A team of former Ethereum Foundation researchers focused on institutional privacy has launched EthSystems, a new for-profit company aimed at building confidentiality infrastructure for financial institutions using Ethereum.
The startup emerged from the Ethereum Foundation, which spent the past year developing privacy technologies for enterprise use cases while engaging with central banks, regulators, global banks and asset managers.
The spinout comes amid one of the biggest organizational shakeups in the Ethereum Foundation in years. Following months of criticism over leadership, strategy and the foundation’s role in supporting Ethereum’s increasingly institutional user base, several teams have recently been spun out into independent organizations.
Among them are EthLabs, a nonprofit focused on advancing Ethereum protocol research and scaling, and Ethereum Institutional, a separate nonprofit designed to coordinate institutional adoption and engagement with large financial firms. Together, the organizations represent an effort to distribute responsibilities previously housed within the foundation across more specialized entities.
EthSystems said it plans to commercialize work it began inside the foundation, including confidential stablecoin transfers, private bond issuance, cross-chain settlement systems and open-source protocol specifications.