Topic for today will be first getting serious about privacy.

We'll talk first a little bit about Ethereum, the approach that I've been thinking about in terms of how Ethereum can move forward on privacy, what kinds of things we should do, in what order, what kinds of things we should do that we have not been thinking about before so far, what kinds of things we should not do.

What we've seen so far is that Ethereum has led the way on privacy research and development in a lot of different ways. Zcash, of course, was the first major production implementation of on-chain privacy. Systems on Ethereum were probably either the second or close to the second. So back in 2019, we had the ECMUL and ECADD and ECPAIRING opcodes that enabled all kinds of on-chain privacy solutions to start happening.

Then we saw Tornado Cash launched on Ethereum. It was the chain where the entire arc of that very complicated story happened. By the way, free Roman Storm. Roman Storm continues to need help.

Then PSE - the Privacy & Scaling Explorations in the Ethereum Foundation. They have worked on many kinds of ZkSNARK protocols, a lot of low-level protocol-related research, dev tooling-related & implementation-level work. PSE has been a bedrock of a lot of very bottom-level tooling and ideas on zero-knowledge proofs for scaling and zero-knowledge proofs for privacy.

L2s have contributed a lot. Aztec, in addition to releasing already multiple test versions, I believe Mainnet coming soon, has also been experimenting with a lot of very innovative ideas regarding privacy, but also lower-level things like the Noir language, the entire Plonk and plookup category of algorithms.

Intmax, fully ZkSNARK-based plasma rollup hybrid. Nightfall from EY, championed by Paul Brody quite a bit. Ethereum has been a home for a huge amount of valuable privacy-related work. But the problem is that on real-world value delivered to users, we are far behind where we could be. So, if you're actually using a privacy protocol on Ethereum today, shout them out.

A lot of things are starting to happen, but what does using a privacy protocol today look like? My experience is, one, it requires you to have a separate seed phrase. You have this totally separate thing that you have to worry about holding and not losing and not having stolen if you want to use your assets. That's one.

Two is there is no multi-sig option. The only option is a single key option, which is pretty scary for large amounts of funds.

Three, it requires opening a separate wallet. So whenever you want to do a private send, you have to go and open the thing and then slowly starts loading. It goes from zero to 100. You have to wait 30 seconds.

Four, you need a total of about five clicks to private send and withdraw.

When I use Railway, I count, click one, open the railway wallet, and then click two, you have to click on unshield, which is a different thing than send, the thing that I think of as sending is actually unshielding, sometimes I click send and then I realise that's the wrong thing and I have to do a third click of clicking unshield. Two, click on Shield. Then three, click on Generate Proof. Then you wait. Then four, click on choosing a public broadcaster. And then when the proof is done, it's usually a fifth click to actually start the whole process.

It's a much more complicated gist on a raw UX level than it could be. And also the public broadcaster mechanism, this is something common to Tornado Cash and Railway and anyone of these systems that tries to actually be decentralised.

These things are brittle, these things often break, these things within the last six months I've had situations where it just broke completely on one version and I had to switch versions at some point. Broke completely on one internet connection. I had to either turn a VPN on or turn a VPN off.

So very far from perfect and we can do better.

Why now?

Why do we want to really push for privacy now as opposed to pushing for privacy in, say, either 2021 or 2029? First of all, at the top of all this, privacy is important, right?

Privacy is freedom, privacy is order, privacy is progress, privacy is a bedrock of a lot of things that we care about in this world.

Privacy is not just an abstraction in the same way that something like decentralisation or credible neutrality is. Privacy is a concrete benefit that is directly appealing to users. You can understand what it means to transact privately. Transacting privately as opposed to transacting publicly is something that actually has meaningful differences in the kind of experience you will have during the transaction, but more importantly, after the transaction.

Freedom of speech is easy. Freedom after speech is the harder thing. Also, the technology is mature enough today. This was not true four years ago. Today, we can do it, and therefore, we must.

The way that I think about "privacy on Ethereum is", I break it up into three categories.

First, privacy of writes on-chain. Basically when you perform operations and things like sending, those operations happen on-chain. By default, everything you do on-chain creates a public link between every operation and every other operation. How do we do with these things without creating the on-chain public link?

Then number two, privacy of writes off-chain. So in this case, how do you avoid leaking information when you're sending transactions, like basically all the parts other than the blockchain itself?

And number three, privacy of reads, right? When you read the chain, the chain reveals a lot of things about who you are and what you're doing. And how do we actually try to minimise that?

So let's start with privacy of writes.

Three categories that we can focus on short term. One is funds transfers, two is DeFi, three is voting. These are basic category of operations and there are strong cases to have privacy for each of these.

Private funds transfers. We all know about them. Private DeFi, so Railway, for example, has private DeFi inside of it. Adding privacy to DeFi has value in a lot of different ways. So it's valuable for people not to know what your investments are, what your strategies are. It's valuable for people to not know what your liquidation price is. It's valuable for people to not know everything you're doing in real time so that they can front run you. There's all kinds of reasons why it's important to be private in DeFi in order to protect you.

Having private DeFi increases the amount of funds that people are willing to store in a private context, which in turn makes it more viable to make private transactions.

Privacy in voting, also super important. Projects like MACI are moving forward, starting to actually get used more. Also, other forms of ZK voting already exist and are already increasing in their user friendliness and their integration. So without privacy, voting turns into a very toxic social game and that’s why we need to really make privacy in any kind of on-chain voting a reality at the default.

Then the holy grail of course is to have privacy of general computation. Privacy of general computation is hard for a bunch of reasons. One of those reasons is that general computation involves doing a VM, and VMs involve client-side proving, and client-side proving is even harder to make efficient than server-side proving. And another reason is that privacy, in a general-purpose way, requires rethinking the software development model, because you don't just think about who owns what assets, you have to also think about who has access to what pieces of data.

Things like what Aztec has been doing in terms of figuring out Noir and figuring out their entire account and contract model. It's actually a pretty intricate and challenging amount of work, but ultimately this is the Holy Grail.

Privacy of rights off-chain. Okay, basically, this one's actually the easy one. So basically, the thing that matters here is send raw transaction as well as the various equivalents for ERC-4337, for intent-based transfers, like 7683, for every type of send needs to be able to happen through a mixnet so that when you do these operations, there is not a public link between your IP address and the transaction.

We should not expect that the Ethereum network is private by default. We should expect that people who want to see things are going to run like 30% of the nodes in the network just so that they can see everything that's going on. And the demand for this to increase as on-chain data leakage decreases. And so we need to increase the amount of network layer privacy as well.

Now, privacy of reads is something that we have not been talking about nearly enough, right? So, basically, your chances are, you leaked everything about yourself to whatever RPC provider you're using. This is a problem that can be fixed.

I see two tracks for solving this. One of them is keeping the form factor of a small light client connecting to a large RPC server, but making that connection actually be private. We've been thinking about making light client connections secure for a long time. I've been talking about Helios for a long time. Noah Citron has been heroically working on Helios for a long time. What Helios does not do is to give you light client security, it does not give you any kind of privacy.

And actually, a lot of the time, the more harmful thing that an RPC can do to you is not feed you bad information, even though feeding you bad information can totally cause you to lose huge amounts of money in a DEX. Rather, it's stealing your information and then potentially selling it off and potentially sending it out somewhere else.

The idea here is basically we use cryptographic technologies in order to make it possible for people to ask RPC servers for information, get back responses, without the RPC servers even knowing what they answered. So there is a short-term approach which uses trusted execution environments together with oblivious RAM, basically using these trusted hardware-based security models to reduce the opportunities for data leakage. And ORAM basically makes the TEE problem easier because you don't have to worry about leaking memory access patterns. Instead, the thing that has to be private is basically just a much smaller thing that has basically all of one memory in it. But then, of course, hardware-based security models are very imperfect, and there is a more holy grail solution, which is private information retrieval, PIR.

This thing has a lot of challenges in terms of efficiency, but the efficiency of PIR has been improving more and more with every passing year, and it is something that we actually can get to doing.

Making hardened RPC nodes is one of these paths. The other one of these paths is making it easier and more practical for a user to run their own node, even as Ethereum L1 scales.

Who here runs their own node or has run their own node in the last 12 months? Okay, someone shout out how many gigabytes it takes on your hard drive. A few hundred? Okay. Mine is like 2048, but I got a fancy laptop to play around with self-hosted LLMs.

Who here has on the hard drive of their laptop more than 256 gigs of disk space? Or more than 512? Now in the EIP over 9000, I forget the exact number, in the proposed EIP that specifies Ethereum node requirements, the expected amount of disk space is four terabytes. So who here has four terabytes? Now this is a problem, right?

There actually is a pathway to make the node running requirements decrease massively. And that pathway basically is one, history expiry, make it so that nodes do not have to store history. If you even only do that, then two is you do things like block level access list and zkEVMs.

And so you basically get verified blocks, and the only thing that you have to track is the state itself. Then you just get fed verified deltas to the state, you can apply the deltas directly, then that can reduce, even today, a node's storage requirements to something like 50 to 80 gigabytes.So who here on their laptop has, let's say, at least 80 gigabytes of space? Who here has that on their phone? With today's numbers, we can actually make state-storing nodes pretty viable. Now, of course, the argument is what happens if L1 scales by 10x? Then within a few years, we expect that to increase back to the hundreds of gigabytes.

The solution is partial state nodes, basically nodes that only store parts of the state. And we need to figure out some kind of way of basically splitting apart parts of the state that are spam for parts of the state that are relevant to important applications, and then you as a user can store only those parts of the state. So if you make queries that touch only those parts, then nobody outside of you and your computer actually needs to find out anything about what reads you're making. This is another piece of privacy of reads. 

A third piece of privacy of reads is identity and accounts. Who here has used zkEmail? Anon Aadhaar, any of the ZK wrappers? Who here has a World ID? I mean, I had one and I lost it. Then, so, you know, hopefully their recovery. Now, who here has used ZK Passport? Actually, I have two.

One of the parts of this, basically, what is identity API used for? Identity is an important piece in all kinds of different applications. It can be used to prove that you are the same person that previously did some action. It can be used to prove that you're not a robot. It can be used to prove that you are a member of some community. But at the same time, identity has all kinds of risks if it's done incorrectly. So single global identifiers are something that could be abused for deplatforming, especially if they're not implemented well single.

If you have a single global identifier, even if everything is done through nullifiers, you can still be coerced into revealing your nullifier. So a lot of challenges in getting into this whole space and doing it well. This is something where the world is moving forward into these kinds of things. Our community might be the most well positioned to actually figure out a well-designed privacy-friendly and pluralistic form of identity and reduce the chance that the thing that the world standardises on is just terrible across multiple dimensions.

Privacy of ID is something that directly comes into wallets themselves. So private account abstraction, right? Right now, to use Railway or to use Privacy Pools or any of these, you need to have one single key. Who here would feel comfortable trusting one single key with $1 million? $10 million? Okay. Let me ask the question another way: more than 10% of your assets? More than 50% of your assets? See, very few hands raised, right? And so basically, for privacy to be viable, we need the underlying accounts to actually be much more secure than single keys.

The most very basic thing you can do is, of course, multisig, right? But the real long-term thing that we can do is private account abstraction, right? Basically, whatever your normal account is, the account that you use to send normal transactions, In order to spend from private accounts that are ZK-linked to that account, you have to provide a zero-knowledge proof that you still control that account. And then on top of that, you have to reveal that you control some extra secret, and the point of that extra secret is just the privacy part.

If we do this, then we can make ZK accounts much more secure. We can basically enable much more secure and zero-knowledge ways of revealing who you are both to your on-chain account and to all kinds of other on-chain applications, and we can make this work seamlessly with your existing accounts on Ethereum.

So this is kind of my general privacy mind map. There are other important things to think about here.

One of those things is when do we get into doing privacy on the L1? I think this is a topic worth exploring. The reason to not do this literally tomorrow is basically that if you implement that and there's a bug in the privacy mechanism, then someone can print infinite money and you won't even be able to tell. So it's... pretty scary in that sense. We should wait until our privacy stack is and our ZK stack is formally verified proven to a much greater extent and ideally we can do that for the ZK that we use to scale Ethereum and for the ZK that we use to make Ethereum private at the same time.

ZkSNARKs on their own are not enough for a lot of things. There are things that require FHE, though even with FHE, you need to have basically a multi-sig backdoor committee that reveals when things get decrypted, which is scary in its own way.

For me, the holy grail is obfuscation. Maybe we actually might get obfuscation in the not-too-long-term future. We'll see.

There's things that are worth thinking about in terms of the Ethereum of 2040 from that point of view. It's a discussion that we should consider. My view on short-term things the L1 should do for privacy is basically that whatever we do in terms of L1 account abstraction and L1 fossil support should be designed with privacy protocols in mind. That's the basic bottom line that we should agree on in terms of what L1 does for privacy in the short and medium term, at least until we were confident enough in the cryptography to actually stick privacy features into the L1 directly.

In conclusion, privacy on Ethereum is happening, and there are already things that are underway on each of the items that I talked about. And I think anyone who is here can actually help build out any part of that map, right?

For anyone of these bubbles, anyone of these things, there are things that people in this room can go and contribute to. If you are someone who is good at hacking around Ethereum clients, you can go build a partial state node. If you're someone who is good at figuring out private account abstraction and some of the challenges around doing on-chain reads and doing the client-side proving, you can work on that. Working on client-side proving enables a lot of these, so client-side proving work is important. Privacy-preserving voting is important.

Each and every one of these items here are potential hackathon projects and are potential long-term projects for people here to put a lot of effort and time in. Let's work together. Let's make the best privacy-preserving user experience on Ethereum possible.

Recording

Q&A session

How would you explain what a nullifier is and why can it be coerced easily?

V : Okay, so the way that the math works right is that you have a secret and then using that secret you can think of it as you hash the secret plus one and then you get a public number and then you hash the secret plus two and then you get your nullifier.

What you do if you have some resource that can only be spent once, then when you receive the resource, you publish the first number and then when you spend it, you publish the second number along with a proof that there exists some first number that someone was publish someone published previously where that basic the same secret was used to generate both, right? And because the secret always stays private to you permanently, you're the only one that's able to make the proof. You're the only one that's ever able to actually know that link. And so what this means is that essentially, you're able to make a proof that says I'm using or I'm allowed to take this action because I have a resource of a particular type. And this proof at the same time the nullifier being published basically prevents you from claiming the resource twice. It prevents you from dossing the system.

The issue with coercion is basically that someone can always if they see that there is an any action and that action is connected to you um then which they could find out offline or through any other way then they know that you're you are a user of this system and they can force you to reveal your secret and I mean potentially they can torture you or lock you up until you actually reveal the secret that that maps to that nullifier. And then once you do that then that also reveals your original ETH value and then potentially that reveals your entire history. Right?

These are the kinds of issues that ZK by itself and especially ZK identity because it creates this persistent object that you end up creating like many application specific nullifiers from right is like needs to solve for right because if you don't then like someone can basically kind of force you to reveal your entire identity that you used to sign everything.

Do you have an opinion on the EIP-7503 Zero-Knowledge Wormholes and do you think there's plausible deniability maybe possible?

V : Yeah, I think it's cool. I saw there were some recent improvements to it. Things like making it work off of receipts instead of state proofs which I think really improves the simplicity, reduces code complexity which is good. For me personally to feel comfortable with it, the main blocker is basically that ZK technology needs to get mature enough.

It needs to get to the point where we have really really strong assurance that this kind of thing is not going to be broken, right? Because if someone breaks it, they can actually can print basically an unlimited amount of money, right? Because the size of the anonymity set it's not even the set of all explicit depositors. It's basically the set of all people who have transferred ETH into accounts where it has not been spent from. And so it's the like someone could just print tens of millions of ETH before we know what's going wrong, right?

Being really solid on security is the big prerequisite for me. And there's also smaller things like the fact the 80 bytes kind of thing and that even with the grinding it only has 92 bits of collision security which is on the boundary of like being okay. think if we're going to take time to be confident on security we should also take time to like maybe figure out how to finally move away from 20 byte addresses. Some security related things need to be figured out. Personally if the security related things were already solved like I would totally love it and like want it to be in ASAP but it will take time and at some point we'll get to the point where we're comfortable with things like that.

You mentioned that you want to see our privacy tech stack formally verified. Obviously formal verification comes in many formats. Can you talk just what you would like to see under what paradigm to give you the confidence in the next?

V : Yeah so one analogy is like the way that we're approaching formal verification of the zkEVM right and there there's two aspects to it one is formally verifying the arithmetization. Basically this prover creates a machine-verifiable proof of the mathematical statement that if you have a valid witness like valid polynomial values for these for these polynomial then that means that you have a valid execution of the underlying VM that's like and some implementation of that in lean that where the you know like final state is some particular value right and then on top of that you can even prove other statements so like for example there are some ZKVMs that have already proven a property called determinism which basically means that the ZK EVM accepts exactly one post state route. That's powerful because it means that like there aren't bugs that allow an attacker to just prove anything.

Once you have and then another part of the proof is like actually proving the kind of correctness of the proof systems themselves, right? And that's something that I think we've gone into less because we're still in the arc of optimizing the proof systems but at some point we need to start doing that. So that's the basic thing. Similar types of things can be done for client-side proving, right? We can potentially even mathem like convert statements like if you put one coin into Railway then you can take one coin out into a mathematical statement that you can actually verify ends to end right or you can do similar things to virtual machine execution right.

We do things like that then like we can get more comfortable with the actual safety of all of this zero knowledge machinery that in the future millions of ETH will be dependent on.

Do you agree with the with the community's reaction to the ban of the Tornado Cash some years ago and if not how do you to the and how do you prevent how do how do you prevent it in the future?

V : I mean what to you what was the Ethereum community's reaction to the Tornado Cash ban?

I thought that many node runners started to to censor transactions and also I don't know if there was public support for developers of Tornado Cash.

V : Yeah. Yes. There was definitely a scare back in about 2022 to 2023 regarding block builder censorship, right? And this is like an intersection of the privacy legal issues and the whole like builder centralisation problem. So my view on the builder centralisation problem right now is that like we need Fossil um as a way of mitigating the mitigating it. Like basically what Fossil does is it creates 16 different actors per slot who have the power to force any transaction to get included inside of that slot. We get like very strong censorship resistance even if the entire block building market gets monopolised by one actor like not saying we should let that happen right but even if as a second layer of defense I know there are people who are working on multi-party block building technologies like basically market designs where blocks get built through the collaboration of multiple actors by default and if that happens that also helps kind of decrease the risk of single block builder dominance. That's strategy two and strategy three is like I think we should at least explore some kind encrypted mempool ideas in parallel.

To me those are the top three and I think if privacy is going to be first class importance for Ethereum it should be then like we needs to have multiple paths toward continuing to make sure that we have it right and also I mean in general like these things should be the responsibility of L1. We should not require individual like identified actors including builders or even including application developers to be virtuous, right? We should really ensure censorship resistance of the L1 and also we should do a version of account abstraction that is friendly to privacy protocols. 7701 for example does this and so that way Privacy pools and Railway and Tornado cash will be able to get rid fully of the of the public broadcaster dependency.

You showed a slide with a lot of things that could be paralysed like the reads, the rights, etc. Were those use cases what you had in mind when Ethereum came out with with Whisper? And if so because you also said that off-chain is good because it doesn't leak as much metadata. Is there a strong case for for the adoption of off-chain peer-to-peer like I'm going to say Waku? Would Waku make sense for a bunch of those?

V : Yes. Waku is a successor to Whisper. So Waku is very important work and I know it's already starting to be used in messengers. These things are good. I think Waku actually is one of the things that we should explore for the privacy preserving send RPC transaction use-case.

I do think that like Waku-type things are insufficient in a couple of ways. Maybe one or two years ago the vision for how privacy would happen is basically you would have things like the portal network and so you would you which would not just cover history it would also cover state and if you wants to make a state read then you would ask the peer-to-peer network and you connect to it through Waku and then it would give you back a Merkle branch right the reason why I think this is insufficient is that anonymisation is not enough.

Let's say I do a Railway withdrawal and I withdraw into account X right and then right before I do this there is in the network a query that goes to account X and also a query that goes to account Y right then what's actually happened is while there is information that is out there in the public that linked X to Y it actually doesn't even matter that theoretically X and Y might have been mapped to different nodes. Because even just those two accesses happening at the at the same time is still enough information to probabilistically narrow the user down to a very small number of participants.

For that reason we don't just need anonymisation. like we actually need a mechanism that allows users to do reads without those the the content of the read like the index or the address that you're reading being exposed to anyone except for the user themselves.

I view those two technologies as as being highly complimentary for the Ethereum use-case. Like I think for for this for the sending transaction aspect mixnet type things which includes Tor and ITP which which can also include Waku is indispensable.

Yeah I mean that is a legal question which is above my pay grade. Imagine there are definitely very passionate legal people who have been exploring ways to do that but I'll leave the question to them.

Talk about Waku again in back in 2021 I built a messaging app that was and using Waku and of the interesting things is that because the node was running in browser I didn't have to require the user to do some operation like run a node. What do you think about because I'm running also many nodes archive so I use my own explorer have my own RPC which is private but we have learned that people don't want to run their own so is there any way we could have something similar that says in order to access the service you have to even without knowing it?

V: I mean the challenge with the without knowing it part is that even a partial state node is going to take tens of gigabytes and you can't like ask people to download tens of gigabytes in the background without telling them because like at the very least it's going to like destroy a bunch of people's phone plans, right? I think the anything that is like seamless and fully in the background is something that realistically is just going to require um some kind of like light client based approach.

Now, what you could do potentially is you could have like an even more radical partial state node, like a node that only like stores the state of like say a privacy protocol and nothing else. And so it's obvious to the network that you're a user of the privacy protocol, but not but but they don't see anything else, right? And that's interesting.

That would be like one thing that is important to keep in mind. Right, but I mean in general I mean the other challenge of course of this kind of run a node without the user even knowing it is basically that then like if the ecosystem standardises too much over that then like users don't become aware of like what security guarantees they have. So the type of approach that I would favor is where this is related to the whole problem of embedded wallets in general. Where if you use an application with an embedded wallet then by default the embedded wallet does its thing but also if it detects that you have a browser wallet then it automatically switches over to the browser wallet and then the browser wallet can run the checks itself and give you a guarantee that you're being secure even if like the dapp interface has been hacked.

Just wondering about governance and privacy. I know you mentioned the on-chain voting as well as the fund transfers and kind of the important privacy elements there. Are there any other specific use-cases around governance that get you excited and where you think it's crucial to enable privacy?

V: I mean I think for me like governance is it's like often one part voting and two parts communication, right? And so having privacy preserving comms and having privacy preserving comms with the level of UX quality that people are willing to actually adopted and defaults to it is something that's very valuable. So I mean Signal I think has done quite a good job but also like Signal definitely lags behind other apps on at least some dimensions. I mean I know increasingly you've been seeing people migrating to Mattermost which is like self-hosted over Slack though which is like I think fine for the context of an organization for the context of something more diffuse like a DAO like you probably want people to be able to communicate in a way where the trust guarantee doesn't even depend on the operator.

Having like something stronger and sort of even more cypherpunkish would actually help a lot. That's one and then for the voting part basically every part of a governance process should be ZKed right and then like basically the principle is sort of only necessary transparency right so the the rules of the of the game have to be transparent and have to be very clear to everyone but in the context of the actions like only the contents of the action that need to be public would be the contents of the action that actually get made public. And like we can think about that as a starting principle. Apply that across all the different you know regular DAO voting, quadratic voting, quadratic funding sort of designs. I mean sortation is interesting also right because you should be able to have zk sortation where nobody else knows if you've been chosen right because if you have been chosen that's like a very easy coercion vector. We need to think privacy-first across all of these things.

Any work on reintroducing interfaces to allow for encryption decryption keys which might be derived from a root key via a standardized API. So, this is is this like the equivalent of what MetaMask did back in the day with giving you like an encryption?

V: Yeah, this is a good idea. This is actually not too far from some ERC's that have already been made. Like I think 5564 is the ERC for stealth addresses and stealth addresses implicitly depend on a public key encryption technology, right?

So if you generalize that only a little bit then you can basically have a system where each account can publicly show like what its encryption key is and then you'd be able to do encrypts to an account and I think that would be super valuable. Maybe as a portal app it would also be super cool to set a small defined restricted payload which can be decrypted right we don't need to make it big like a very small interface very clearly defined to just send something in for encryption decryption.

V: Oh, I see. So, you mean like the equivalent of a Zcash memo field? Yeah, I would support that.

Is Railgun ever going to lower their quarter % fee? Do you know?

V: I mean that's that's a question for them. Realistically for higher levels of adoption at some point they will have to but I think this is this is their choice.

Lots of privacy projects will help to corporations. How do you see the synergy between B2B privacy and sort of like human privacy and where are the disconnects between them?

V: So I think they share a lot on technology right and like enterprise privacy projects and my kind of look these sort of grassroots Ethereum ecosystem privacy projects have contributed to the same code on many occasions many of them are forks of each other there's a lot of implicit collaboration at the tech level often one thing that's happened in practice so far is that the B2B privacy use cases they've decided that for their compliance needs they have to have some kind of backdoor whereas I think for these more consumer oriented privacy protocols like there's been a strong standard of them being backdoor free and things like Privacy pools and Railgun that basically allow people to like publicly say I am not like one of these depositors like that's fine right but the thing that's not fine is a system where your privacy can retroactively be rug pulled, right? If you think you're private, you should stay private. And this kind of guarantee is incompatible with the kind of approach that B2B has been taken and like the B2B protocols compliance needs. So that's like probably the biggest disconnects that we've seen so far.

I mean my personal dream is of course that over time kind of norms keeps changing and the compliance needs on even the B2B side will start shifting toward more like a kind of privacy pools and Railgun style selective disclosure approach but that's something that of course we'll continue taking time but no I mean in general I do see those ecosystems as being very collaborative just because even if they make different decisions, they use like 90% of the same code.

What is privacy end-game?

V: Privacy endgame is basically that like you should be able to have your digital life without revealing information to other people that you do not want to reveal or that you do not know you're revealing. I think privacy is also valuable in physical space and like I definitely do not appreciate all of the people that just like randomly I mean like photo me and then put me up on crypto Twitter and then there's like people talking about like oh you know like this is what Vitalik is doing now. Unfortunately those kinds of problems are kind of outside of our area of expertise to solve.

The domains that I think will matter over the next two decades right I think are like especially as physical privacy keeps decreasing digital privacy needs to keep increasing to compensate and this involves privacy of communications this involves privacy of funds transfers this involves privacy of governance operations and ultimately like those three things you know they're not entirely separate categories. They're a continuum, right? Like any funds transfer is at least in part of communication. You know like any communication is at least in part a governance operation, right? But then other categories that will pop up privacy of AI so AI is like increasingly becoming sort of a second brain and like chatGPT seeing all of that as something that should not happen.

Who here, has a local LLM installed on their devices now? You should. Who here has bought a some kind of computer or GPU specifically to be able to run better local LLMs? Okay.

One thing that you can do by the way that's like actually economically optimal is buy something powerful but share it between you and a group of your friends, right? So like for example like if you look at a Mac studio the if you with top end specs like the cost does go to the crazy side it's $12,000 but the way the thing that the property that LLM use has is basically you're only actually using it like 1% of the time right and a full-size Mac studio is actually powerful enough to run full-size DeepSeek at a very good speed and so one thing you could do is you could basically take one such device and basically give you know yourself and a few a few or like or a dozen or a few dozen people that you know like you reasonably trust access to it, right?

There's a lot more experimentation with kind of local and even kind of going up to the larger model is a good thing. Because yeah the AI is going to become more and more a part of your thought we're also going to get start getting BCIs very soon brain computer interfaces and so privacy of BCIs is literally privacy of your mind basically you know privacy will go down a lot if we're not careful and if we are careful and if we do the right thing we can keep it at a similar level or even increased and I think this is a very valuable project to push for.

Can you share the perception of cypherpunk within two years because the first year once you published the article and I'm just checking a Devcon talks only Peter Van Valkenburgh from CoinCenter was the only one talking about the cypherpunk then some B2B companies were exploring like how they can talk about this what legal would allow them to talk about and what's the state of this cultural shift and change.  

V: This is actually a very good political moment to start talking about cypherpunk and privacy topics more openly. And I think this is actually true for a couple of reasons.

One of those reasons is that the just the global political environment is much more unfriendly than it was I mean more than two years ago, definitely more than four years ago and like way more than than 10 years ago. And so the idea that you know, oh, you can just go run one of these centralized things and it's run by like nice idealistic tech people and like they're definitely not going to do anything bad or get captured by people who will make them do anything bad is just like more obviously completely false. And this is not something that like grassroots rebels care about. This is something that institutions care about. This is something that governments care about, right? That's like one thing.

In this kind of like much less friendly and much more unstable environment, having more sovereignty over your own data at an individual level and at a group and community level is more important. And the other thing is that like there are people who have talked about the current era as being an era where you can just do things. And sometimes of course this is bad because just doing things sometimes involves just shooting missiles.

At the same time from an individual point of view like you know you can just do things does mean you know you can just go and make privacy protocols. You can just go and send people $10,000 without telling anyone and like you can just really go much further in asserting your digital rights than people were comfortable with a few years ago. And there's like basically from both of those angles. The need has increased and the opportunity has increased and supporting kind of personal and local community security and seeing privacy as being a core part of that security is something that is very important to I mean both talk about and make a reality right now.

Since it's very important for you to keep your thoughts private and you run a local LLM how do you deal with the your location privacy?

V: Yeah, currently not well. I do not claim to have good solutions.

And one of the challenges here, right, is that like even if you do you know like burner phones and literally rotate them every month like even a month of data is totally enough to uniquely fingerprint and identify you. So it's a hard problem.

If you want to like really go further out on location privacy then like we will have to figure out kind of lifestyle alternatives to having your internet constantly with you on the go that provide something close to that level of quality and like that basically means much more accessible mesh networks that might even mean kind of more piratey stuff like something that automatically connects to Wi-Fi networks and automatically does the click through and like you know like goes through passwords or whatever. You need an alternative to that for connectivity is probably the number one thing but then even kind of beyond the the beyond that right the other thing is just like the ease of in person surveillance and just all of the cameras that are everywhere right and the more realistic thing to do is to just kind of continue to fight for laws that kind of restrict those kinds of things and like and put controls on them, right?

People can get around them, but like it like every single one of those things does push the people creating the cameras to be more careful and to kind of not be as brazen in data collection or in like in letting the data get leaked. But no, going further beyond that like I definitely admit it's a challenge.

What's your opinion on the how privacy projects can reach product market fit because we're talking with the folks on the scene and only barely a few for example for Railgun it took three years to hit the break even barely any self-funded project of three people can reach this state for Rotki is based on the personality of Lefteris and there's not many people like him so what how would you suggest privacy builders to go post hackathon in their way to find that product market fit.

V: We should learn a lot from Signal, right? Signal is like the one reasonably cypherpunk project that like actually has gotten a huge amount of adoption to the point where you know famously even the US government uses it. That's Bitcoin. Well Bitcoin I would not call Bitcoin a privacy project right. We should like from from my point of view like what succeeded with Signal is like it actually does have a good enough UX that it's a kind of like maybe like 80 to 90% capable drop in like Skype or Telegram replacement and then like that's good enough to the point where like basically you have these spikes of adoption that happened you know Snowden revelations and then the whole like Pavel Durov situation last year and like basically every time this happens more and more people become interested.

But in order for that to happen your project has to be ready for it right and so to me like one of the warnings is basically just improve UX right though I mean at the same time where like even Signal is like it's definitely not strong enough on the metadata privacy and so we do need to keep pushing harder there.

Usually developers when they do hackathons overscope what's possible within three days. What would be the the low hanging fruit in terms of dev hours spending on privacy.

V: So if you want to work on like for example PRI then one simple thing is instead of focusing on state you focus on history and the easy problem that you do is basically that the input is a log topic and the output is and basically the client asks the server give me what the log the one log in the previous block that is compact that has that log topic and then the server rep like scans overall of the logs in just that one block. So that's like a set of size 100 to like maybe between 100 and a thousand then replies back with that like if you just have that like that already is the seed of privacy preserving history query and like that's a thing that I mean I think especially in the GPT era lots of people here are very able to go and vibe code um well or hopefully the you know like locally running DeepSeek like 0525 or like whatever the most recent one um era um so then If um you know we're talking about like ease of use then like build a wallet that like creates a one-click experience for Privacy pools or Railway operations.

Then if we're talking about like ZK voting, actually fork one of the some DAO-like governance framework and basically rip out the backends and make it private. And otherwise, make it look as close to identical as possible.

I think that's kind of roughly the the bite-sized chunk you'd want to do for the hackathon.

What are your thoughts about whistleblowing rights and how they intersect with privacy data?

V: Yeah, I mean in general I think whistleblowing is absolutely important and I'm generally a big believer of know Julian Assange's maximum, maxim of privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful and I generally think that like actively forcing powerful organizations including companies including governments to be more open than they otherwise would be is like actually one of the more important counterforces to reduce the risk of like some kind of single actor dominating the world in in some irreversible way in the future. To me whistleblowing is definitely an important part of that. One area where ZK tech would help is it can actually make whistleblowing credible right because not only can you reveal information but you can reveal information attached to a zero knowledge proof of the truth of that information.

What do you think about zkTLS for? zkTLS is good. Yeah, you should use it.

Thank you.

Note: speech has been turned from video to text & modified for reading experience. If you saw any conversion artifact - contact us.

Events

Funding the Commons

• Collaborated with Funding the Commons

• Spoke at the main event x PG

• Moderated panel: Isabela Fernandez x Tor, Julio Linares x Poetic Technologies, Kassandra.eth, Liz Steininger x Least Authority, Matan x Ethereum Foundation, moderated by PG & Mykola Siusko x Web3Privacy now

W3PN Hacks

Disruptive hackathon re-defining productive approach to collective tech-imaginaries: anti-bounty, interdisciplinary mentors beyond techies, non-technical bounties, not focused on specific protocol, but problems to be solved.

Wonderful stats

• 423 hackathon sign ups

• 120 hackers

• 34 project submissions

• 29 mentors

• 12 Judges hackathon winners link

Dappcon

recordings: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSsVHWrO8Yh0FJ8ntD0nLa4S7xx0XSbOQ

ETHCluj

meetup link vibes

ETHPrague

meetup participants: Viktor Tron x Swarm, Olexander Kurbatov x Rarimo, Mario Havel x Ethereum Foundation, Vaclav Pavlin x Waku, Leo Gomez x Codex, ​Paul Boes x Circles, GnosisDAO

main event

• New Cypherpunk Generation x mf link

• Panel #1: Mario Havel x EF, Serinko x Nym, Emil x RailgunDAO, Lasha x Rarimo, moderated by Mykola Siusko x Web3Privacy now link

• Panel #2: Alexander Kurbatov x Rarimo, moderated by Mykola Siusko x Web3Privacy now link

ETHDam

Web3privacy Now Meetup x ETHDam 2025 · Luma

Shaping and Defending the Techno-Political Evolution: Open Source, Public Goods, and Grassroots Movements Technology shapes our eras, defining humanity and...

https://luma.com

participants: Sandi Fatic x Calimero, QJ x Ethereum Community Fund, Ameen Soleimani x 0xbow, Tien (local activist), PG x Web3Privacy now

Main event

PG https://youtu.be/YW0VTklTrF4?si=RdfjIs_GmgEyHsYP

MF https://youtu.be/6Qj-b1SKPQs?si=o4xwCDZ8BWM1fqK2

ETHCC

Occupy EthCC · Luma

Ah, Cannes! 245 side events - the opposite what power dynamics of decentralization should be like. We say no to hundreds BD-focused side events. We perform...

https://luma.com

contributors: Migle, Alina, Caolan, Mykola

Participated at third-party events

Made a CypherRave in Berlin

Public Goods Funding X Space

participants: Peter Van Valkenburgh x Coin Center, Andreas x Fileverse, Lefteris Karapetsas x Rotki, Gavin Birch x Namada, Alina Latinina x Web3Privacy now, PG x Web3Privacy now, Ben West

Lecture at University of Naples - Federico II

PG “Crypto as a Political Technology” link

Memathon

https://jokerace.io/contest/polygon/0x69a42939b1db1455e7150b79794d0b392f2b26f9

Protocol Berg

mf x New Cypherpunk Generation link

ETHGlobal

feat @0x_m_f, @jensei_, @FlowTranquil + @0xlizards use-case https://ethglobal.com/showcase/dust-ops-uk2n7

ETHDublin

participants: Vitalik Buterin x Ethereum, Nick Almond x Jito, Maria Paula x Aave, moderated by Mykola Siusko x Web3Privacy now

Cryptorave (Brazil)

Mykola Siusko x W3PN with Daniel Vasquez x Nym on Decolonial Cypherpunk link

d/acc day

Urbe Web3forum x Privacy day

Accelerated Explorer aka Privacy dashboard progress

• milestone unlocked - 700 projects listed

• Road to Explorer v 1.5 https://github.com/web3privacy/explorer-data/discussions/1382

• New UI https://explorer-new-ui.vercel.app/

  contributors: Humbaba, Lucilia Pastore, Mykola

Activated Privacy Builder Pack

• ETHGlobal integration link

• ETHBratislava integration link

contributors: Jensei, Tatiana

Updated Privacy use-case idea Generator

added 50 use-cases from Vitalik Buterin x Ethereum to Harry Halpin x Pcavversaccio x SEAL911

Launched publishing

Zine #01

• Designed

• Printed

• Distributed

  contributors: Vovo, Peter, Mykola, Coin, PG

Book "Privacy in the digital age"

• Got new contributions from 5 authors

• Negotiated with 2 publishing houses

contributors: PG, Audrey Tang, David Chaum, Peter Van Valkenbourgh, Naomi Brockwell, Primavera De Filippi, Fatemeh Fannizadeh, Jaromil Rojo, Andreas Tsamados.

Scaling Academy

Homepage

Web3 Privacy Now Academy is your free pass to mastering privacy in the digital age. 🔥 Learn the essentials-cryptography, human rights, and activism-all in one place.🔐 Take back control of your data, identity, and future.🌍 Join a community that believes privacy isn't just a right-it's a movement. No fluff. No gatekeepers.

https://academy.web3privacy.info

Key stats

• 188 students

• 124 people in the community

• 4 languages

• 6 courses live 5 course in production

• New courses

  • Privacy 101 French link

  • Privacy 101 Spanish link

  • GDPR 101 course link

• Website design fully refurbished

• New Interview section: 20+ interviews taken

• Plus two people in team doing fundraising

contributors: Peter, Michel Bauwens, PG, Nats.

Expanded our media direction

Recorded 25 interviews

Isabela Fernandes x Tor, Vitalik Buterin x Ethereum, Dr. Richard Carback x quip network, Lisa Akselrod x Aztec, Nanak Nihal Khalsa x human.tech, Jacob Czepluch x Phyllax, Loring Harkness x Brainbot, Liz Steininger x Least Authority, Evi Nova x independent developer, Oleksandr Kurbatov x Rarimo, Eugenio Reggianini x European Blockchain Association, Tien x FNV, Joachim Schwerin & Judith De Boer x Alexey Pertsev legal defence, QJ x Ethereum Community Fund, Ameen Soleimani - OxBow, Sandi Fatic x Calimero, Kate Stapleton x Inco

• published interviews 1, 2, 3, 4

• Updated Privacy Landscape map (Q2 2025): link

• Launched a new Cypherpunk Playlist by Wassim Alsindi x 0xsalon txt, listen

• Launched a Radio

contributors: Babybit, Peter, Wassim Alsindi, tree, Coinmandeer, Mykola

Partnerships

Made 14 partnerships across 3 events on 2 continents.

• Crecimiento link

• PSE link

We received & gave grants

Ethereum Foundation decided to support two of our initiatives: Cypherpunk Congress 2 in Buenos Aires & Ethereum Ecosystem Mapping research. And we gave grant to support Wom.xn collective development.

• EF x Ethereum Privacy Mapping Ecosystem link

• WomenX in Privacy link

Stacks

Personal FOSS Stack Explorer

Explore what personal FOSS stacks experts are using

https://stacks.web3privacy.info

Continue to expand free and open-source stack micro-web featuring expert soft/hardware options to explore.

• Jimjim link

• Josh Davila aka The Blockchain Socialist link

Free our branding

• 30+ new posters link

• + stickers + landscape map + t-shirts

New Merch Drop

Web3privacy Now! Shop | Spreadshop

Protect Your Privacy & Elevate Your Style!

https://web3privacy.myspreadshop.net

Q2 was just the beginning. What started as a whisper, “privacy matters”, is becoming a collective, coordinated signal. One that’s now building tools, shaping culture, and distributing resources in defiance of surveillance capitalism. We're not just resisting; we’re building new defaults. From memes to meetups, from research to raves, Web3Privacy Now is where privacy becomes a shared practice, not a product or a feature. Thank you to everyone who contributed, supported, showed up, built, shitposted, or cared.

See you in Q3. Stay human. Encrypt everything.

🖤 W3PN collective

“Trying to raise money for privacy is like selling umbrellas in a drought. You know the rain’s coming, but no one wants to invest until they’re already soaked.”

Last week, a collection of builders, donors, and philosophical troublemakers gathered in a virtual bar known as X Spaces to discuss the noble and bewildering task of funding privacy in a world that keeps confusing it with invisibility.

With Gavin Birch (Luminara, Namada), Peter Van Valkenburgh (Coin Center), Ben West (Pretty Good OSINT Protocol), Andreas (Fileverse), Lefteris Karapetsas (rotki), and our own contributors, - Jensei, Alina Latinina and Mykola Siusko.

Web3Privacy Now

@web3privacy

x.com/i/spaces/1yoKM…

34

9:56 AM • May 22, 2025

What followed was part strategy session, part group therapy, and part existential performance art. The topic? Public goods funding. The subtext? How to keep the lights on without selling your soul to a venture capitalist wearing sunglasses indoors.

Act I: The Economics of Independence (or, Trickledown Privacy and Other Fairy Tales)

You see, most people think public goods work like fairy dust. You sprinkle some donations, flap your arms meaningfully, and out comes privacy for everyone. In practice, it’s more like trying to crowdfund a spellbook while fending off dragons with a pamphlet.

The truth is this:

“Either you build slow and true, or you chase the money and watch your soul slowly wither”

Privacy tools don’t trend. They don’t go viral (unless you count surveillance tools). They don’t meme well, unless you’re a particularly principled lobster.¹

But that doesn’t mean they’re not essential. It just means you’ll have to build like a monk, market like a jester, and fundraise like a pirate.

Act II: The Three Laws of Privacy Funding (As Discovered by People Who Tried)

1. You will hit a wall.

   Not metaphorically. The wall will have names like “KPIs,” “strings attached,” and “we don’t have budget for that”.

2. Don’t take money from just anyone.

   Especially not from mysterious tech princes who think privacy is a feature toggle. Your mission is not a vending machine.

3. You will have to communicate.

   With users, with donors, and with each other. If privacy is your product, then trust is your marketing, and unfortunately, this one doesn’t speak in KPIs.

Lefteris summed it up nicely:

“If you don’t have the persona, you’ll have less traction.”

Which is unfair, really. But so is gravity.

Act III: Tools, Tips, and Acceptable Forms of Madness

Some practical tools emerged, usually mid-rant:

• Start small. Proof of concepts, memes, weird experiments. Privacy isn’t viral, but curiosity is.

• Consider a membership model. Give people a way to chip in regularly, especially if they love the vibes.

• Find angels early. Not the glowing kind with wings. The kind with wallets and a history of backing strange and beautiful things.

• Hire someone to help raise funds. Yes, they’ll take a fee. No, you cannot keep doing this alone.

• Mix and match. Grants, bounties, merch, dev work, public speaking, a traveling cabaret if you must. Survival is patchwork.

  Most importantly:

  “Don’t optimize. Don’t pitch. Just make it obvious you care”.

Act IV: A Word on Hope (and Other Unreliable Narrators)

Throughout the Space, there was an undercurrent of something dangerous: earnestness.

Some still believe in the idea of privacy as a shared right. Some still believe funding can come from people who don’t want to own you. Some even believe, and get this, that we need more naive, angry activists who haven’t yet learned to compromise.

And perhaps that’s the best kind of wisdom we can offer:

Be the kind of person who would get rugged for a good cause. It won’t make you rich. But it might just help the rest of us stay free.

And if you thought this tale ended with a neat moral and a donor-shaped deus ex machina, think again. The next chapter is TAPE_02, unofficially titled “Nobody Gives a Shit About Women or Privacy”, because subtlety is for people with marketing budgets.

It’s a conversation between myself and PG from Web3Privacy Now, who two years ago wandered into the woods of funding idealistic tech and somehow made it out alive (albeit with a slight eye twitch). We talk about the usual suspects: budgets, BD calls, and the philosophical nightmare of trying to define “alignment” without descending into PowerPoint decks.

Also making an appearance: Womxn in Web3 Privacy, or @winprivacy if you’re short on characters and long on vision. Think of it as the feminist infrastructure division of the resistance, incorporating research, Safe Events Initiative and Sisterhood programs.

Spoiler: there are no easy answers, but at least there’s company.

¹ Lobby Lobsters, for the uninitiated, is what happens when fundraising meets seafood NFTs.

Web3Privacy Now is evolving from a signal into a structure. Here’s everything we made happen this Q1.

Funding the Movement: 10k for +80 Privacy Projects

In collaboration with Drips Network, we launched a funding round that distributed $10,000 to more than 80 privacy-focused initiatives. From experimental tooling to educational content and grassroots campaigns, the funds were allocated directly and transparently.

This marks a milestone in our goal to democratize access to resources for those building the future of online freedom.

Read the full report on Mirror.

Contributors: Jensei, Mykola

$100,000 Donation from Namada

We are proud to announce a 100,000 USD donation from the Namada Foundation to support our 2025 ecosystem development efforts. These funds will support education, events, and infrastructure aimed at decentralizing privacy tooling.

It was our biggest one-time donation to date. Big love to Namada community & everyone involved in pushing privacy advocacy forward 🤍

Welcoming New Contributors

We opened an official contributor call, inviting writers, technologists, organizers, and advocates into our core workflows. Shoot us an email if this sparks joy! ✨

Web3Privacy Now

@web3privacy

We are searching for people who can strengther our movement!

Project manager (full-time / project based)
Researcher (project based)
Fundraising manager (full-time / part-time)
Designer (ocassional tasks)

DM &/or web3privacynow 'at' protonmail.com

20

7:59 AM • Mar 27, 2025

IRL Meetup in Bucharest

Community is at the heart of all we do. We hosted a meetup in Bucharest, during ETHBucharest, connecting with local builders and advocates to expand our network in Eastern Europe.

The crowd followed up talks on privacy, memathon, and how to protect yourself as a political activist, with a few beers and interconnections.

Shepherd: Andreea

Community Giveth Campaign

Our Giveth campaign continues to provide a transparent, crypto-native way for supporters to back our work directly. Every contribution fuels an independent, privacy-first web3.

Donate and share to support us 🤍

Contributors: Jensei

Personal stacks

Privacy personal stacks are growing and populating.

Personal FOSS Stack Explorer

Explore what personal FOSS stacks experts are using

https://stacks.web3privacy.info

Contributors: agonist, Mykola, mf

Academy Is Open

We began prototyping W3PN Academy, an educational initiative combining hands-on learning with privacy philosophy. Early drops featured content on anonymous on-chain interactions, governance, and self-defense in the digital realm, and even a mini course on how to meme for digital resistance.

Meme Crash Course from Academy

Meme the system

Make memes. Win prizes. Fight surveillance. Learn how to create viral, punchy memes that spread privacy culture - no design skills needed. This quick course gets you ready to join the Web3Privacy Now Memethon (April 1-22) with $3,000+ in prizes up for grabs.

https://academy.web3privacy.info

Glitch the System: A Tactical Guide to Confusing AI

Glitch the System: A Crash Course in AI Disruption

AI tracks faces, outfits, and even online behavior-but you don't have to make it easy for them. In this bite-sized crash course, you'll learn: ✅ How AI links your face across platforms (and how to break the match) ✅ Which fashion, filters, and accessories disrupt tracking ✅ How AI scans metaverse avatars & crypto wallets-and how to stay private ⚡ No fluff, just action: Each lesson is under two minutes, packed with quick, practical tactics you can start using right now.

https://academy.web3privacy.info

We also have a Spanish version of the courses, with the help of our lovely friends over at Womxn in Web3 Privacy.

Privacy 101 - Español

Introduction to Privacy

https://academy.web3privacy.info

Contributors: Peter, PG, Mykola

Explorer Featured on Ethereum Dashboards

Our project, the W3PN Explorer (aka the Privacy Dashboard), was officially featured on ethereumdashboards.com. The dashboard provides a curated overview of privacy projects, protocols, tooling, and research across the ecosystem.

See the Explorer below ⬇️

Contributors: mf, Mykola, Shan, Ethanolo

W3PN X Spaces

We kicked off a recurring series of X Spaces to foster public conversation around privacy. In April, we hosted guests such as Jarrad Hope (Status) and EUCI to talk privacy, culture, and networked resistance.

Web3Privacy Now

@web3privacy

x.com/i/spaces/1BdxY…

36

11:38 AM • Apr 21, 2025

These spaces are becoming a key voice in the web3 discourse on surveillance, governance, and autonomy, and give a human touch to the digital resistance.

Contributors: Alina

Memathon Officially Launches

Why Memathon? Because memes are fast, viral, and impossible to ignore. They compress complex ideas into something you feel before you even understand. While policy papers gather dust and whitepapers get skimmed, memes get shared, remixed, embedded in culture. In the fight for privacy, memes are how we bypass the noise. They speak the language of the internet. They hit where attention lives. In a world where surveillance is the norm, memes are the backdoor to the collective mind.

We opened bounty categories, selected judges, and launched a dedicated portal on Fileverse to manage submissions and memberships. You can find memes on JokeRace and on X under #memathon.

Web3Privacy Now

@web3privacy

x.com/i/spaces/1BdGY…

37

11:30 AM • Apr 14, 2025

Listen to the X space we hosted to talk about the cultural resistance through shitposting, the anatomy of a great meme and the philosophy behind it.

Contributor: Alina

Launch of the Official Merch Shop

In Q1, we dropped the W3PN Merch Shop, allowing our community to sport encrypted style and fund grassroots initiatives at the same time. From embroidered hoodies to cheeky stickers, it’s privacy with a punch

Contributors: Coinmandeer

Berlin Hackathon Applications Open

In preparation for our next big event, we opened applications for the 2025 W3PN Hackathon. The call is open to developers, designers, researchers, and rogue builders.

Contributors: mf, Kitty

Hackathon Use-Case Generator

Generate ideas curated by our community and experts.

Contributors: Giacomo, Mykola

Documentary Released

The first episode “Stay Human” of our documentary series dropped, offering a glimpse into the faces, voices, and values shaping the movement. This series will highlight builders, whistleblowers, and activists within the global privacy community.

This episode highlights the importance to be a human in the internet age. This is the story of how it all began and the values ​​that drive us.

Contributors: BabyBit, Jensei

What’s in the Works?

Congress II

​Congress I was a blast: 2000 people, 50 speakers, 30 partners, Chelsea Manning & Vitalik Buterin speaking, Audrey Tang in the audience!

​We decided to make a sequel and strengthen Cypherpunk values, culture and actions within the Ethereum ecosystem, and we officially released Congress II.

Contribute: Speak, Partner

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress #2

16 Nov 2025 - First Congress was a blast: 2000 people, 50 speakers, 30 partners, Chelsea Manning & Vitalik Buterin speaking, Audrey Tang in the audience! We decided to make a sequel and strengthen Cypherpunk values, culture and actions within the Ethereum ecosystem

https://congress.web3privacy.info

New Academy Course Drop

Commons, Cosmolocalism & Web3 with **Michel Bauwens **(P2P Foundation). Going over decentralization beyond markets, coordination as civilization, real Web3, rooted & regenerative. 1 hour micro-course and a live session with Michel!

Join the Telegram Chat

Book in the Works

We are curating our first installment of a book series designed to raise awareness about privacy, justice, and freedom within the digital realm. The series aims to engage the general public by transforming complex concepts into accessible topics while delivering compelling perspectives.

This first publication will feature contributions from frontline advocates of privacy and digital rights, as well as scholars, inventors, philosophers, and lawyers.

It will offer insights through carefully crafted chapters, an introduction, infographics, QR codes, and even memes!

Among the contributors, you will find names like Audrey Tang, Peter Van Valkenburgh, Naomi Brockwell, David Chaum, and more.

Contributors: PG

Research Loading…

Our new research “Understanding Ethereum Users’ Risk Perceptions and Privacy Practices” investigates Ethereum users’ mental models, privacy skills, and risk perceptions in the face of growing surveillance and behavioral manipulation online. By conducting qualitative research, including semi-structured interviews and expert input, the study will map how end users understand, experience, and navigate privacy on Ethereum.

The aim is to offer user-centric insights and actionable recommendations for building practical, trusted privacy solutions, supporting Ethereum’s mission to remain secure, censorship-resistant, and aligned with its original cryptographic roots.

The project is already underway and connected to Web3Privacy Now’s ecosystem.

Q1 was just the beginning

What started as a whisper, “privacy matters”, is becoming a collective, coordinated signal. One that’s now building tools, shaping culture, and distributing resources in defiance of surveillance capitalism.

We're not just resisting; we’re building new defaults. From memes to meetups, from research to raves, Web3Privacy Now is where privacy becomes a shared practice, not a product or a feature.

Thank you to everyone who contributed, supported, showed up, built, shitposted, or cared. See you in Q2.

Stay human. Encrypt everything.

🖤 W3PN Cats

The European Union stands at a regulatory crossroads.  In 2018, GDPR became the global gold standard for privacy. But in 2025, it risks becoming the hammer that shatters public blockchains — unless we act.

The newly released EDPB Guidelines 02/2025 do not just challenge developers — they fundamentally threaten the existence of public blockchains. The European Data Protection Board explicitly suggests that when deletion of individual data is not possible, the entire blockchain may need to be deleted. This is not a drill. That’s like calling for the deletion of the internet.

You wouldn't delete the internet to enforce privacy. But they are now seriously considering deleting blockchains.

At the European Crypto Initiative (EUCI), we’ve spent years fighting for decentralised digital rights. Today, we’re sounding the alarm: the time to act is now.

What’s at Stake? Five Critical Points Every Builder Should Know:

The current GDPR framework — and its reform process — is dangerously out of step with decentralised systems:

🔥 The Blockchain Kill Switch: Regulators propose entire blockchain deletion if personal data erasure is impossible.

🚫 Public Chains Under Attack: Guidelines "favour" permissioned blockchains over public, decentralised ones.

⛓️ Identify Your Controller: Blockchains must establish a "data controller," fundamentally clashing with decentralisation.

🌐 Cross-Border Complexity: Globally distributed nodes trigger GDPR transfer headaches.

🤖 Smart Contract Risks: Automated smart contracts may require human intervention and appeal processes, even post-execution.

🕵️ Deletes the Progress, made with Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs):  practically ignores the existence of ZKPs and homomorphic encryption as valid tools for compliance.

What This Means for Ethereum and Other Public Chains

The EDPB guidelines create existential challenges for projects like Ethereum:

• Potential Blockchain Deletion: If even one piece of personal data can't be erased, the whole chain could be targeted.

• Push Toward Permissioned Chains: Public chains must justify their existence against a regulator’s default bias.

• Persistent Identifiers: Ethereum’s account-based model could be classified as personal data.

• Cross-Border Node Problems: Validators worldwide may trigger complex GDPR transfer rules.

• Smart Contracts in Danger: Automated smart contracts risk violating GDPR’s automated decision-making provisions.

The Time to Shape the Future is Now

The European Data Protection Board’s public consultation on the new blockchain guidelines is open until June 30, 2025. Without urgent input, these draft rules could become the enforcement standard, putting public blockchains at existential risk in Europe. We have a narrow window to ensure that privacy-preserving blockchain technology doesn't get regulated out of existence.

Here's How You Can Help

We will soon enter a critical feedback window in the legislative timeline and want to prepare in advance. EUCI is coordinating the Web3 community's voice, and we need yours in it. Here's how you can get involved:

1. Submit Your Use Case or Comment

   We are building a GDPR Reform Feedback Repository with real-world examples from builders. If your project uses PETs, ZKPs, or operates without a clear data controller, tell us what needs fixing. Join our Signal group and submit your case: https://signal.group/#CjQKIFytj2mPisij9AdnQA4bQMKLFPAjcQ_ULXRRzkis0WDiEhBeEX4VMx-UT811iE7nSi_C

2. Meet the Policymakers With Us

   EUCI will be meeting members of the European Parliament, national regulators, and Commission staff. We’re bringing your stories with us. Want to present directly or endorse a submission? Reach out. Contact: info@eu.ci

3. Support and Get Your Name on the EUCI GDPR Submission

   We are preparing a joint Web3 community submission to the EDPB. Add your name to show that builders, researchers, and privacy advocates support decentralised solutions. Make your voice heard! Contact: info@eu.ci or through the Signal group.

This Isn’t Just About GDPR. It’s About the Future of the Internet

We don’t fix this now, and we’ll be living in a Europe where public blockchains are treated as legally noncompliant by default — unless retrofitted with centralised chokepoints. That’s not privacy. That’s regression.

In this pivotal moment, Web3Privacy Now and the European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) are joining forces to defend the future of decentralised, privacy-preserving technologies in Europe and beyond. Our collaboration goes beyond this call to action — together, we are working on building a united front to advocate for privacy, decentralisation and innovation. We have the expertise. We have the community. What we need right now is mobilisation. Let’s not allow bureaucracy to erase the future of decentralised, privacy-preserving infrastructure.

Let's build a Europe where privacy and decentralisation aren't criminalised — they're protected.

For full details, see the EDPB "Guidelines 02/2025 on Processing of Personal Data Through Blockchain Technologies."

Contact the European Crypto Initiative at info@eu.ci for more information or to get involved.

Author: Vyara Savova
Editor: Andreea, PG

What is privacy, really? I’ve been trying to answer that question for years. As someone who’s worked in communications for 15 years, and now leads the Web3Privacy Now Academy, my job has been to explain complex ideas—often deeply technical ones—to people in a way that makes sense. And yet, even after years inside the privacy space, I still struggle to explain what privacy is in a way that lands. Not just factually, but emotionally.

When I talk to people outside the space, I often find myself in half-hour conversations—layering metaphors, examples, real-world consequences—just to help someone understand why privacy matters. Unlike security, which can be summed up in a sentence (“No one steals your money”), privacy resists simplicity. It's not about one clear threat. It's about something deeper and harder to name.

That tension led me to a thought that I now want to explore:

**                                             What if privacy is the freedom of online behavior?**

What is freedom?

We often talk about freedom of speech—this sacred right to say what we believe without punishment. But online, even when no one silences your words, everything else is being tracked: every click, scroll, hesitation, misstep. Everything has consequences. And that raises the question—can we truly say we are free?

In political philosophy, Isaiah Berlin distinguished between “negative freedom” (freedom from interference) and “positive freedom” (freedom to act, to realize one's potential). When we apply that lens to digital life, it becomes clear that privacy is not just a negative freedom—it's not just about stopping surveillance. It’s also a positive freedom: the precondition for agency, exploration, and creativity online. It’s a freedom of behavior.

Without privacy, we don’t just lose control over our data—we lose the invisible space in which we think, move, and evolve without being watched. Just as surveillance chills speech in authoritarian regimes, invisible digital tracking shapes behavior in subtle and powerful ways. The platforms don’t tell you how to act—but you learn, quickly, what content gets rewarded, what tone gets amplified, and what kind of person the system favors. It’s the absence of the freedom of behavior.

This isn’t dystopian fiction. It’s now.

Take job applications. Some hiring platforms track how quickly you fill out forms, whether you apply late at night, or if you copy-paste too much text. These small behavioral signals are fed into scoring systems that quietly rank you before a human even looks at your name. No one told you the rules—but you’re being judged all the same. It’s the absence of the freedom of behavior.

Or pricing. You might shop online and see a product for fifty euros, while someone else sees it for forty, just because they live in a different neighborhood or use a different device. The system has decided, based on your behavior and profile, how much you’re willing to pay. You never had a chance to negotiate. It’s the absence of the freedom of behavior.

“You’re not choosing who to love”

Dating apps? Same thing. Behind the scenes, they score your profile based on photos, grammar, how others engage with you—and then show you a filtered version of the world. You’re not choosing who to love. You’re choosing from those whom the algorithm decided you should see. It’s the absence of the freedom of behavior.

These examples reflect a shift in power that’s been deeply explored by Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term surveillance capitalism. She describes a world where human experience is turned into behavioral data, which is then sold to predict—and increasingly shape—our future actions. According to Zuboff, we are not just users of digital platforms; we are raw material for behavioral prediction markets.

This is also where my work with the Web3Privacy Now Academy comes in. The Academy emerged out of a simple realization: there’s no single, trusted educational space focused on Web3 privacy. So we built one. A space to gather scattered resources, produce accessible content, create courses, define terms, and build a foundation of understanding—not just for developers or privacy advocates, but for anyone who wants to explore the topic.

Can we finally get rid of anxiety?

And yet—even within the Academy, and even with years of communications experience—it’s still hard to explain privacy in a way that sticks. That’s why this metaphor of freedom of behavior has become meaningful to me. It’s not just a way to simplify a concept—it’s a way to frame digital life in terms of autonomy, not anxiety.

This mirrors the political urgency described by Timothy Snyder, who reminds us that freedom isn’t something we automatically inherit—it’s something we practice. He writes about positive freedom as a form of resistance: not just the right to be left alone, but the right to act, to choose, to shape our lives consciously. In a digital world increasingly driven by profiling and prediction, privacy becomes the architecture of that freedom.

We often frame privacy as protection—something defensive, something we need to shield ourselves. But I think it’s also something creative. Privacy gives us the space to think without shaping ourselves for an audience. It gives us the freedom to ask dumb questions, make strange choices, and grow in unpredictable directions. It’s not just about hiding—it’s about becoming. And that’s the freedom of behavior

And if freedom of speech was one of the great pillars of the twentieth century, maybe freedom of behavior is what the twenty-first will demand. Not just the right to speak—but the right to move, explore, and exist in digital space without being reduced to a prediction.

Maybe privacy isn’t the opposite of openness? Maybe it’s what makes openness possible in the first place?

The term has been coined by women Jude Milhon. But it has been hijacked by white American men. And the rest was a glorious creation myth’s history.

Fast forward. 32 years after The Cypherpunk Manifesto… Internet grew to unprecedented places, dreamed cryptographic tools has been implemented, hacktivism culture is blooming, we even have a first internet-native generation at play! Not even talking about Snowden, Manning, Anonymous, wars, surveillance capitalism, pandemic, mobile phone, AI, or “digital cash”.

Don’t you feel an urgency to crack original myth and reboot it? So historical cypherpunk roots will enable progress, but won’t lock it down within an “old world”, so centric around the States.

Chasing shadows of the past

This essay is a call to unlock imagination of the radical cypherpunk futures around the world - an invitation to make culture accessible to more people from different countries & continents, cultures & origins, devices & degrees, communities & affiliations.

Example of what impacts cypherpunk conditions:

I propose to diversify cypherpunk concept by mediating on a new type of cypherpunks that already exist in the world, embody original ethos, but push the boundaries of techno-political activism forward.

Close your eyes for a moment, try to imagine new just world where everyone can become a cypherpunk…

ChinaCypher - local cypherpunk

purpose: protect communication (1on1 & communal) from internal surveillance actors.

tools: Signal &/or Matrix,, Proton, Brave

Recently Chinese Ethereum community members approached us in need to boost privacy education behind local community.

Covid-19 increased surveillance, and raised alert within government ability to dominant both digital & physical space. Here cryptography & privacy-boosting tools can help protect millions of people.

Yisi Liu from Mask Network

ChinaCypher can be a young Ethereum community member exploring human rights, privacy & secure online cross-border communication (remember, that crypto is a global phenomenon).

bottlenecks:

• language barrier - English isn’t the first language

• cultural differences in a cross-cultural communities

note: did you know that many Chinese people participated in AssangeDAO & helped to significantly impact Julian’s defence campaign?

AccidentalCypher - one-time cypherpunk

purpose: wants to have a healthy internet experience.

tools: AdBlock, VPN, Brave

Check the most popular privacy tools in the world. AdBlocker will be #1 - because advertisement pollution distracts us from what matters, and drives into never-ending consumerism. So millions of people empowered themselves with practical & simple tooling like plugins to make internet life more meaningful.

AccidentalCypher uses cryptography & privacy in a plug’n’play way. It’s not a life commitment, but case-by-case scenario:

• travels into UAE - uses VPN

• wants to decrease cookies - uses Brave browser

From time to time they advocate for privacy, but in a non preaching way - just occasional recommendations.

bottlenecks

• technical complexity - don’t have time to read manual or watch long-explainers

• UI-dependency - habitual connection with a simple screens & big buttons (anti-CLI)

FemCypher - “killjoy” cypherpunk

purpose: protect communication (1on1 & communal) from internal surveillance actors. tools: Signal &/or Matrix, VPN, Proton, Brave, mixnet

There aren’t so many “official” female cypherpunks. While women actively contributed to the freedom of press, exposed internet surveillance, became whistleblowers, & even were imprisoned for protecting social justice.

Chelsea Manning is a perfect example of a female cypherpunk. OG of internet anti-surveillance, contributing to Nym mixnet, leaking to Wikileaks, you name it.

bottlenecks

• patriarchal culture

• peer exclusion mentality (how many female CTOs are there?)

Observation

• 1993 required coding-first approach (tools weren’t mainstream)

• 2025 requires advocacy, education, community building and nurturing around collective privacy-focused tooling usage. Think of this as a low-code or no-code environment.

WellCypher - caring cypherpunk

purpose: protect communication (1on1 & communal) from internal surveillance actors.

tools: Signal &/or Matrix, VPN, Proton, Brave

WellCypher is a person preoccupied with an internet well-being.

She is aware of internet harmful impact on attention span, misinformation, negative thinking acceleration & so on. She clearly understand Big Tech’s role in the state of internet 24’.

WellCypher wants to protect themselves & family from the constant urge to have a screen from the first thing in the morning to a bedtime’s endless scroll.

They experiment with the different tools to decrease internet noise, boost productive time, care about sleep, ability to read books & concentrate on a one subject. Through experimentation processes they came to different tools like OpenOffice to AdBlock.

bottlenecks

• long time to search & test meaningful tools

• different privacy-readiness within the family members (from newbies to mid-tech savvy people)

TransCypher

purpose: protect communication (1on1 & communal) from external bad actors.

tools: Signal, Google Drive, Proton, Brave

McKenzie Wark is a philosopher who wrote Hacker Manifesto among many other books.

Recently she curated Hacker manifesto’s anniversary E-flux mag (influential contemporary art magazine) opening “hacking” concept to different disciplines like “smartphone illegal repair culture” in China.

She is a scholar who supposedly use private messaging tools & is actively engage in the pro-transgender rights community.

bottlenecks:

• Google Office dependency - editors, academia & publishers use it massively for collaboration

• traditional social media dependency - Facebook, Twitter etc are tools for connection with the community, people interested in transformative justice

PoorCypher - low-income cypherpunk

purpose: protect communication (1on1 & communal) from external bad actors.

tools: Signal, Google Drive, WhatsApp

PoorCypher has a basic laptop, cheap Chinese phone & limited internet connection.

He lives in Texas. Has internet connectivity by megabytes (prepaid), occasionally has unlimited internet in public places.

WhatsApp offers E2EE and a low-bandwidth connectivity with peers. That can be use as a means of collaboration in relations with its massive adoption and low-threat actor’s activism.

bottlenecks

• low income - can’t afford new laptops & smartphones

• no peers - lack of community to educate & support on a privacy-focused journey

• limited internet - fragmented access to knowledge

• non-technical - can’t assess open-source x github culture, install GrapheneOS etc

IndigenousCypher - spiritual & non-linear cypherpunks

purpose: protect community & sovereignty from both external actors (governments) and neo-colonialism

tools: Signal, Google Drive, WhatsApp

IndigenousCypher is a “subject” of neo-colonial “barbarian” projection. Meanwhile they are actively supported by hacktivists helping to document deforestation with drones, use mesh-networks for local collaboration etc.

There’s a tendency in art circles to study indigenous communities and practices. Whole Biennale are dedicated to “indigenous gaze”. Giving technology to indigenous activists - invitation to non-linear thinking.

UACypher - self-defence cypherpunk

purpose: protect communication (1on1 & communal) from internal surveillance actors.

tools: Signal, VPN, Proton, Brave, AdBlock

The Ukrainian-Russian war accelerated necessity for an online-safety (both within Ukraine & especially on an occupied territories). Suddenly thousands of people learned how to store (or rather, not to store) sensitive data on the phone, not erase all data, because it can look suspicious etc.

UACypher can be a volunteers who fundraise for a humanitarian cause. They want to feel emotionally stable online (in times of informational warfare), build a meaningful collaboration with peers and decrease amount of misinformation.

As a non-technical person UACypher prefers tools with appealing interfaces, simple to use. From AdBlock to Signal messenger. They are preoccupied with a secure communication, but Signal is enough since they have different age groups in their non-profit. We cover privacy-personas impacted by Ukrainian-Russian war here

GovCypher - institutional cypherpunk

purpose: empower civic society while working from within a government

tools: mix of corporate SaaS, plus open-source, and custom coordination tooling at scale (based on government issued IDs).

Does cypherpunk loses its values once working with government? What happens when cypherpunk integrates cryptography, hacktivism and coding into governmental body? Especially, when large civic society is protected from misinformation, or potential disruption by big players like China?

Unlike heroes of the past, some talented hacktivists & cryptographers have chosen state affairs as an actionable way to shape local & global digital landscape. Think of them as ambassadors of encryption and ethics of data usage within the system.

bottlenecks

• governments can influence individuality and corrupt personal ethics

• every large system requires tradeoff on the road to cypherpunk standards implementation

• not every cryptographer or activist is good in state management and complex negotiations

Citizen Lab that tracked NSO Group’s spyware by using cryptographic, surveillance, and security tooling is based within university (public institution). They serve society and practically empower security standards within your devices on a global scale (example: Apple or WhatsApp pushed updates within their devices and software).

Summary

Cypherpunk culture is locked within the old cabinets of American men above 60s. Many original cypherpunks are dead. Even Cypherpunk manifesto has been published 30 years ago.

Diversity directions

Decolonial thinkers propose frameworks of “unlearning”. They help to be free from mental concepts of privilege, class, history. It’s an invitation to break the chains, and let imagination spark changes related to geo, age, gender, income, beliefs, habits, culture, politics, mind, body, communities…

Open question

“Cypherpunks write code” manifesto says, but its challenged these days…

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists, - Andrej Karpathy

Maximalist approach will be no to “vibe coding” or “give away code responsibilities to LLMs”. But people are different. And many will benefit from self-hosted LLMs, and beyond.

How cypherpunks x LLMs will look alike? How it can still be in-sync with original values, but unlock access and potential to local cypher-activists?

Cypherpunk 2.0 transition checklist

1. Closely observe local context: how economics, politics, tech adoption and customs impact encrypted and privacy-focused tools.

2. Imagine different cypherpunk scenario: smaller or even granular - performing cypherpunk ritual via E2EE Signal with one contact is enough for a start.

3. Not everyone is a Snowden. You or your community don’t need to make cryptographic tooling, but have free access to them - also enough.

4. Imagine totally radical cyborg-cypherpunks, otaku-cypherpunks, or even sifpunks.

5. Radical futurisms will belong to non-anthropocentric creatures, but rather kinship between fungi-alikes and biosphere. Cypherpunks will be part of bio-techno-scene on the ruins of capitalism.

Radical cypherpunk imagination has its home - Cypherpunk Congress.

Continue diving into Cypherpunk 2.0 imagination: Make Cypherpunk - one Ethereum at a time article

Mykola Siusko, Web3Privacy now

Useful literature

• Anna Tsing - The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

• Chelsea E. Manning - README.txt

• McKenzie Wark - A Hacker Manifesto

• Various - e-flux Issue #146 A Hacker Manifesto at Twenty

• Nicolas Nova - A Bestiary of The Anthropocene

• Corinna Lenhardt - Cyberpunk and Indigenous Futurisms

• Rasheedah Phillips - Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time

• Audrey Tang, E. Glen Weyl & co - PLURALITY: The future of collaborative technology and democracy

• Ronald J. Deibert - Chasing Shadows Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy

p.s. Dr. Ambelin Kwaymullina:

Through the paintings that follow, I explore non-linear time; the nature of knowing in Aboriginal worldviews; and the processes by which true futures can be reached in the form of nurturing relationships that do not embody the unequal dealings that have marked the past.

With the conclusion of Privacy Proof 2024 Awards, we have partnered with Drips to co-create a reward structure aimed directly towards the projects that have been nominated by the community (70+ GitHub repositories and 6 Ethereum wallets addresses).

—

TLDR

Help us fund and spread memes of production for privacy!

Are you a project owner?

1. Claim Your Repos: Connect your wallet to the Drips app to claim your project on Optimism Drips.

2. Report Issues: Flag repo/address concerns directly to web3privacy [email] or X dm

3. Configure Funding: Add and support your maintainers and dependencies with a portion of your funds.

Are you a privacy supporter?

Donate: Help sustain privacy projects - your funds will reach key builders.

—

WTF is Drips?

Drips is a decentralized funding protocol that enables continuous, transparent, and programmable financial support for open-source projects. Instead of relying on one time donations, contributors can set up ongoing funding streams, ensuring that builders receive sustainable support over time.

Drips allows projects to allocate a portion of their funds further to their dependencies, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem - enabling more than $1.5M in funding dripped! Made possible by a talented team from Radworks focusing on open-source code development.

How the "Drips for Privacy" Campaign Works?

1. Project Selection: After careful consideration and community-driven Privacy Proof 2024 Awards nominations we have put together 3 lists:

   • Favourite Pro-Privacy Project

   • Exciting Innovation

   • Major News or Key Event

2. Project Onboarding: The projects in the lists can claim their project on Drips on Optimism and configure which maintainers and dependencies they want to share their funds with.

3. Community and Partners Call to Action: Supporters of privacy initiatives can donate funds directly to the Drip List created on Optimism Network.

4. Sustainable Support: In addition to one-time donations, or specific time limited rounds, Drips also allows for continuous funding. Any time (from the deployment) the Drip List will be open and distributing funds according to the set list for projects selected in 2024: Become a supporter.

Check out the results of the 2024 awards of each category below:

Projects

News & events

Exciting innovation

Doxxer

Web3Privacy Now and Drips invite repository administrators to claim their projects and set up dependencies (optional), privacy advocates to help us spread the word, and partners and philanthropists to support and donate to the cause.

Together, we can build a more private, secure, and decentralized internet.

Useful links

Web3Privacy now - collective fostering privacy & freedom in the web3.
Drips - an ecosystem for supporting any repo on GitHub.
Radworks - a platform that supports developers to host, collaborate on, and reward open-source code using decentralized tools and networks.

However, as we transition into the digital age, these foundations are rapidly eroding.

The rise of data-driven economies and algorithmic systems—controlled by powerful entities driven by profit and influence—erodes individual agency, control, and self-determination. At the same time, it imposes new epistemic frameworks, reshaping how we engage in democratic processes, participate in markets, construct our identities, and connect with one another.

“The rapid spread of information online, out of context and against our privacy expectations, has too often eroded our communities, driven out our cultural heritage, and created a global monoculture.” Tang & Weyl, 2024

Reclaiming Human Agency in an Algorithmic World

In today’s world, technology stands at the apex of epistemics, transforming nearly every aspect of our lives into an object of technological knowledge and control. This unchecked visibility into human thought and behavior enables unprecedented levels of surveillance and manipulation.

Screens have become the dominant lens through which we understand ourselves and the world around us, offering colorful and catching alternate realities or simulations, reshaping perceptions and influencing decisions on an unprecedented scale.

“We celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us.
- Shoshana Zuboff, 2019

Redefining Privacy Beyond Data

Data protection has failed.

We have lost control over our personal information, largely because we willingly trade it for convenience. We use services designed to profit from our data, unaware of the cost. Yet, when we attempt to reclaim our privacy through anonymity tools, we are treated not as individuals protecting a right, but as criminals hiding a crime.
- Alexis Roussell

To reclaim privacy, we must redefine it—not as mere data ownership or protection, but as the foundation of true autonomy. Privacy is not just freedom from control; it is the power to shape our own meaning, free from imposed narratives.

When did we grant corporations and institutions the authority to know us, label us, and shape our identities and political decisions with more power than we ourselves possess? - Meredith Whittaker

Caring for Freedom: Defining What Truly Matters

If we see freedom only in opposition—only as resistance—we remain trapped in a reactive cycle, forever fighting against what we fear rather than building what we believe in.

We cannot defeat manipulation and control without first defining what we stand for.

Without a clear vision of the good, "evil" becomes nothing more than a shifting excuse, dictated by convenience and impulse—leaving us vulnerable to manipiulate.
- Timothy Snyder

The most effective way to challenge the epistemic authority of entities that claim the right to define us, they way we connect, co-create meaning, and express our political beliefs, next to developing better policies, is to opt out. We must turn to existing solutions that reflect our values and drive the change we all deserve.

The Impact of Care Surpasses the Power of Cypher

The past 30 years of relentless effort and innovation should have made one thing clear: innovation and hacktivism alone won’t change the world.

Cypherpunks can build the tools, but to change the world, those tools must be used. Reaching the masses requires designers, marketers, writers, journalists, artists, and social scientists. Their work must be protected and legitimized—this is where lawyers, policymakers, politicians, and NGOs come in, shaping the legal and regulatory landscape. And to give their movement depth and staying power, they need the intellectual foundations provided by academics, philosophers, and sociologists.

Real change isn’t just about code—it’s about culture, law, and society. True impact comes from care and collaboration.

From Cypherpunk to Carepunk: lets unite-only together are we strong.

Efforts to restrain Surveillance Capitalism are scattered among communities, professions and perspectives.

We have fantastic scholars, researchers, advocates who are focused on privacy, others who are focused on disinformation, others who are focused on the nexus with democracy - Shosana Zuboff

Divisiveness runs deep in our society. Leaders thrive on fear-mongering and divide-and-conquer tactics, while our tech-driven world offers fewer chances for genuine human connection. As facilitators, leaders, and conveners, we play a crucial role in creating spaces for solidarity and meaningful relationships.

This matters because the solution to [surveillance capitalism / centralization / corruption / injustice…] isn’t a one-size-fits-all killer app—it’s a diverse ecosystem of perspectives, skills, and actions working together.

Let’s Forge and Empower Relationships of care

To address the challenges of our time, we must unite and harness our collective force. This can only be achieved by fostering understanding and solidarity, building bridges, and creating shared vocabularies.

Not everyone writes code or has the time to navigate the complexities of self-sovereign technologies. But many share the ideals behind them—and would join the cause if given the opportunity.

Let’s make cypherpunk ethos impactful. Let’s reframe it through positive narratives and practical solutions that resonate with the broader public so to drive social and political change. Together.

People act on what they understand and value. Let’s meet them there.

By making privacy accessible and relevant, we can unite voices from all walks of life—not just tech—expanding the movement’s reach and impact.

This is why we must move beyond cypherpunk and embrace a broader framework: carepunk. By welcoming diverse perspectives, skills, and communities, we can advance freedom in this digital era.

A definition of Carepunk: the New Comprehensive Resistance

CAREPUNK fuses these forces into a ethos that resists systems reducing human agency to a commodity.

It champions autonomy, mutual aid, and defiance against exploitation; demanding a redistribution of power and responsibility throught a pro-positive and practical action.

Carepunk is about a radical and practical reimagining of society—one where autonomy, solidarity, and community take precedence over exploitation and neglect. This transformation begins with the individual, extending to family, community, and society. It starts with you: staying true to your principles, values, and caring for them.

Conclusion: The Journey Ahead

To safeguard the fundamental principles that have historically protected our rights, it is imperative for individuals to actively engage and collaborate in finding more effective ways to advocate for freedom in the contemporary digital landscape.

The challenge of our time is to balance between leveraging the immense potential of technology but ensuring that this does not come at the expense of privacy, autonomy, and justice.

Technology is the most powerful force transforming our world…and remains our single greatest lever to shape our collective future… Reality is defined not just by who we are, but how we connect. — Tang & Weyl, Plurality book, 2024

The fight for privacy is the fight for autonomy, dignity, and the preservation of what it means to be human in the digital age.

Welcome to the conversation. The future depends on it.

-PG

Expert selections showed diversity within the privacy stack from deGoogle OS to open-source Docs alternative. Moreover, ZK use-cases are on the raise within email & passport, transactional privacy still receive lots of attention (Railgun, Fluidkey), new mainnets like Penumbra got well-deserved attention. Let’s explore Privacy Proof winners together!

“Privacy Proof” is an annual awards facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective. It aims to feature key projects, news, innovations & doxxers of the market selected by 90+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from Vitalik Buterin to Zooko behind the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun, Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All contributions are public & can be found on X & Fileverse

And Key News and Events of the year award goes to…

Winner

GrapheneOS - Open source privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.

Second place

DarkFi - an L1 for anonymous engineering: the emerging art of building privacy-first applications

Third place

ddocs / Fileverse - onchain space for online collaboration.

Detailed overview

• 51 projects

• 12 non-Web3 solutions

• 8 dapps

• 4 messengers/chats

• 4 protocols

• 4 identity-related

• 3 wallets

• 2 VPNs

• 2 OS from Tails to Graphene

• 2 AI-related

• 2 mixnets from Nym to HOPR

• 2 research-projects

Longlist to explore

1. Monero - privacy-focused cryptocurrency

2. Akash Chat - AI Chat without any tracking

3. Wassabi Wallet - bitcoin walllet focused on privacy (DYOR)

4. Penumbra - L1 on Cosmos

5. GrapheneOS - deGoogle OS

6. ZK email - email dapp on Aztec

7. ZKpassport - identity dapp on Aztec

8. Railgun - ZK-centric on-chain financial privacy for Ethereum

9. Rarimo - ZK-identity protocol

10. DarkFi - L1 focused on anon engineering

11. Nym - Layer0 mixnet

12. Meta's Llama3 LLM - local-machine centric LLM

13. Monero Nodo - Monero-focused node

14. ddocs - alternative to Google Docs (E2EE)

15. anoncast - anonymous co-posting on Aztec

16. OHMNI - streetwear focused on blockcing radio signals & electromagnetic radiation

17. Web3Privacy now - think-and-do privacy ecosystem for the web3

18. OpenPassport - anon-preserving digital identity facilitated by Privacy&Scaling Explorations

19. 0xbow - “privacy pools” facilitation org

20. Aztec - on-chain private L2 for Ethereum

21. Radicle - GitHub alternative

22. ZKP2P - trust-minimized p2p offramp

23. DarkIRC - fully-anon chat powered by DarkFi

24. iden3 - zk-powered identity protocol

25. AnonAadhaar - identity project facilitated by Privacy&Scaling Explorations

26. Railway wallet - Railgun-centric web3 wallet

27. Reticulum - cryptography-based networking stack

28. Enclave - FHE-based Encrypted Execution Environments

29. Apple privacy projects - Intelligence, Private Cloud Computing, and Swift Homomorphic Encryption

30. Tails - ephemeral & private OS

31. EIP-7503 - Zero-Knowledge WormhTolerns

32. HOPR - Layer0 mixnet

33. Proton 2024 releases - suire of privacy-focused projects made in Switzerland

34. SimpleX - decentralized messenging protocol

35. Predicate - network for simplifying transaction prerequisites

36. Cursive - cryptography & design lab focused on digital signatures (ZK + FHE)

37. Women in web3 privacy - community empowering women with the knowledge & tools to navigate digital environments.

38. Zashi - Zcash-centric wallet

39. Payy - ZK payment service for your phone

40. Anytype - alternative to cloud-based environments for collab

41. JP Morgan FHE tokenization platform

42. V2Ray - platform to build proxies on top of the network

43. HOPR (VPN) - VPN powered by HOPR mixnet aka GnosisVPN

44. NymVPN - VPN powered by Nym mixnet

45. Signal - privacy-enhancing messenger

46. Superbacked - an app used to generate highly resilient distributed encrypted backups

47. Kagi search - ad-free search engine

48. idOS

49. Fluidkey - stealth addresses on Ethereum, Base, ENS

50. Microsoft Confidential Computing

51. 51. FCMP x Monero - Full chain membership proofs++

Useful link to find a white rabbit

• Awards web: link

• Web3Privacy now X

• General web

• GitHub

We thank every expert who participated in the awards poll. Glad that you contributed to spread privacy awareness forward.

Always DYOR! And let the spirit of privacy be with you.

Exciting Innovation is a great category to explore potential next-gen privacy. It covers both scientific papers and daily-apps that can enhance your privacy stack. Cryptography and it’s advancements lies at the heart of this category.

“Privacy Proof” is an annual awards facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective. It aims to feature key projects, news, innovations & doxxers of the market selected by 90+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from Vitalik Buterin to Zooko behind the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun, Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All contributions are public & can be found on X & Fileverse

And Key News and Events of the year award goes to…

Winner

Note: we decided to split winners into 2 brackets - the most voted research or project & the most voted cryptography (like ZK or FHE). This will help to unite different votes under common “stack” and introduce complex applicability of specific cryptographic tooling.

Research or project direction

We have two winners that received the same amount of votes. Clearly reflecting on complexities of the privacy landscape: on one hand - anonymity, on another - compliance.

• Full-Chain Membership Proofs++ for Monero

• Privacy Pools by (paper or company)

note: Privacy Pools paper has been presented in 2023. It hit “Runner up” innovation category Privacy Proof 23’. 2024 version represents “proof-of-innosence” development, 0xbow implementations, ongoing security audit behind Chainway solution.

Runner-up

Nym & Noir language by Aztec team hit “second" place or Runner up with the same amount of votes! Here consumer VPN stands alongside ZK-language. It’s a striking representation of hard-to-achieve equilibrium: daily privacy + cryptographic advancement at the same time.

Cryptography domains

Winner

ZK advancement - ZKLM, ZKP for digital IDs, ZKvm, zk<>mpc (cosnarks), ZK TLS and ZK email parsing advancements in speed and complexity, MegaHonk (Aztec zk research), repurposing signatures already in everyday use for privacy-preserving applications (zkemail, Anon Aadhar, OpenPassport, ZKpassport), zkLLM…

Runner up

FHE advancement - fhEVM co-processors: enabling FHE on Ethereum, Base etc, FHE/MPC VMs, Confidential auctions in DeFi, Confidential erc20 framework (Inco + Circle research collab), FHE implementations like Enclave…

Longlist >>

Protocols and apps

Veildotcash

SimpleX

Anoncast

Fluidkey

DarkIRC

Namada

Aztec Noir and launch of Devnet was a major step forward for privacy

Rarimo

Haveno DEX

Penumbra mainnet launch

Shutter

Fileverse (incl ddocs)

Enclave E3

Venice AI

NymVPN launch

zkBOB

UX improvements with Element

Retoswap p2p Monero exchange

DarkFi

Gnosis VPN

Privado ID

Railgun

Holonym and privacy preserving KYC (proof of clean hands) 

Zcash shielded assets

Labyrinth x 0xbow collab

Session

Zama & Zero Knowledge Proof on PoW upcoming on Alephium

Research

Bounty: Obfustopia.io

Indistinguishability obfuscation

Silent payments x Bitcoin

FMCP++ x Monero

fhEVM co-processors: enabling FHE on Ethereum, Base etc

Threshhold MPC chains for key management

Noir language gaining popularity
Not TEEs
Buenos Aires adds ZKP into city app

TEE research
$ZEC in a Brave wallet

zkML
Anon DAOs
Paper: Secret Sharing with Snitching (anti-collusion research)

General approach: Combining TEEs with MPC or threshold cryptography for layered security
Ongoing advances in ZK tech and use cases especially
Zero-Knowledge Location Privacy via Accurate Floating-Point SNARKs

Peer to peer/user-owned networks (Clan, Urbit)

Advancements in MPC and FHE, and people experimenting with interesting ways to use them (Gauss Labs, TLSNotary, Fhenix)

Repurposing signatures already in everyday use for privacy-preserving applications (zkemail, Anon Aadhar, OpenPassport, ZKpassport)

surveillancewatch.io

The research on Post-Quantum zero-knowledge credentials going on at Qubip.eu (EU/Horizon grant nr.101119746)

Post-quantum key agreements in Signal and iMessage (PQXDH & PQ3)

Zero knowledge proofs for common crypto matter
Confidential auctions in DeFi

Advancements in threshold encryption (traitor tracing, silent setup, IBE, scalability)
zkTLSDisintermediation via zkTLS and protocols like DiStefano
Private Shared State with Noir (eg. MPC-ML, Private games etc)
UltraHonk
MegaHonk (Monk)
Secure communication becoming more researched
zkLLM: Zero Knowledge Proofs for Large Language Models

Extractable Witness Encryption

RLN (privacy-preserving rate-limiting for p2p networks)
AeriusLabs zkSnap (private voting)
Client side proving efforts from many teams (@PrivacyScaling, @worldcoin, @aztecnetwork, @0xPolygonMide, @penumbrazone)
Local AI Available to Everyday People
co-Snarks
Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs)
Split Learning for Deep Learning Models
AE2EE with Prism (prism.deltadevs.xyz)
In-browser Light Node with Celestia

In-browser-extension RPC node with Penumbra

Brave’s zkTLS could be a gamechanger.
E

ERC-7779 - Interoperable Delegated Accounts

Passkey integrations becoming common
Angelus by Mathcastles

Practical MPC (Cursive)
Zcash sustainability fund
Decentralized Compliance
Deployment of Federated Learning & Analytics at Google
Non-native field arithmetic
FHE/io
Linux plausible deniability filesystem encryption

ZK TLS and ZK email parsing advancements in speed and complexity
zkTLS/Email based applications
More legit ZK, TEE, MPC applied research to return “cryptography” to “crypto”
TEE development
ZKvm
Naomi Brockwell’s excellent work on practical privacy insights

zk-proofs starting to become usable in practice (Nym’s unlikable payments, Namada mainnet etc)
coSnarks

Being able to run LLMs locally

ZKP for digital IDs
FHE/MPC VMs Confidential
ZK STARKs 
ZKLM on Mina

FHEConfidential erc20 framework (Inco + Circle research collab)

Rate Limiting Nullifiers by PSE

dogfooding RLN in Waku

Privacy Pools

Fair & Capital - efficient economies with MPC
ZKLMStateless mesh networking with fully decentralized coordination

Each year brings mix of different news from cryptography advancement to dev imprisonment. 2024 been a year of positive signals (Assange - free, Tornado Cash positive ruling), and negative implications (continues attack on end-to-end-encryption, massive personal data breaches).

“Privacy Proof” is an annual awards facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective. It aims to feature key projects, news, innovations & doxxers of the market selected by 90+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from Vitalik Buterin to Zooko behind the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun, Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All contributions are public & can be found on X & Fileverse

And Key News and Events of the year award goes to…

Winner

Tornado positive ruling ensuring that privacy development is less of a crime, especially within the “smart contract development” realm.

important note: Roman Storm still need your support.

Runner-up

Julian Assange has been released from prison.

Notable mentions

• Samourai devs arrest

• The arrest of Pavel Durov

Longlist

Apple caller ID using PIR

Tornado positive ruling

Samourai devs arrested

Chat control got rejected

Gary Gensler is finished

FBI tells people to use encrypted apps instead of SMS

TEE GPUs becoming viable faster than initially thought

The attacks on encryption from EU governments and others

Mark Andreeesen and friends pushing surveillance tech and police partnership for their network states

Exiled Russian Opposition Leader Launches Blockchain-Based Referendum

Age verification (i.e. mandatory doxxing) laws passing in the US and Europe

Apple native integration of ChatGPT

Anti-crypto army losing US elections

Web3Privacy

Buenos Aires adopts verifiable credentials

Julian Assange being freed!

NIST Releases First 3 Finalized Post-Quantum Encryption Standards

Firn Protocol

@firnprotocol

PLEASE WITHDRAW ALL ASSETS

Firn will be shutting down its relay on Dec. 31st, 2024. If you still have Ether in Firn (on any of the four chains), you may permanently lose those assets.

Please withdraw all of your Ether at your earliest convenience.

3

6:31 PM • Nov 10, 2024

Android RCS

E2EE enabled by Signal Protocol finally rolled out

The arrest of Pavel Durov

Chainalysis XMR video

Women in Web3 Privacy established

Multiple Monero Exchange delistings

Regulatory Actions Against Worldcoin

National Public Data Breach -2.9 billion records were compromised

American Privacy Rights Act

Trump elections

Salt Typhoon Telecom Breaches

Snowflake Customer Breaches

US recommendation to use end to end encryption

Midnight Blizzard attack on Microsoft

EU AI Act

Dawn of the new zk era

Ross being freed

Impending flourishing of agorist markets

The Lavender story of how the Israeli forces use an AI targeting system to automatically generate kill lists in Gaza

Signal usernames

WhatsApp vs NSO

Mainnets

Namada mainnet

Penumbra mainnet

Aleo mainnet

Events

Monerokon

Monerotopia

Lunarpunk festival

These are the champions responsible for leaks, breaches, surveillance, data manipulation, anti-privacy features, and non-ethical behaviour. Their actions vary, but the consequences are the same - minus to privacy.

Approach “Doxxer” category as an educational track & explore how different orgsnisations, governments and individuals undermine privacy.

“Privacy Proof” is an annual awards facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective. It aims to feature key projects, news, innovations & doxxers of the market selected by 90+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from Vitalik Buterin to Zooko behind the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun, Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All contributions are public & can be found on X & Fileverse

And the Doxxer of the year award goes to…

Winner

Coinbase encourage people to not use VPN while accessing it’s services.

Runner-up

Arkham - a crypto intelligence platform that works on doxxing wallet holders.

Notable mentions

Fractal & OpenAI - the decentralized identity stack & LLM

Fractal data breach compromised personal data of 1M customers.

Organizations

Arkham - a crypto intelligence platform

• Fractal - decentralized identity stack

Worldcoin - digital proof of human identity based on biometrics scan through digital device

Chainalysis - blockchain analysis firm

UnitedHealth says Change Healthcare hack affects over 100 million, the largest-ever US healthcare data breach | TechCrunch

UnitedHealth, the largest U.S. health insurance provider, blamed a Russia-based ransomware gang for the huge data breach of U.S. medical data.

https://techcrunch.com

• RedLine

  Meta - social metaverse company (ex-Facebook)

Big Socials - a grouping of the largest IT companies in the world

Luma - crypto events management platform

Kid Security - parental control app

Zcash TEX Address

Snowflake breach

Telegram - popular messenger

Coinbase asking users to not use VPNs

ChatGPT - a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI

Mobilewalla - an American data broker company that collects and sells mobile device data

Gravy Analytics - location intelligence and foot traffic data

Ledger - crypto-wallet company

AT&T Data Leak - 110M customer details breached

'Privacy Nightmare on Wheels': Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla - Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota - Flunks Privacy Test

Mozilla's latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org

Coinbase has been ramping up surveillance and working closely with us government, closing accounts.

VW Suffers Major Breach Exposing Location of 800,000 Electric Vehicles

A massive data leak involving over 800,000 Volkswagen EVs has left sensitive user information unprotected on the internet.

https://cyberinsider.com

Rand

@randhindi

I wasn’t going to comment on Sunscreen’s allegations initially, but some people I respect and admire have unfortunately rushed to conclusions without asking me about it first. So here is what actually happened and why we decided to take action.

I find it extremely disheartening

Sunscreen

@SunscreenTech

If @zama_fhe and @randhindi believe in their work, we invite them to compete with @sunscreentech in a way that moves the industry forward rather than engage in secret campaigns of intimidation, IP trolling, and speech suppression. Thread

On December 3, following a 6+ month

322

7:59 AM • Dec 20, 2024

Home

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https://www.livenationentertainment.com

National Public Data (NPD) - a data broker company

Governments

Government databases

Australia age-gated internet content KYC enforcement

The U.S. Government for Mandating Backdoors

• the EU

• Ylva Johansson (and every EU nation that didn’t block the proposal)

FATF (The Financial Action Task Force) - global action to tackle money laundering, terrorist and proliferation financing

• Every government

  FINCEN - US bureau safeguarding the financial system from illicit activity, counter money laundering and the financing of terrorism, and promote national security

DoJ attacking onchain privacy tools

EU politicians for trying to ban E2EE in messaging apps

The Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DGCNECT) of the European Commission, for leading the development of the European Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet project

Norwegian government - tax/income info of every citizen

The FATF with the introduction of the travel rule

Individuals

Michael Saylor - American entrepreneur behind MicroStrategy

Januus (Thiel Fellowship) - mapping cryptowallets for physical locations  and people on a global scale.

ZachXBT - crypto investigator (positive example)

**Sam Altman - entrepreneur behind OpenAI

@brian_armstrong for encouraging people to buy coffee with USDC on Base

John Barnett - for whistleblowing about Boeing not addressing safety issues (positive example)

Kash Patel - Transparency from within the US government (Doxxer on the inside)

Other

Watch Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery | HBO Max

Watch Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery on HBO Max. Plans start at $10.99/month. From Emmy®-nominated filmmaker Cullen Hoback, this revealing documentary dives into one of the most enduring and high-stakes mysteries in technology and finance: the origins of Bitcoin and the identity of its anonymous creator, known as Satoshi Nakamoto.

https://www.hbomax.com

LLMs

"Active listening" for ad targeting

Anyone building without privacy is ngmi

All transparent blockchains (Solana, Ethereum, L2s, Tron, Bitcoin, etc)

Bitcoin - decentralized cryptocurrency

The people who built and deployed Lavender for doxxing people in Gaza

Privacy Pools' 'proof-of-innocence'

Lumma Stealer - Fake CAPTCHA Attack

ETHGlobal hackathon with $700K prizes. Privacy-focused bounties covered not more than 5% of the total pot. Scalability, hyper-financialization and LLMs occupy hackathon game. So no surprise that next-gen hackathon projects can fix crypto-toxic image within so-called web2 world.

Possible solution - crafting a next-gen of builders that will have cypherpunk values at core mixed with playful vibes of the youth. Let’s examine our patient more closely!

WHY PEOPLE ARE VISITING HACKATHONS

Have you ever visited Ethereum hackathon? It’s a place of lots of young developers in search of friends, fun, money and future opportunities. They aren’t Snowden alike figures, not even Wikileaks anon-army. They are young and want to have fun.

Where fun stands for

• the general event enjoyment

• meeting with cool people

• developing meaningful things (they do believe in this!)

• compete for nice financial prizes & fame etc.

Here hackathon is like a computer game populated with bunch of characters, bosses and final rewards. So it shouldn’t surprise you that merch, communication and devrel team of many protocols look as if they are part of Anime fair curating holiday for otaku. It’s called “cultural fit”. Mascots capture emotional connection, plush toys facilitate belonging, and memecoins fill introvert-lack of social bonding-void.

Design of their dapps even look different from traditional colleagues from web2 world!

And now imagine what happens when those people build, for example, decentralized voting solutions without practice of IRL voting, lack of alternative voting mechanisms enabling (example: assemblies).

Summarising

• developers just want to have fun

• Gen Z has different cultural attributes (comparing to OG hackers from 90s)

BROKEN HACKATHON MECHANICS

Majority of the crypto hackathons are capitalist rat games. Money pot is at the centre of hacking. As if hackers aren’t a social classes that can challenge authority, but a labor class serving surveillance capitalism (including transparent chain - surveillance). They don’t argue much what “decentralisation” stands for. They just know that it’s sorta easy to get into crypto-development game, find friends, enjoy time & earn easy money.

There are many smart people touring hackathons & just “mining” bounties as if it’s a part of the lifestyle:

The result? Thousands of dead post-hackathon repos. A cemetery of open-source code, half of which is clunky (you know that majority of the hackathon demos doesn’t work well & need further bug fixing).

Summarising

• overfocus on bounties enforces greed

• “hackathon tourism” produce “dead code”

Homework: try to find out how many privacy-focused post-hackathon projects survived and evolved for at least 1 year after being coded?

A few post-hackathon survivors: Fluidkey x ETHRome, Web3Privacy now Explorer x ETHRome, Brume x ETHBrno.

LACK OF POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

People are here, money too, but privacy-projects have low impact once devs are experimenting with hackathon projects. Why so?

Lack of curation from hackathon managers, mentors &/or bounty givers.



Lots of devs are “shooting at the stars” trying to tackle world-global problems like “Turkish elections” (real example from hackathon and MACI implementation). What’s the chance that these devs will shape the state of Turkish electoral progress? Low. Maybe they can focus on so-called low-hanging fruits like micro-communities, crypto-savvy people. It’s an echo-chamber, small reach, but “demo” can quickly be turned into usable product.



Someone from orgs should limit devs imagination for better.

Lots of use-cases aren’t applicable to daily life.



2025, people still complaining that crypto has not a single use-case for web2 people. It’s partially true. Especially, when you look at the hackathon projects - many demos are zombies that no one would use. In privacy landscape they usually tackle hyper-scenarios that can’t be solved with existing team of 2-3-4 people, or try to “fix Big Tech” (example: private feedback on employees aka “Let’s redefine Glassdoor once again”).



Hacker hackathon journey example

Current bounty giver + tech mentors approach lacks personas or people in need of privacy-enhancing tech (including extra functionality that has privacy features, but isn’t perceived as “just privacy tooling”, think og the “fog of war” in Starcraft 2 as a privacy feature).

Tor personas research is an excellent example of people in need of privacy in relation to their tech literacy, internet accessibility etc.

Democracy or decentralisations are political notions, but they aren’t teached at hackathons.

So we are in the situation when thousands of people have thousand different understanding of decentralisation, and privacy too. It was evident for cypherpunks of the first generation that governments and corporations can abuse power against people. They aren’t necessary your friends, especially when elections can change influencers in power and their agenda. But hackathon devs are politically ignorant. Rarely you would hear a radical or bold statement behind the demo (a few post-Tornado Cash demos only prove general trend).

Developers need extensive education: cypherpunk basics, End-to-end encryption, ethical cryptography, privacy, surveillance capitalism, hacktivism, you name it. Only then they would be able to craft real privacy-enhancing tech for the daily use.

Demo is enough for success (spoiler: it’s not!)



Demos need additional polishing as mentioned above. Not just bug fixing, but custdev, front-end updates, integrations support, extra documentation, copy, business development… Yes, startup or product-approach. Where goal isn’t to deploy demo to github, so it will die there, but find “privacy-market-fit” (audience that use product and help to achieve sustainable financial model). Here financial model can vary from subscription & fees to donations and “personal time investment”.

CRAFTING CYPHERPUNK HACKER CLASS

“There aren’t even hackers. They hijacked “hacker” culture!”, - quote of the OG hacker after visiting another Ethereum hackathon.

Lets try to highlight potential transition from “hacker imposter” to “Cypherpunk hacker 2.0” within the crypto hackathon landscape:

The whole “stack” approach is more complex, but devs could start somewhere & become more mature social justice contributors over time.

Matching with practical change or imagining Cypherpunk hackathon of tomorrow.

We highlighted potential transition from Starter cypherpunk to Practitioner in our article here

Pre-hackathon privacy-personas research

Facilitate quantitative or qualitative analysis, talk to people, present profiles in need of privacy now.

Privacy builder flywheel

Provide builders with frameworks that can help ideate around privacy solutions in a playful way.

Match with diverse mentors and speakers

Some devs are tackling whistleblower platforms that just are bad versions of existing tooling. Connect them with experts like GlobaLeaks - share stories behind real activist products and potential enhancement (maybe there’s a ZK-potential for Whistleblower platforms!).

Shape interdisciplinary teams

Help to shape a good balance between technical & non-technical skills. Designers, researchers, marketing, copywriters, custdev pros - everyone matters in a long run. Free demos from technocracy - open-up to unexpected takes on dev hours, scope of work, & MVP.

Pitch social justice in a playful way

Find creative approach to shape responsibility & ethics behind privacy builders. Try to appeal to their cultural norms from use of memes in comms to appealing to their mundane life (example: privacy embedded into quadratic funding with memecoins - real ETHBucharest project).

Reality check

Lets be honest: it’s hard to teach social justice someone within a hackathon weekend “usual 48 hours”. But it’s worth creating a highly-conscious space with asymmetrical positive impact:

• peer-scaling - more mature cypherpunk developers lead by example newcomers (example: Nym’s devrel Max, who participates in hackathons, can share horizontal activism stories, impact, and ideology)

• mentor-scaling* - *experienced professionals represent not just tech stack, but ethical & activist excellency ready to share solidarity practices for change (Paul-Dylan Ennis can share “hackers as a social class meets Ethereum social layer” stories)

• environment-scaling* - *imagine a space where the “walls are talking” about social justice, useful guides, videos, lectures are all over the place - just plug’n’play into knowledge of transformation

Post-hackathon journey example

Come to Web3Privacy now Careathon & make a difference - 13-15 June, Berlin.

Privacy proof is an annual awards facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective. It aims to feature key projects, news, innovations & doxxers of the market selected by 80+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun, , Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All individual contributions are available via Fileverse Portal

Explore

• projects category longlist here

• exciting innovation category longlist here

• doxxer category longlist here

Longlist

1. Apple caller ID using PIR

2. Tornado positive ruling

3. Samourai devs arrested

4. Chat control got rejected

5. Gary Gensler is finished

6. FBI tells people to use encrypted apps instead of SMS

7. TEE GPUs becoming viable faster than initially thought

8. The attacks on encryption from EU governments and others 


9. Mark Andreeesen and friends pushing surveillance tech and police partnership for their network states 

10. Exiled Russian Opposition Leader Launches Blockchain-Based Referendum

11. Age verification (i.e. mandatory doxxing) laws passing in the US and Europe

12. Namada

13. Penumbra

14. Apple native integration of ChatGPT

15. Anti-crypto army losing US elections

16. Web3Privacy

17. Buenos Aires adopts verifiable credentials

18. Julian Assange being freed!

19. NIST Releases First 3 Finalized Post-Quantum Encryption Standards

20. Firn sunset

21. Android RCS

22. E2EE enabled by Signal Protocol finally rolled out

23. The arrest of Pavel Durov

24. Chainalysis XMR video

25. Women in Web3 Privacy established

26. Multiple Monero Exchange delistings

27. Regulatory Actions Against Worldcoin

28. National Public Data Breach -2.9 billion records were compromised

29. American Privacy Rights Act & Arrest of Tornado Cash Developer Alexey Pertsev

30. Monero's leak

31. Viral Chainalysis video suggesting Monero transactions may be traceable

32. Trump elections

33. Salt Typhoon Telecom Breaches

34. Snowflake Customer Breaches

35. Chat control getting blocked again

36. China hacked the whole US unencrypted telco system

37. US recommendation to use end to end encryption

38. Midnight Blizzard attack on Microsoft

39. EU AI Act

40. Cypherpunk freedom: Assange, Ross (soon)

41. Dawn of the new zk era

42. Ross being freed

43. Impending flourishing of agorist markets

44. SSN breach by US government, huge blow to privacy

45. Expulsion of Worldcoin from Germany and other countries.

46. Aleo mainnet

47. The Lavender story of how the Israeli forces use an AI targeting system to automatically generate kill lists in Gaza

48. Signal usernames

Events

1. Monerokon

2. Monerotopia

3. Lunarpunk festival

Privacy proof is an annual awards facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective. It aims to feature key projects, news, innovations & doxxers of the market selected by 80+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun, , Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All individual contributions are available via Fileverse Portal

Explore

• projects category longlist here

• exciting innovation category longlist here

doxxer category longlist

Orgs

• Arkham

• Fractal

• Worldcoin

• Chainalisys

• UnitedHealth leaking 100m people's health data

• RedLine

• META

• Big Socials

• Luma

• Telegram

• Coinbase asking users to not use VPNs

• ChatGPT

• Mobilewalla

• Gravy Analytics

• Ledger

• AT&T Data Leak (110M customer details)

• Car manufacturers

• Coinbase also has been ramping up surveillance and working closely with us government, closing accounts

• VW Data Breach

• Zama tries to patent FHE

• Ticketmaster (Live Nation)

Mozilla Foundation revealing car manufacturers privacy: link

Governments

• Government databases

• Australia age-gated internet content KYC enforcement

• The U.S. Government for Mandating Backdoors

• the EU

• Ylva Johansson (and every EU nation that didn’t block the proposal)

• Australia Age KYC

• FATF

• Every government

• FINCEN

• DoJ attacking onchain privacy tools

• EU politicians for trying to ban E2EE in messaging apps

• The Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DGCNECT) of the European Commission, for leading the development of the European Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet project

• National Public Data (NPD)

• Norwegian government (tax/income info of every citizen)

Individuals

• Michael Saylor

• Januus (Thiel Fellowship)

• ZachXBT

• Sam Altman

• @brian_armstrong for encouraging people to buy coffee with USDC on Base

• John Barnett - for whisleblowing about Boeing not addressing safety issues

• Kash Patel> Transparency from within the US government. Doxxer on the inside

Other

• HBO Satoshi doc

• LLMs

• "Active listening" for ad targeting

• Anyone building without privacy is ngmi

• All transparent blockchains (Solana, Ethereum, L2s, Tron, Bitcoin, etc)

• Bitcoin

• The people who built and deployed Lavender for doxxing people in Gaza

• Privacy Pools' 'proof-of-innocence'

• Lumma Stealer

What is Lumma Stealer: Technical Details and Recent Fake CAPTCHA Attack

Lumma Stealer targets a wide range of credentials, including browser-stored passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, and other valuable information.

https://cybersecuritynews.com

#2023privacyproof winners announced

https://mirror.xyz/0x0f1F3DAf416B74DB3DE55Eb4D7513a80F4841073/wyFhJ9_ayxA6BXTW0WE1h4ZackVTjrZTeC28Y6-J4mc

Follow Privacy Proof 2024 updates on X

Privacy proof is an annual awards facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective. It aims to feature key projects, news, innovations & doxxers of the market selected by 80+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun, , Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All individual contributions are available via Fileverse Portal
Explore projects category longlist here

Exciting innovation category longlist.

TOTAL: 84 entries

1. Nym

2. Bounty: Obfustopia.io

3. Penumbra mainnet launch

4. Privacy pools

5. Indistinguishability obfuscation

6. Silent payments x Bitcoin

7. FMCP++ x Monero

8. fhEVM co-processors: enabling FHE on Ethereum, Base etc

9. Threshhold MPC chains for key management

10. Noir language gaining popularity

11. Shutter

12. Not TEEs

13. SimpleX and it's privacy

14. Buenos Aires adds ZKP into city app

15. Fileverse

16. Enclave E3

17. TEE research

18. $ZEC in a Brace wallet

19. zkML

20. Anon DAOs

21. Paper: Secret Sharing with Snitching (anti-collusion research)

22. General approach: Combining TEEs with MPC or threshold cryptography for layered security

23. Ongoing advances in ZK tech and use cases especially Holonym and privacy preserving KYC (proof of clean hands) 

24. UX improvements with Element XZero-Knowledge Location Privacy via Accurate 
Floating-Point SNARKs

25. Peer to peer/user-owned networks (Clan, Urbit)Advancements in MPC and FHE, and people experimenting with interesting ways to use them (Gauss Labs, TLSNotary, Fhenix)

26. Repurposing signatures already in everyday use for privacy-preserving applications (zkemail, Anon Aadhar, OpenPassport, ZKpassport)

27. Ddocs

28. Zcash shielded assets

29. NymVPN

30. Gnosis VPN

31. FHE

32. surveillancewatch.io

33. zkBOB

34. The research on Post-Quantum zero-knowledge credentials going on at Qubip.eu (EU/Horizon grant nr.101119746)

35. Privado ID multichain

36. Multidevice zk identity

37. Session

38. Railgun

39. Rarimo

40. coSnarks by Taceo

41. coNoir with Noir

42. Post-quantum key agreements in Signal and iMessage (PQXDH & PQ3)

43. Zero knowledge proofs for common crypto matter

44. MegaHonk (Aztec zk research)

45. Confidential auctions in DeFi

46. Advancements in threshold encryption (traitor tracing, silent setup, IBE, scalability)

47. Disintermediation via zkTLS and protocols like DiStefano

48. Private Shared State with Noir (eg. MPC-ML, Private games etc)

49. UltraHonk

50. Retoswap p2p Monero exchange launched

1. Client side proving efforts from many teams (@PrivacyScaling, @worldcoin, @aztecnetwork, @0xPolygonMide, @penumbrazone)

2. Local AI Available to Everyday People

3. FHE implementations like Enclave

4. Venice AI

5. Labyrinth x 0xbow collab

6. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs)

7. Split Learning for Deep Learning ModelsAE2EE with Prism (prism.deltadevs.xyz)In-browser

8. Light Node with Celestia

9. In-browser-extension RPC node with Penumbra

10. Brave’s zkTLS could be a gamechanger.

11. ERC-7779 - Interoperable Delegated Accounts

12. Passkey integrations becoming commonAngelus by Mathcastles

13. Practical MPC (Cursive)

14. Fluidkey

15. Zcash sustainability fund

16. Decentralized Compliance

17. Deployment of Federated Learning & Analytics at Google

18. Non-native field arithmeticLinux plausible deniability filesystem encryption

19. ZK TLS and ZK email parsing advancements in speed and complexity

20. zkTLS/Email based applications

21. Haveno DEXMore legit ZK, TEE, MPC applied research to return “cryptography” to “crypto”

22. TEE development

23. ZKvm

24. Naomi Brockwell’s excellent work on practical privacy insights

25. zk-proofs starting to become usable in practice (Nym’s unlikable payments, Namada mainnet etc)

26. ZKP for digital IDs

27. User friendly stealth addresses with ENS & smart accounts

28. Secure communication becoming more researched

29. zkLLM: Zero Knowledge Proofs for Large Language Models

30. Zama & Zero Knowledge Proof on PoW upcoming on Alephium

31. Extractable Witness Encryption

32. RLN (privacy-preserving rate-limiting for p2p networks)

33. DarkFi

34. AeriusLabs zkSnap (private voting)

Privacy Proof 2023 winners

https://mirror.xyz/0x0f1F3DAf416B74DB3DE55Eb4D7513a80F4841073/wyFhJ9_ayxA6BXTW0WE1h4ZackVTjrZTeC28Y6-J4mc

Follow Privacy Proof 2024 updates on X

80+ enthusiasts, developers, researchers, cryptographers, cypherpunks, and community builders from the Ethereum, Nym, Logos, Railgun_, Puzzle, Aztec, ZK Sync, dappnode, Electric Coin & Co. & many other organisations.

All individual contributions are available via Fileverse Portal

Detailed overview

• 45 projects

• 12 non-Web3 solutions

• 8 dapps

• 4 messengers/chats

• 4 protocols

• 4 identity-related

• 3 wallets

• 2 VPNs

• 2 OS from Tails to Graphene

• 2 AI-related

• 2 mixnets from Nym to HOPR

Longlist of the project

1. Monero - privacy-focused cryptocurrency

2. Akash Chat - AI Chat without any tracking

3. Wassabi Wallet - bitcoin walllet focused on privacy (DYOR)

4. Penumbra - L1 on Cosmos

5. GrapheneOS - deGoogle OS

6. ZK email - email dapp on Aztec

7. ZKpassport - identity dapp on Aztec

8. Railgun - ZK-centric on-chain financial privacy for Ethereum

9. Rarimo - ZK-identity protocol

10. DarkFi - L1 focused on anon engineering

11. Nym - Layer0 mixnet

12. Meta's Llama3 LLM - local-machine centric LLM

13. Monero Nodo - Monero-focused node

14. ddocs - alternative to Google Docs (E2EE)

15. anoncast - anonymous co-posting on Aztec

16. OHMNI - streetwear focused on blockcing radio signals & electromagnetic radiation

17. Web3Privacy now - think-and-do privacy ecosystem for the web3

18. OpenPassport - anon-preserving digital identity facilitated by Privacy&Scaling Explorations

19. 0xbow - “privacy pools” facilitation org

20. Aztec - on-chain private L2 for Ethereum

21. Radicle - GitHub alternative

22. ZKP2P - trust-minimized p2p offramp

23. DarkIRC - fully-anon chat powered by DarkFi

24. iden3 - zk-powered identity protocol

25. AnonAadhaar - identity project facilitated by Privacy&Scaling Explorations

26. Railway wallet - Railgun-centric web3 wallet

27. Reticulum - cryptography-based networking stack

28. Enclave - FHE-based Encrypted Execution Environments

29. Apple privacy projects - Intelligence, Private Cloud Computing, and Swift Homomorphic Encryption

30. Tails - ephemeral & private OS

31. EIP-7503 - Zero-Knowledge WormhTolerns

32. HOPR - Layer0 mixnet

33. Proton 2024 releases - suire of privacy-focused projects made in Switzerland

34. SimpleX - decentralized messenging protocol

35. Predicate - network for simplifying transaction prerequisites

36. Cursive - cryptography & design lab focused on digital signatures (ZK + FHE)

37. Women in web3 privacy - community empowering women with the knowledge & tools to navigate digital environments.

38. Zashi - Zcash-centric wallet

39. Payy - ZK payment service for your phone

40. Anytype - alternative to cloud-based environments for collab

41. JP Morgan FHE tokenization platform

42. V2Ray - platform to build proxies on top of the network

43. HOPR (VPN) - VPN powered by HOPR mixnet aka GnosisVPN

44. NymVPN - VPN powered by Nym mixnet

45. Signal - privacy-enhancing messenger

46. Superbacked - an app used to generate highly resilient distributed encrypted backups

Privacy Proof 2024 web

Web3Privacy Now Awards 2024

The 2nd edition of the Web3Privacy Now Community awards

https://awards.web3privacy.info

Privacy Proof 2023 winners

https://mirror.xyz/0x0f1F3DAf416B74DB3DE55Eb4D7513a80F4841073/wyFhJ9_ayxA6BXTW0WE1h4ZackVTjrZTeC28Y6-J4mc

Follow Privacy Proof 2024 updates on X

Many people enter crypto and privacy tech without understanding their deeper significance. The principles that inspired cypherpunks in the 1990s, which eventually set the stage for the token-driven innovations of the past decade, are often overlooked.

While there is an abundance of socio-political, philosophical, and historical resources to explain these foundations, they are scattered across various platforms, websites, and playlists, making them hard to access and synthesize.

Recognizing the importance of education and practical guidance for meaningful development, Web3Privacy Now has established Privacy Academy to bridge this gap.

The Purpose

Privacy Academy's mission is twofold: to illuminate the foundational values that gave rise to the crypto movement and to equip individuals with the practical knowledge needed to sustain and enhance its impact.

The Academy strives to make this knowledge universally accessible, empowering everyone, everywhere.

Academy Today

We begin with Privacy 101 course for general public.

We’re not just about dumping a bunch of links and calling it a day. We want to create a place where:

• Total beginners can finally understand what privacy is, why it matters, and how to protect it.

• Web3 folks can rediscover the "cypherpunk roots" that laid the foundation for crypto.

• Anyone can find practical tools and guidance to navigate the privacy maze.

Privacy Academy is about building bridges: connecting people to knowledge, tools, and a community of like-minded privacy enthusiasts. (Think of us as the "Privacy Avengers.")

At the moment Academy includes:

• Privacy 101: A beginner-friendly course that breaks down what privacy is (spoiler: it’s more than clearing your browser history), why it’s critical, and how to protect it. Topics include the history of cypherpunks, surveillance capitalism, and practical tools like Signal and Tor.

• Library: A curated collection of books, articles, and resources recommended by the Web3 privacy community. It’s like your go-to playlist for getting smarter about privacy.

• Glossary: A straightforward guide to key privacy and Web3 terms. From "zero-knowledge proofs" to "surveillance capitalism," we break down the jargon to make learning accessible.

Homepage

Web3 Privacy Now Academy is your free pass to mastering privacy in the digital age. 🔥 Learn the essentials-cryptography, human rights, and activism-all in one place.🔐 Take back control of your data, identity, and future.🌍 Join a community that believes privacy isn't just a right-it's a movement. No fluff. No gatekeepers.

https://academy.web3privacy.info

Academy Vision

Looking ahead, Privacy Academy is gearing up for a transformative year. In addition to expanding our foundational courses, we’re cooking up new offerings like a "Privacy 201" course for savvy privacy enthusiasts and a specialized ZK Developers track.

But we’re not stopping there.

Our ultimate goal is to evolve into a Privacy Solution Accelerator—a hub that fosters impactful privacy innovations. We aim to:

• Create solutions that avoid redundant or ineffective code.

• Transform hackathon demos into sustainable, real-world projects.

• Redirect funding to value-aligned developers by connecting them with experienced mentors and grant programs.

This vision is about more than education; it’s about creating a thriving ecosystem of privacy-first solutions.

How to Get Involved

Start Learning: Visit the Academy, explore the courses, and give us feedback. We’re in beta mode, and your input is crucial to making this the best it can be.

Join the Chat: Hop into our Telegram chat to share your thoughts or roast our memes. Seriously, we want to hear from you. Join TG chat here.

Support the Mission: Sponsor, donate, or partner with us to make privacy education accessible to everyone.

Roadmap

Milestone 1 [Q4 2024] - Curated Learning Resources ✅ We gather the best existing materials and curate them to be accessible to the average crypto user but also to the total beginner. This empowers users to learn exactly what they are looking for or interested in and to implement best practices effectively.

Milestone 2 [Q2 2025] - Structured Learning Paths We create various learning paths and playlists, and run cohort-based programs similar to kernel. These programs allow participants to interact with each other, to receive guidance from mentors and experts, and to enhance their learning experience.

Milestone 3 [Q4 2025] - Project Accelerator and Post-Academy Support We launch an accelerator for final projects from the Academy learners and provide post-academy support and work introductions. Graduates will be able to publish their projects and ideas on our grant/bounty platform where they will find the opportunity to be funded or crowdfunded.

Milestone 4 [Q1 2026] - Original Content Production We will start producing our own content in collaboration with our network and key experts to further enhance our educational offerings.

Special thanks to the Global Chinese Community of Commons (GCC) for their generous grant supporting the initiative. This partnership will enable the academy to expand its presence in Asia through GCC’s extensive community network.

Additionally, GCC will assist in preparing a comprehensive report highlighting the state of digital privacy in Asia and real-world use cases to address pressing privacy challenges.

WHY PRIVACY

In any society, privacy is essential for protecting civil liberties and human rights.

Privacy enables individuals to participate in political processes without fear of retribution or surveillance, ensuring that they can freely express their views, associate with others, and engage in activism.

Robust privacy practices assist in balancing power between individuals and the state or corporations. Without them, unchecked surveillance and control leads to a loss of personal freedoms and the rise of authoritarianism.

When we talk about privacy, we are discussing more than just data protection. We are addressing the fate of our societies, their present, and their future.

WEB3PRIVACY NOW  MISSION

We aim to manifest profound political and social change by advocating 
Privacy in the Web3 Era.
 With unified efforts, we carve out a path toward a more equitable, decentralized and freedom-respecting digital commons.

Web3Privacy Now

Advocates worldwide are uniting to make privacy fundamental pillar of the Web3 industry, transforming it into a cultural movement that champions freedom and decentralization.

https://web3privacy.info

web3privacy now is an invaluable addition to the crypto community. They are some of the few builders and advocates focused on the real core issues of individual autonomy and privacy; true cypherpunk stuff. Their side events at conferences like Devcon SEA and Eth Berlin have been some of the best gathering points for like-minded folks and orgs--like my own, Coin Center--to talk about the grave issues facing our movement. Join them in the fight against surveillance and unlawful developer persecution.

Kris Is x Gitcoin Citizen

W3N reminds us daily of why we are here. Privacy—a basic human right—beats at the heart of the cypherpunk ethos, the essence of everything worth building. Their conferences are a gathering place for the mad ones, the dreamers, the rebels who see the world as it could be. They bring together the lunarpunks, the uncompromising builders, the visionaries, and the long-term thinkers. These are my people, our people, creating a future that remembers what matters.

Julio Linares x Poetic Technologies

I think what you do in holding a space for the question of freedom, digital privacy and direct action is of greatly importance, specially today. As the politics of our world sink deeper into fascism, creating counter infrastructures and technologies that preserve people's autonomy and the freedom to reveal information will be vital for the resistance.

Lefteris Karapetsas x Rotki

A community I am part of, Web3Privacy now, has its 2 years birthday today! Privacy and data sovereignty are values I continuously stand for daily, especially through building Rotki.

In the team of Web3Privacy now I found like-minded people, friends and comrades. Happy birthday!

Sebastian Bürgel x GnosisDAO

I appreciate Web3 Privacy Now for upholding Cypherpunk values, which are at the core of the Web3 movement. In a space increasingly influenced by hyper-financialization, having an organization dedicated to principles that distinguish Web3 from Wall Street serves as a crucial guiding light.

Scott Moore x Gitcoin

Web3Privacy is a reminder that cypherpunk values still matter, and that a better world is possible.

Ying Tong x independent applied cryptographer

web3 provides a mechanism for intelligent cooperation among distributed entities; and central to the realisation of this vision, is the ability to do so privately. I am grateful to w3pn for creating a platform for building, discussing, and advocating in this problem space.

Nick Almond x FactoryDAO

I’ve had the pleasure of watching this community develop over the last 2 years and participated in 3 of their events. Every one of them has had a unique vibe with deep critical thinking on the nature of the industry, with a strong practical advocacy for privacy technologies. The cypherpunk ethos is returning to crypto and I think this is in no small part down to the hard work of @nicksvyaznoy, @PG_CDG and the rest of the @web3privacy team, who are all genuinely welcoming and wonderful people. Follow them, support them, make sure to get to the future events!

Evin McMullen x Privado ID

Thank you so much web3privacy for leading the way to make space for these core values to shine through onchain

Lasha x Rarimo

I think Web3 privacy now has provided an umbrella for builders in the space, where we can not only find each other through a list of great projects but also have had many gatherings to network and connect giving rise to wild collabs

Max x Nym

• Managing in a very real way to not only create and expand the tent of those involved in privacy development, but buy up and update the Cypherpunk ethos and what it means to work on meaningful parallel technologies.

• Spreading the message and bringing back cultural hacking and subversion

• Basically the only good parties in crypto and all around great ethos and crew

Guru x Waku

the whole narrative of web3 especially during global events was just about blockchains before Web3PrivacyNow. over the last two years, Web3Privacy collective has built mainstream awareness about the essence of privacy and cypherpunk ethos in the Web3 ecosystem.

Jaromil x Dyne.org

I've been developing, lurking and partying around crypto for 15 years now and remember clearly there were some people worth knowing and making friends. The blockchain hype has been terrible because it flooded the space with obnoxious situations and a load of sociopaths, while interest in the most popular value proposition never faded: privacy for everyone and lower liability when running collective infrastructure. It has been a fine ride all the way, I just missed the part where we were making new interesting friendships. Thanks to web3privacy it is now back, and for this I am very grateful to this genuine community and its ways to keep alive the heartbeat of the real crypto movement.

Will Scott x Filecoin

Having an identity to rally around is critical for change. In 2 years, web3privacy now has become that identity for the importance of privacy in all forms.

Eleftherios x Radicle

Over the last two years, I mostly stepped away from crypto events, feeling disconnected from the nihilistic, short-term focus dominating much of the space. While I still believe in the tech's potential for net-positive use cases, the focus on hyper-speculation wasn't something I could get excited about. So, I focused on the work we do with Radicle and Drips, ignoring the rest.

Then, almost a year ago, I found Web3PrivacyNow. They managed to amplify the cypherpunk voice within the cryptocurrency space, proving it’s not just alive but growing stronger. There is a thriving, principled community in crypto that it's worth contributing to. Today it's their 2nd birthday. Happy Birthday, Web3PrivacyNow! 🎉 Your mission is more important now than ever.Jaya x Nym

Happy birthday to Web3 Privacy Now! You are incredibly important as an independent industry body - with research projects and reports providing an essential overview and benchmarking of development of Web3 privacy software. Continue your good work of undoing the surveillance driven digital economy and advocating for privacy as a fundamental human right!

Andrew Woo x Protocol Labs

Privacy, censorship resistance, and verifiability are core to digital human rights—and essential for a more open, fair internet. Web3Privacy fights for these values, building tools and advocacy that give people real agency online. At Protocol Labs, we’re proud to support their work. It’s a critical part of creating systems that serve humanity, not control it. Happy 2nd birthday!

Shayan Eskandari x ex-ConsenSys, IranUnchained

Web3Privacy started as a open source github project similar to any other awesome list of X on github. From there it grew to a big community of privacy advocates promoting the use of privacy tech in everyday life and even continues to bring forth hacktivists in the space to tell their stories and what this tech can become in the near future.

Amit Chaudhary x Labyrinth

Web3Privacy Now is the best community for privacy that unites people to collaborate and turns user privacy into reality with exciting narratives.

LunarDAO

A catalyst leading a brilliant charge into privacy content for the web3 ecosystem.

Eléonore Blanc x CryptoCanal

One event at a time, they are building an ecosystem to ensure that no one forgets the political frontiers being pushed by crypto. Web3Privacy Now has been rallying support and ensuring that privacy holds a prime spot at all the major conferences worldwide.

Hazel Hu x GCC of Commons

Web3 privacy reminds me of why I first joined this industry. I was astonished by Bitcoin and Ethereum's design and their potential to bring unprecedented freedom to individuals. While the current market has diverged from our initial vision, communities like this one can help us realign with our original goals.

Pie Man x Fairblock

Most bullish event by far in EthCC was Web3Privacy Now: right in the middle of the park without anything fancy going on, the only incentive to stay was lovely people with extreme passion for deep but practical steps, cryptography, and amazing applications.

Matteo Tambussi x Stake Capital

The balance between Transparency and Privacy, accountable and unaccountable, manifest and secret, convex and concave, 1 and 0 is one of the most fun puzzles blockchain tech has to solve for the world. W3P community approaches this with incredible humility and an unravel-the-knot open debate approach. Also I like how they dress.

Juan aka juanaxyz00

Staying true to the reasons that brought you into the space in the first place can be a difficult and lonely endeavor; there are always shiny new things that get more attention and detract from the overarching mission of what sovereignty-enabling technology aims to offer. Web3Privacy has been a great way to meet other like-minded people, find common goals, and work toward them in a distributed fashion. If you’re wondering whether you could provide something of value to the space by collaborating with Web3Privacy, the answer is yes!

Juraj Bednar

Web3privacy is spreading awareness of Cypherpunk ideas among otherwise very solarpunk projects. Ideas of transparency should be balanced with user privacy, which is crucial for sovereignty. I think it created this spark of going back to cypherpunk roots. Happy birthday!

Ben West x Thrive protocol

As surveillance technology spreads world wide and governments embrace authoritarianism, now more than ever the discussion of privacy and security is essential. I'm so glad the cypherpunk spirit is alive and well in this community. The underlying values are as important as the proliferation of the stack of private and secure technology and this group is facilitating both.

osh Davila aka The Blockchain socialist

Web3Privacy Now stands at the intersection of privacy activism, cypherpunk ethos, and class consciousness, reminding us that true digital freedom cannot exist without social justice. A new class of cypherpunks is being born.

Claire Kart x Aztec

Web3Privacy Now is convening the important conversations our industry needs to have around a critical question.​​​​​​​

S El Damaty x Holonym

W3PN is a tuning fork for the values we aspire to see manifest in technology built for human flourishing. Technology too often removes agency from the equation, W3PN advocates for privacy as a precursor to technology that fortifies individual sovereignty.

Michael Parenti aka Exiled Surfer

Michael Parenti Bday Message To Web3privacy Now

Listen to Michael Parenti bday message to Web3Privacy now by Web3Privacy for free. Follow Web3Privacy to never miss another show.

https://www.mixcloud.com

…& counting!