Vitalik Buterin Pushes Native Privacy For Ethereum Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) outlined three near term Ethereum $ETH upgrades aimed at making privacy a built in network feature. The proposals include account abstraction, FOCIL, keyed nonces, and new access layer privacy tools. The upgrades are designed to make private transactions harder to censor and reduce user tracking across the network.

LATEST: ⚡ SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce urged regulators not to treat crypto privacy tools as signs of criminal intent, saying privacy should be the norm for law-abiding users.

Public chains expose everything by default — salary, trades, treasury flows. Most privacy tools are either too slow, too clunky, or too risky for compliant users. @SilentSwap brings fast, compliant privacy to public chains: > Encrypted intent checked against AML and OFAC lists > Routed through a TEE — no link between sender and recipient > Permissioned, non-custodial, one-toggle UX A team with background spanning Nasa, Paypal, Apple, and leading Defi protocols. Catch SilentSwap at EASY Residency S3 Demo Day.

Google Chrome is about to eliminate the last loopholes that allowed older ad blockers to keep working. According to The Verge, Chrome versions 150 and 151, expected in late June and July, will remove the final pieces of code related to Manifest V2 extensions. This means legacy ad blockers such as the original uBlock Origin will no longer function in Chrome, with only Manifest V3-compatible extensions supported. Google says the change is necessary due to technical debt and security risks from the old system. Critics argue that Manifest V3 limits the effectiveness of advanced ad blockers and privacy tools. Most Chrome users have already switched to Manifest V3 alternatives like uBlock Origin Lite, while others have moved to browsers that still support Manifest V2 extensions.

A Small Manifesto Against the Current @Zcash Bandwagon Zcash is a remarkable piece of cryptography, but cryptography isn't the bottleneck for crypto in 2026. Distribution, liquidity, and developer adoption are. And those are the exact dimensions on which Zcash is structurally disadvantaged. 1. Network effects work against single-purpose privacy chains Privacy is a network-effect product: the larger the anonymity set, the stronger the privacy guarantee. Zcash currently has ~30% of supply in shielded pools, and most activity moves in and out of the shielded layer rather than staying within it. A shielded pool with ~5M ZEC and a few thousand daily active users provides meaningfully less privacy than the same cryptographic primitives running on an L1 with 10M+ daily addresses. The math is brutal. If 100 people hide in a room, finding any individual is hard. If 100 million people hide in a room, it's impossible. Privacy coins concentrate users. Privacy features on general-purpose chains recruit them. 2. Liquidity and acceptance are non-negotiable A privacy coin that gets delisted from major exchanges, as Zcash repeatedly has across Japan, Korea, the UK, and parts of the EU, becomes harder to acquire, harder to exit, and harder to use at scale. Privacy tools built on Ethereum, Solana, or Base inherit the liquidity of the underlying chain. You don't have to choose between privacy and the ability to transact with the rest of the financial system. Zcash forces that choice. Nobody wants to make it. 3. People don't want private money. They want private applications Most people don't need to hide a $50 ZEC transfer. They need confidential business payments, private payroll, undisclosed treasury operations, sealed-bid auctions, private voting and confidential DeFi positions that don't leak through transaction graphs. None of these run on a privacy coin. They run on smart contract platforms with privacy primitives like @aztecnetwork on Ethereum, @AleoHQ as its own L1, @solana 's confidential transfers, @penumbrazone in the Cosmos ecosystem, FHE-based chains like @fhenix and ZK-rollups in general The future of privacy is programmable, not denominational. 4. The technology has been completely commoditized zk-SNARKs were Zcash's moat in 2016. By 2026, they're the foundation of every major L2, dozens of privacy systems, and most rollup architectures. The Zcash team did the foundational research, and then watched the IP escape. The chains that benefited most aren't paying rent to Zcash, and they never will. It's one of the cleanest examples in crypto of pioneering a technology and capturing none of the value. 5. Regulatory exposure cuts the wrong way Privacy coins occupy a uniquely vulnerable regulatory category. Privacy tools on general-purpose chains can be designed with selective disclosure, view keys for auditors, compliance hooks and they live inside chains regulators have already accepted as legitimate financial infrastructure. Zcash has built the same compliance tooling (view keys, selective disclosure protocols) but still carries the "privacy coin" label that triggers automatic delisting regardless of actual functionality. The technology isn't the problem. The category is. 6. The unit-of-account problem For privacy to matter for real economic activity, it has to be denominated in money people actually use, this is the biggest lesson in crypto over the past 5 years. Nobody pays salaries, settles invoices, or runs treasuries in ZEC. They use USD, EUR, USDC, USDT. Privacy that requires switching unit-of-account is privacy that won't be used at scale. The winning model is private stablecoins and private transfers of mainstream assets, which requires programmability Zcash structurally doesn't have and isn't on a path to building. 7. The "private Bitcoin" comparison is just stupid At the end of the day, Zcash only really competes with Bitcoin, except it doesn't, because the "private Bitcoin" framing falls apart on contact with reality. You don't get to slap "private" on as a feature and call yourself Bitcoin's successor when you don't have the liquidity, the decentralized robustness, the regulatory acceptance, the size, or the history. Bitcoin's hashrate is distributed across hundreds of pools and tens of thousands of independent miners globally. Zcash's hashrate is functionally controlled by a handful of pools running ASICs from a few Chinese manufacturers. Zcash inherited Bitcoin's consensus model with a fraction of Bitcoin's decentralization. And decentralization isn't a sliding scale where "more" earns you partial credit. It's binary. You're either close enough to Bitcoin to inherit the monetary properties that come with extreme decentralization, as Ethereum genuinely is, or you're not, and the "moneyness" argument doesn't apply to you at all. Ethereum and even Solana have an order of magnitude better chances of reaching Bitcoin's market cap than Zcash does. That's not a controversial claim. It's just looking at the data.

Ethereum is for shipping. Here are some of the things the Ethereum ecosystem launched, upgraded, and announced over the past month. 0/ @RobinhoodApp launched Robinhood Chain (@RobinhoodCrypto) on mainnet, an Ethereum Layer 2 built on the @arbitrum stack, enabling 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs for users in over 120 countries through Robinhood Wallet. The network surpassed $1B in DEX volume in just over a week. 1/ @aztecnetwork achieved Stage 2 rollup decentralization under @l2beat's framework, removing governance control over its core protocol and taking another step toward trust-minimized infrastructure. 2/ @VitalikButerin shared updates to Ethereum's evolving technical roadmap, outlining the next phase of Lean Ethereum and the protocol's long-term direction. 3/ @ethlabs_org launched as a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH. Their mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy. 4/ @ethereuminsti launched as an independent non-profit dedicated to accelerating the institutional adoption of Ethereum, its L2s, applications and overall ecosystem. 5/ @aave introduced Stable Vaults, fixed-rate stablecoin yield vaults designed for seamless integration into consumer applications. 6/ @zama launched the First DeFi Yield Venue for Confidential USDC (cUSDC) in partnership with @Morpho and @SteakhouseFi, bringing private stablecoin lending to Ethereum. 7/ @swissknifexyz launched a new Privacy Protocol Tracker, making it easier to compare fees, wait times, supported chains, and other metrics across Ethereum privacy protocols. 8/ Global tickets for @EFDevcon 8 went live, alongside speaker applications for this year’s conference in Mumbai, India. 9/ @Optimism and @toss__official signed an agreement to explore bringing the Korean Won onchain, expanding blockchain-based financial infrastructure for one of South Korea's largest fintech platforms. 10/ @OctantApp completed Epoch 12, its first full quadratic funding round using a zero-knowledge vote coprocessor and new voting application, distributing 88.1 WETH to Ethereum public goods projects. 11/ @0xprivacypools launched the trusted setup ceremony for Privacy Pools V2 ahead of its next protocol deployment. 12/ Gwei Name Service launched an ownerless, immutable Ethereum naming system built without administrative ownership. 13/ @ammalgam launched on Ethereum mainnet, introducing oracle-free lending without impermanent loss. 14/ @lodestar_eth added support for Fast Confirmations, allowing Ethereum node operators to confirm transactions in a single slot using validator attestations. 15/ @PrivacyBoost introduced preconfirmations for private transfers, allowing transfers to be treated as usable in around one second before final settlement. 16/ The @ethereumfndn published Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions, a new primer introducing Ethereum as a credibly neutral digital public utility for policymakers and enterprise leaders. 17/ @OndoFinance launched @OndoPerps, enabling tokenized stocks to be used as collateral for perpetual futures across equities, commodities, and indices. 18/ @base introduced Base Privacy, giving enterprises infrastructure to trade, pay, and settle onchain with built-in confidentiality and compliance features. 19/ @BGDA_UK launched BAGEY, a natively tokenized UK regulated fund on Ethereum where the blockchain serves as the legal register of record. 20/ @sparkfinance launched the Stablecoin FX Layer on @Uniswap v4, introducing shared liquidity infrastructure that lets stablecoins access a common liquidity layer. 21/ @Trueo_ launched user-created prediction markets, allowing anyone to create a market by asking a question and letting participants trade on the outcome through a fully onchain prediction market. 22/ @kpk_io integrated @OpenCover Covered Vaults, allowing depositors to add opt-in onchain insurance to curated vaults, with coverage underwritten by @NexusMutual. 23/ @PropellerSwap launched Turbine on Ethereum mainnet, enabling large trades to settle with lower slippage by sourcing liquidity across onchain, offchain, and peer-to-peer markets. 24/ Hosted by @web3privacy, the Neocypherpunk Summit brought together around 1,000 builders and researchers in Berlin to advance privacy, open-source infrastructure, and human rights. 25/ @eth_systems launched as a company building modular privacy infrastructure for institutional Ethereum.