Opinion: Agata Ferreira, Assistant Professor at Warsaw University of Technology
Web3 is becoming a new consensus around the world. For years, privacy was treated as a compliance issue, a liability for developers, and a niche concern at best. It is now becoming clear that privacy is actually built on digital freedom.
The announcement of the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy Cluster – a cross-team effort focused on private reads and writes, confidential identity, and zero-knowledge proofs – signals a philosophical redefinition of what trust, consensus, and truth mean in the digital age and a more profound realization that privacy must be built into the infrastructure.
Regulators should pay attention. Privacy-preserving designs are no longer just experimental; They are now a standard approach. They are becoming the way forward for decentralized systems. The question is whether law and regulation will adapt to this change or remain stuck in the old logic that equates visibility with security.
From shared observation to shared verification
For a long time, digital governance has been built on the logic of visibility. The systems were trustworthy because they could be viewed by regulators, auditors or the public. This “shared overview” model is behind everything from financial reporting to blockchain explorers. Transparency was a means of ensuring integrity.
However, in cryptographic systems, a more powerful paradigm is emerging: shared verification. Instead of every actor seeing everything, zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-preserving designs enable verification that a rule was followed without revealing the underlying data. Truth becomes something you can prove, not something you must uncover.
This change may seem technical, but it will have deep consequences. This means we no longer need to choose between privacy and accountability. Both can co-exist, becoming directly embedded in the systems we rely on. Regulators should also adopt this logic instead of fighting against it.
Privacy as infrastructure
The industry is realizing the same thing: Privacy isn’t a luxury. This is infrastructure. Without this, Web3’s openness becomes its weakness, and transparency is reduced to surveillance.
Emerging architectures in the ecosystem demonstrate that privacy and modularity are finally coming together. Ethereum’s Privacy Cluster focuses on confidential computation and selective disclosure at the smart-contract level.
Others are going deeper, integrating privacy into the network consensus itself: sender-unlinkable messages, verifier anonymity, private proof-of-stake, and self-healing data persistence. These designs are rebuilding the digital stack from the ground up, aligning privacy, verifiability, and decentralization as mutually reinforcing qualities.
This is not an incremental improvement. This is a new way of thinking about freedom in the digital network age.
Policy is lagging behind technology
Current regulatory approaches still reflect the logic of shared observation. Privacy-preserving technologies are scrutinized or banned, while visibility is mistaken for security and compliance. Developers of privacy protocols face regulatory pressure, and policymakers believe encryption hinders observability.
This perspective is outdated and dangerous. In a world where everyone is being monitored, and where data is collected, bought, sold, leaked and exploited on an unprecedented scale, lack of privacy is a real systemic risk. It undermines trust, puts people at risk and undermines democracy. In contrast, privacy-preserving designs make integrity provable and enable accountability without risk.
Lawmakers must begin to view privacy as an ally, not an opponent – a tool to enforce fundamental rights and restore trust in the digital environment.
Management, not just investigation
The next phase of digital regulation should move from scrutiny to advocacy. Legal and policy frameworks should protect privacy-preserving open source systems as vital public goods. The management stance is a duty, not a policy option.
Connected: Compliance will not affect your privacy
This is meant to provide legal clarity for developers and differentiate between acts and architecture. Laws should punish misconduct, not the existence of privacy-enabling technologies. The right to maintain private digital communications, association and economic exchange should be considered a fundamental right, which should be enforced by both law and infrastructure.
Such an approach would demonstrate regulatory maturity, recognizing that resilient democracies and legitimate governance depend on privacy-preserving infrastructure.
architecture of freedom
The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy initiative and other new privacy-first network designs share the idea that freedom is an architectural principle in the digital age. It cannot rely solely on promises of good governance or oversight; It must be incorporated into the protocols that shape our lives.
These new systems, private rollups, state-separated architectures, and sovereign zones represent a practical synthesis of privacy and modularity. They enable communities to build independently while remaining verifiably connected, thereby combining autonomy with accountability.
Policymakers should see this as an opportunity to advocate for fundamental rights to be directly incorporated into the technical foundation of the Internet. Privacy-by-design should be adopted as legality-by-design, which is a way of implementing fundamental rights through code, not just through constitutions, charters and conventions.
The blockchain industry is redefining the meaning of “consensus” and “truth,” replacing shared observability with shared verification, visibility with verification, and surveillance with sovereignty. As this new dawn for privacy takes shape, regulators face a choice: limit it under old frameworks of control, or support it as the foundation of digital freedoms and a more flexible digital order.
The technology is getting ready. The laws need to catch up.
Opinion: Agata Ferreira, Assistant Professor at Warsaw University of Technology.
This article is for general information purposes and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. The views, opinions and opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
