Feedback from: Agata Ferreira, Assistant Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology
A new consensus is emerging in the Web 3 world. For years, privacy was considered a compliance issue, a liability for developers and, at best, a niche concern. It is now becoming clear that privacy is what digital freedom is built on.
The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement of the Privacy Cluster—a cross-team effort focused on private read and write, cryptographic identities, and zero-knowledge proofs—reflects what trust, consensus, and truth mean in the digital age, and a deeper sense that privacy must be built into the infrastructure.
Regulators should pay attention. Privacy-preserving designs are no longer just experimental. They are now a standard approach. They are becoming the way forward for decentralized systems. The question is whether law and regulation will adapt to this change or remain stuck in an old logic that equates visibility with safety.
From joint observation to joint validation
For a long time, digital governance has been built on the logic of visibility. The systems were reliable because they could be observed by regulators, auditors or the public. This “shared observation” model is behind everything from financial reporting to blockchain explorer. Transparency was a means to ensure integrity.
However, in cryptographic systems, a more powerful paradigm is emerging: joint authentication. Instead of having every actor see everything, zero-knowledge proof and privacy-preserving designs verify that a rule has been followed without revealing the underlying data. Truth becomes something you can prove, not something you must expose.
This change may seem technical, but it has profound consequences. This means we no longer have to choose between privacy and accountability. The two can coexist, embedded directly into the systems we rely on. Regulators, too, should adapt to this logic instead of fighting against it.
Privacy as infrastructure
The industry is realizing one thing: Privacy is not a niche. This is infrastructure. Without it, Web 3 openness becomes its weakness, and transparency falls under surveillance.
Emerging architectures in ecosystems show that privacy and modularity are finally changing. Ethereum’s privacy cluster focuses on cryptographic computation and selective disclosure at the smart contract level.
Others are going deeper, integrating privacy into the network consensus itself: sender-defective messaging, verifier anonymity, private proof-of-stake and self-healing data persistence. These designs are rebuilding the digital stack from the ground up, framing privacy, authentication and decentralization as mutually reinforcing properties.
This is not an incremental improvement. It’s a new way of thinking about freedom in the age of digital networks.
Policy lags behind technology
Current regulatory approaches still reflect the logic of shared observation. Privacy-preserving technologies are scrutinized or limited, while visibility is faulted for security and compliance. Developers of privacy protocols face regular pressure, and policymakers believe that encryption is a deterrent to observability.
This approach is outdated and dangerous. In a world where everyone is being watched, and where data is harvested, bought, sold, leaked and exploited on an unprecedented scale, the absence of privacy is the real systemic threat. It undermines trust, puts people at risk and undermines democracies. In contrast, privacy-preserving designs enable integrity and enable accountability without exposure.
Lawmakers need to start viewing privacy as an ally, not an adversary — a tool to enforce fundamental rights and restore trust in the digital environment.
Stewardship, not just checking
The next phase of digital regulation should move from scrutiny to support. Legal and policy frameworks should protect open source privacy protection systems as important public goods. A stewardship stance is a duty, not a policy choice.
Related: Compliance doesn’t have to cost you privacy
This means providing legal clarity for developers and distinguishing between actions and architecture. Laws should punish corruption, not the existence of privacy-enabling technologies. The right to maintain private digital communication, association and economic exchange should be considered a fundamental right, which should be enforced by both law and infrastructure.
Such an approach would demonstrate formal maturity, and recognize that resilient democracies and legitimate governance rely on infrastructures to protect privacy.
Architecture of Freedom
The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy initiative and other new privacy-first network designs share the idea that freedom is an architectural principle in the digital age. It may not depend on commitments to good governance or monitoring. It must be built into the protocols that shape our lives.
These new systems, private roll-ups, state-segregated architectures and autonomous zones represent a practical synthesis of privacy and modularity. They enable societies to build freely while remaining connected to verification, and thus link sovereignty with accountability.
Policymakers should see this as an opportunity to support the direct embedding of fundamental rights into the technological foundation of the Internet. Privacy-by-design should be accepted as design in law, not just through constitutions, charters and conventions, but a way of enforcing fundamental rights through code.
The blockchain industry is redefining what “consensus” and “truth” mean, replacing shared verification with shared observation, with shared verification, visibility with verification, and surveillance with sovereignty. As this new dawn for privacy takes shape, regulators face a choice: limit it under the old framework of controls, or support it as the foundation of digital freedom and a more flexible digital order.
The tech is evolving. Laws need to catch up.
Feedback from: Agata Ferreira, Assistant Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. The views, opinions and opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of QuintalGraph.
