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This year I was honored to be selected by the Ethereum Foundation as a Devcon Scholars Program. As part of the program we had the chance to engage with other knowledgeable scholars, learn more about Ethereum and attend Devcon VII in Bangkok, Thailand.
As a researcher, I get the chance to learn more about Ethereum’s main trends and communicate them to a broader audience. For my Learning Artifact, rather than focusing on highly technical topics such as cryptoeconomics or a single core protocol development, I decided to reflect on one of the main tracks in Devcon: the Cypherpunk Track.
In this blog you will find my explorations on cypherpunk values from reading blogs and manifestos, attending Devcon talks and events such as Web3 Privacy’s Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress. I dive into the cypherpunk principles, their relevance to Ethereum and how they continue to shape the way we think about core protocol infrastructure.
While you may associate cypherpunk with the cyberpunk ideals of future technology and defying systems to resist capture from authorities, cypherpunk ideals stand on their own.
Cypherpunks believe in securing privacy and freedom through cryptography in a digital controlled world. Reclaiming ownership over their data and identity beyond centralized oversight, cypherpunks build in public, in dialogue with a community, for others to benefit and progress the work. To take the words directly from the Cypherpunk Manifesto: “We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.”
You might already see how some emergent principles of the cypherpunk ethos directly overlap with Ethereum's vision.
Privacy & Freedom
Censorship resistance & Security
Self-sovereign digital money
Decentralization
Open Source
Ethereum’s cypherpunk vision cannot be fully realized until privacy is woven into its infrastructure – across L1 contracts, L2 solutions and the applications built on top of them.
Privacy refers to information asymmetry. It’s the ability to prove a statement is true without revealing undisclosed information. It is the power to selectively reveal information and, as such, brings the notion of choice and ownership. Privacy is not about not revealing anything, rather, it’s about having enough granularity in the tech and infrastructure to enable users the freedom to only reveal what is relevant when transacting or interacting with others.
Among the core principles in the cypherpunk ethos, privacy is the one with the most room for growth in Ethereum. Yet it is crucial to achieving a censorship resistant network. This means that privacy remains to be integrated by design in apps and layers, not as an optional feature.
Beyond that, privacy tools will only be truly effective when they are modular and composable. When technologies are built in a composable way, a privacy preserving tech stack can emerge, fostering a positive cycle of user adoption and innovation. This has already begun taking shape in the latest years with the growth of the ZK landscape and applications like ZK email, ZK passport, and ZK TLS, which allows users to prove the receipt of user data from other Web 2 apps in a trustless manner.
Although Ethereum stands as the most decentralized network with over 1 million validators and more than 34 million ETH staked (according to beaconcha.in), some points of centralization remain, undermining the network’s goals of robustness, censorship resistance, and decentralization.
For instance, although client diversity has improved, most execution clients are still concentrated in Nethermind and Geth. Hosted nodes make up approximately 16% of the network and a significant part of total ETH staked is done so through centralized entities, creating reliance on third-party services. Block building also remains a point of centralization, with two main entities dominating, and 6 relays accounting for 99% of MEV-Boost blocks —the sidecar software used in around 91% of Ethereum blocks proposed by validators. While builder censorship has declined this year due to Beaverbuild opting to not censor transactions, relay censorship still represents a significant bottleneck for fully censorship resistant transaction processing.
These issues highlight the need for ongoing improvements to align Ethereum more closely with cypherpunk principles. The significance of these values lies not in requiring Ethereum to perfectly align with them, but in their role as a compass – reminding us of the foundational principles behind Ethereum, even amid the turbulence of market fluctuations.
There are many teams working on projects to further these values, too many to just list in this post. You can refer to Web3 Privacy Now's explorer to search for projects building in the privacy space.
To continue my explorations of this learning artifact, I decided to list some thoughts and strategies around infrastructure, community, and funding pushing cypherpunk values forward that I learnt during Devcon.
Infrastructure embodies the underlying values of its mechanism design.
As Roger Dingledine highlighted during his Devcon talk, “Technology is not neutral. Think through the changes needed in the world, and make sure that the architecture and projects stir those changes. Otherwise you'll accidentally recreate existing power structures of centralization and control”.
A cypherpunk-inspired infrastructure prioritizes decentralization, privacy and user-sovereignty, ensuring these principles are further baked into the Ethereum design. Initiatives like Aztec Network’s creating private execution environments to query data without reliance on data custodians are examples of this. Projects and composable tools that build upon the privacy stack also push these values forward. Examples of such projects include Zupass (privacy-preserving authentication using ZKPs), Ddocs and Fileverse (encrypted, peer-to-peer document collaboration), Waku (censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication protocol), Enclave (open-source protocol for Encrypted Execution Environments), and many more.
To further align with cypherpunk values, Ethereum's mechanism design could continue to revisit overlapping values, structuring incentives within L1 to promote desired outcomes. This involves addressing practical scalability challenges in the roadmap while preserving a censorship resistant network and reducing points of centralization, and prioritizing the validator set diversity.
For example, solving statelessness to greatly reduce the load on solo stakers (see The Verge roadmap), reducing slot times only when pre confirmations can allow home stakers to be able to keep up or rethinking Ethereum’s issuance prioritizing their validator sustainability (Devcon had an interesting Community Led Discussion on the topic of Ethnomics). Advancing censorship resistance in the network can also look like developing based rollup architecture, using the L1 as the method for sequencing transactions, among other initiatives.
Building in the open and in community is one of cypherpunks most significant values – a principle that is at the core of Ethereum. A thriving community embraces discussion, allowing for dissidence and diverse viewpoints, but aligning around core values. This openness fosters long-term, positive-sum outcomes by combining different perspectives to solve complex challenges.
Spaces like the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress can also help in cultivating these ideals and making complex tools seem more approachable. They serve as hubs for education and dialogue of privacy values, about risks, and trade-offs, allowing different viewpoints to enter the conversation. Spaces like these can inform progress and reinforce core cypherpunk concepts in Ethereum.
A less explored challenge, I learnt, lies in creating the funding mechanisms for privacy projects as they evolve beyond the demo/small stage. Ensuring their continuity requires incentives for bigger projects to retain privacy, censorship resistance, decentralization of power and to enable freedom of choice to their users as core values. However, such incentives often fall short for larger projects. There is still a lot of room for research and design here.
As I conclude this exploration into cypherpunk values, I want to highlight that both in my personal exploration and as a community, there is still much to uncover in the privacy space. The conversations at Devcon have deepened my understanding of the current state while sparking excitement and curiosity about the road ahead.
The cypherpunk ethos challenges us to build with intention, ensuring that Ethereum's future and the technologies we create value privacy and remain decentralized and censorship-resistant.
This year I was honored to be selected by the Ethereum Foundation as a Devcon Scholars Program. As part of the program we had the chance to engage with other knowledgeable scholars, learn more about Ethereum and attend Devcon VII in Bangkok, Thailand.
As a researcher, I get the chance to learn more about Ethereum’s main trends and communicate them to a broader audience. For my Learning Artifact, rather than focusing on highly technical topics such as cryptoeconomics or a single core protocol development, I decided to reflect on one of the main tracks in Devcon: the Cypherpunk Track.
In this blog you will find my explorations on cypherpunk values from reading blogs and manifestos, attending Devcon talks and events such as Web3 Privacy’s Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress. I dive into the cypherpunk principles, their relevance to Ethereum and how they continue to shape the way we think about core protocol infrastructure.
While you may associate cypherpunk with the cyberpunk ideals of future technology and defying systems to resist capture from authorities, cypherpunk ideals stand on their own.
Cypherpunks believe in securing privacy and freedom through cryptography in a digital controlled world. Reclaiming ownership over their data and identity beyond centralized oversight, cypherpunks build in public, in dialogue with a community, for others to benefit and progress the work. To take the words directly from the Cypherpunk Manifesto: “We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.”
You might already see how some emergent principles of the cypherpunk ethos directly overlap with Ethereum's vision.
Privacy & Freedom
Censorship resistance & Security
Self-sovereign digital money
Decentralization
Open Source
Ethereum’s cypherpunk vision cannot be fully realized until privacy is woven into its infrastructure – across L1 contracts, L2 solutions and the applications built on top of them.
Privacy refers to information asymmetry. It’s the ability to prove a statement is true without revealing undisclosed information. It is the power to selectively reveal information and, as such, brings the notion of choice and ownership. Privacy is not about not revealing anything, rather, it’s about having enough granularity in the tech and infrastructure to enable users the freedom to only reveal what is relevant when transacting or interacting with others.
Among the core principles in the cypherpunk ethos, privacy is the one with the most room for growth in Ethereum. Yet it is crucial to achieving a censorship resistant network. This means that privacy remains to be integrated by design in apps and layers, not as an optional feature.
Beyond that, privacy tools will only be truly effective when they are modular and composable. When technologies are built in a composable way, a privacy preserving tech stack can emerge, fostering a positive cycle of user adoption and innovation. This has already begun taking shape in the latest years with the growth of the ZK landscape and applications like ZK email, ZK passport, and ZK TLS, which allows users to prove the receipt of user data from other Web 2 apps in a trustless manner.
Although Ethereum stands as the most decentralized network with over 1 million validators and more than 34 million ETH staked (according to beaconcha.in), some points of centralization remain, undermining the network’s goals of robustness, censorship resistance, and decentralization.
For instance, although client diversity has improved, most execution clients are still concentrated in Nethermind and Geth. Hosted nodes make up approximately 16% of the network and a significant part of total ETH staked is done so through centralized entities, creating reliance on third-party services. Block building also remains a point of centralization, with two main entities dominating, and 6 relays accounting for 99% of MEV-Boost blocks —the sidecar software used in around 91% of Ethereum blocks proposed by validators. While builder censorship has declined this year due to Beaverbuild opting to not censor transactions, relay censorship still represents a significant bottleneck for fully censorship resistant transaction processing.
These issues highlight the need for ongoing improvements to align Ethereum more closely with cypherpunk principles. The significance of these values lies not in requiring Ethereum to perfectly align with them, but in their role as a compass – reminding us of the foundational principles behind Ethereum, even amid the turbulence of market fluctuations.
There are many teams working on projects to further these values, too many to just list in this post. You can refer to Web3 Privacy Now's explorer to search for projects building in the privacy space.
To continue my explorations of this learning artifact, I decided to list some thoughts and strategies around infrastructure, community, and funding pushing cypherpunk values forward that I learnt during Devcon.
Infrastructure embodies the underlying values of its mechanism design.
As Roger Dingledine highlighted during his Devcon talk, “Technology is not neutral. Think through the changes needed in the world, and make sure that the architecture and projects stir those changes. Otherwise you'll accidentally recreate existing power structures of centralization and control”.
A cypherpunk-inspired infrastructure prioritizes decentralization, privacy and user-sovereignty, ensuring these principles are further baked into the Ethereum design. Initiatives like Aztec Network’s creating private execution environments to query data without reliance on data custodians are examples of this. Projects and composable tools that build upon the privacy stack also push these values forward. Examples of such projects include Zupass (privacy-preserving authentication using ZKPs), Ddocs and Fileverse (encrypted, peer-to-peer document collaboration), Waku (censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication protocol), Enclave (open-source protocol for Encrypted Execution Environments), and many more.
To further align with cypherpunk values, Ethereum's mechanism design could continue to revisit overlapping values, structuring incentives within L1 to promote desired outcomes. This involves addressing practical scalability challenges in the roadmap while preserving a censorship resistant network and reducing points of centralization, and prioritizing the validator set diversity.
For example, solving statelessness to greatly reduce the load on solo stakers (see The Verge roadmap), reducing slot times only when pre confirmations can allow home stakers to be able to keep up or rethinking Ethereum’s issuance prioritizing their validator sustainability (Devcon had an interesting Community Led Discussion on the topic of Ethnomics). Advancing censorship resistance in the network can also look like developing based rollup architecture, using the L1 as the method for sequencing transactions, among other initiatives.
Building in the open and in community is one of cypherpunks most significant values – a principle that is at the core of Ethereum. A thriving community embraces discussion, allowing for dissidence and diverse viewpoints, but aligning around core values. This openness fosters long-term, positive-sum outcomes by combining different perspectives to solve complex challenges.
Spaces like the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress can also help in cultivating these ideals and making complex tools seem more approachable. They serve as hubs for education and dialogue of privacy values, about risks, and trade-offs, allowing different viewpoints to enter the conversation. Spaces like these can inform progress and reinforce core cypherpunk concepts in Ethereum.
A less explored challenge, I learnt, lies in creating the funding mechanisms for privacy projects as they evolve beyond the demo/small stage. Ensuring their continuity requires incentives for bigger projects to retain privacy, censorship resistance, decentralization of power and to enable freedom of choice to their users as core values. However, such incentives often fall short for larger projects. There is still a lot of room for research and design here.
As I conclude this exploration into cypherpunk values, I want to highlight that both in my personal exploration and as a community, there is still much to uncover in the privacy space. The conversations at Devcon have deepened my understanding of the current state while sparking excitement and curiosity about the road ahead.
The cypherpunk ethos challenges us to build with intention, ensuring that Ethereum's future and the technologies we create value privacy and remain decentralized and censorship-resistant.
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