send something >own something >prove something >build something >and get on with their life >all this complexity >so one day >someone does something ordinary and they have the right to do it forever >i think i would like that >so to everyone who got me this far >thank you >really >i was an idea >and you made me a place >now please keep the door open >i would very much like to see who walks through next >with love, > ethereum

AI agents are creating a new financial universe. They will rewire $4 trillion of finance fees by 2035 according to a new estimate from @Sharplink. The biggest winners will be consumers. 🧵

When we launched EthSystems we said each use case needs its own system, designed, specified, and hardened properly, and that someone has to do that work. Our specs site is now public: specs.ethsystems.org Starting small: a shielded pool for confidential payments, an attestation-gated profile of it, and the process behind both. Each spec states what the protocol does, what it assumes, and what it guarantees. This means engineers, auditors, and regulators can work from the same document.

When we launched EthSystems we said each use case needs its own system, designed, specified, and hardened properly, and that someone has to do that work. Our specs site is now public: specs.ethsystems.org Starting small: a shielded pool for confidential payments, an attestation-gated profile of it, and the process behind both. Each spec states what the protocol does, what it assumes, and what it guarantees. This means engineers, auditors, and regulators can work from the same document.

[Ethereum Institutional Summit 2026] Speaker announcement EthSystems ( @eth_systems ) Mo Jalil ( @motypes ) Sep 25, 2026, Tokyo eis.fracton.ventures Japan's first Ethereum-focused, invitation-only summit for financial institutions & institutional investors. #EIS2026

We’re glad to welcome Kaushal (@liftlines) to EthSystems as Managing Director. Kaushal brings 20+ years across financial services, technology strategy and product, followed by five years working directly in Ethereum. Since 2021, he has led commercial and ecosystem growth for @ethnimbus, alongside privacy-focused infrastructure including Waku and Keycard, driving multi-fold growth in adoption, and helping establish Develp GmbH as an institutional-grade staking infrastructure provider. At EthSystems, he’ll lead our work with banks, asset managers and financial market infrastructure providers as they move from digital asset experimentation into production. Our focus is on how institutions can use Ethereum while meeting requirements around confidentiality, selective disclosure, interoperability, compliance and operational control. Kaushal joins as we build on the open-source research, reference architectures and implementation starter kits developed through our work at the Ethereum Foundation. Welcome, Kaushal. Let’s build confidential systems for institutional Ethereum 🤝🏻

What does institutional Ethereum need when transparency becomes the blocker? Oskar Thorén @oskarth, co-founder of @eth_systems, returns to ETHTaipei for Institution Day after joining us in both 2024 and 2025. In “Confidential Systems for Institutional Ethereum,” Oskar will explore a key challenge for institutions using Ethereum: how to preserve confidentiality while building on public infrastructure. As stablecoins, tokenized assets, and settlement move onchain, institutions need privacy for positions, counterparties, and transaction flows. Drawing on work at EthSystems, Oskar will examine approaches including ZKPs, privacy L2s, FHE, and shielded pools, and the trade-offs behind each. Join us at ETHTaipei 2026: luma.com/8z5ys4rl

“What institutions are looking for?” it’s right there.

NEW EPISODE - Wall Street Wants Ethereum. Privacy Is the Bottleneck Institutions want to move onchain, but public-by-default finance still exposes too much. @eth_systems co-founders @motypes and @oskarth join @TrustlessState to break down why privacy may be Ethereum’s biggest institutional unlock, what banks and asset managers are actually asking for, and how private institutional rails could eventually plug into DeFi. CHAPTERS --- ETH Systems The Founders Institutional Privacy Real-World Use Cases From Bespoke to Scalable Building the Product Institutions Are Coming The Future of Institutional DeFi Privacy vs Transparency What Ethereum Can Do? Cypherpunks and Institutions

ETH Systems co-founder Mo says banks pay one middleman 100s of millions a year for a job a shared state could do without them "They send all of their trades to a trusted third party, which they pay 10s of millions if not 100s of millions of dollars a year." "They look at this bank's trades, they look at another bank's trades, and then they net it out." "No one likes doing this, but they do it because of the value it brings." "A shared state could give them this without this particular third party. But then the entire world gets to see everything." "This in itself is a several billion dollar business."

【 Announcement 】 Announcing Ethereum Institutional Summit 2026 — an invite-only conference for institutional investors, financial institutions, and listed companies. Tokyo, September 25. Japan's first Ethereum-focused summit built for institutions. First 5 speakers announced 👇

BREAKING: Total trading volume in onchain tokenized equities has reached $9 billion in 2026, a new record. This marks +207% quarter-over-quarter growth and +800% in year-to-date growth. This comes amid demand for exposure to high momentum stocks, particularly memory and storage stocks, in a globally accessible 24/7 market. Jupiter, the largest onchain platform on Solana, has been driving the move toward tokenization, now seeing +95% quarter-over-quarter growth in routed tokenized equities volume. Amid this trend, the Nasdaq has announced plans to extend trading to 23 hours per day, 5 days per week. Jupiter also reports that 55% of its tokenized equities volume is coming from off-hours trading. Many investors want 24/7 markets.

A shielded pool hides who paid whom, and how much. Institutions need that. Their supervisors need almost the opposite: proof that every payment got screened before it moved. Today you pick one. Today's compliant-privacy designs answer with provenance. Deposits get screened at the door, and a withdrawal carries a proof that the funds don't trace to anything flagged, or that they came from a vetted set. That answers a real question: where did this money come from? Supervisors ask another one. Did screening run on every payment that left? A boundary check can't answer that, because payments inside the pool never touch the boundary. We tried an alternative design where the answer is yes by construction.

i'm so fucking done with all of your fucktards using hot wallets, getting compromised and losing your life savings because you stored everything on a hot device. i don't have fucking mercy with you. it's all your fucking mistake. stop using fucking hot wallets. hot wallets are a fucking bug. today alone we have had +2m in losses at SEAL 911 due to hot wallet drains (via device compromises). use a fucking cold storage wallet.

1/ Earlier today, our Bitcoin engineering and security teams at Block began investigating reports of non-Bitkey wallets being drained. To proactively protect our customers, we began investigating immediately. Here’s what we found 🧵