Wall Street Demands Ethereum Privacy Upgrade or Risk Being Shut Out

Mo Jalil and Oskar Thoren, co-founders of ETH Systems, say that institutions are knocking on Ethereum's door, but only if its privacy issues can be addressed. The two men spent years working on institutional privacy inside the Ethereum Foundation before spinning out as a for-profit operation this month.

Their argument is that the cryptographic primitives for institutional privacy already exist, but what doesn't exist is the translation layer between these primitives and the legal, regulatory, and operational reality of banks. This gap is the single biggest barrier to Wall Street adopting Ethereum at scale.

Jalil described a tier-one investment bank that sends all of its trades and positions to a trusted third party for inter-dealer compression. The cost is staggering, with an annual price tag of 'tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.'

ETH Systems is pursuing a staged strategy that begins with the most specific, messy, and bespoke work possible, and then generalizes from it.