Opinion: Agata Ferreira, Assistant Professor at Warsaw University of Technology
There is a new consensus taking shape across the Web3 world. For years, privacy has been treated as a compliance issue, Responsibility to developers At best, a specialist concern. It is now clear that privacy is actually what digital freedom is based on.
Ethereum Foundation Announcement Privacy group — a cross-team effort focusing on private reads and writes, secret identities and zero-knowledge proofs — is a sign of a philosophical redefinition of what trust, consensus and truth mean in the digital age, and a deeper recognition of the necessity of integrating privacy into infrastructure.
Regulators should pay attention. Privacy-preserving designs are no longer just an experiment; They are now a standard approach. They have become the way forward for decentralized systems. The question is whether law and regulation will embrace this shift or remain stuck in an outdated logic that equates visibility with safety.
From joint monitoring to joint verification
For a long time, digital governance has been built on the logic of vision. The systems were trustworthy because they could be monitored by regulators, auditors, or the public. This “shared monitoring” model is behind everything from financial reports to blockchain explorers. Transparency is the means to ensure integrity.
But in cryptosystems, a more powerful model is emerging: cross-validation. Instead of every actor seeing everything, zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-preserving designs allow verification of rule following without revealing underlying data. Truth becomes something you can prove, not something you have to reveal.
This shift may seem technical, but it has serious consequences. This means we no longer need to choose between privacy and accountability. Both can coexist, and be directly integrated into the systems we rely on. Regulators must also adapt to this logic rather than fight it.
Privacy as infrastructure
The industry realizes the same thing: privacy is not a niche. It’s the infrastructure. Without this, Web3’s openness becomes its weak point, and transparency collapses into surveillance.
Emerging architectures across ecosystems show that specificity and modularity are finally converging. Ethereum’s privacy group focuses on secret computation and selective disclosure at the smart contract level.
Others go deeper, incorporating privacy into the consensus of the network itself: unlinkable messaging to the sender, auditor anonymity, proof of private ownership, and self-healing data persistence. These designs rebuild the digital collection from the ground up, aligning privacy, verifiability, and decentralization as mutually reinforcing properties.
This is not an incremental improvement. It’s a new way of thinking about freedom in the age of digital networks.
Politics lags behind technology
Current regulatory approaches still reflect the logic of joint surveillance. Privacy-preserving technologies are scrutinized or restricted, while visibility, safety, and compliance are confused. Developers face privacy protocols Regulatory pressurePolicymakers still think so Encryption It constitutes an obstacle to the possibility of observation.
This perspective is outdated and dangerous. In a world where everyone is under surveillance, and where data is being collected on an unprecedented scale, bought, sold, leaked and exploited, the lack of privacy is the real systemic risk. It undermines trust, puts people at risk, and makes democracies weaker. In contrast, privacy-preserving designs make integrity provable and enable accountability without exposure to abuse.
Lawmakers must begin to view privacy as an ally, not an adversary, and a tool for enforcing basic rights and restoring trust in digital environments.
Supervision, not just auditing
The next phase of digital regulation must move from audit to support. Legal and policy frameworks should protect open source systems that preserve privacy as a critical public good. The supervisory position is a duty, not a political choice.
Related to: Compliance doesn’t have to cost you your privacy
It means providing legal clarity to developers and distinguishing between acts and architecture. Laws should punish misconduct, not technologies that enable privacy. The right to maintain private digital communications, association and economic exchange must be treated as a fundamental right, enforced by law and infrastructure.
This approach would demonstrate regulatory maturity, recognizing that resilient democracies and legitimate governance depend on privacy-preserving infrastructure.
Freedom Building
The Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy Initiative and other new network designs that put privacy first share the idea that freedom in the digital age is an architectural principle. It may not rely solely on promises of good governance or oversight; It must be integrated into the protocols that make up our lives.
These new systems, private collections, and separate buildings between states and sovereign regions represent the practical synthesis of particularity and modularity. It enables communities to build independently while remaining verifiably connected, thus combining autonomy and accountability.
Policymakers should see this as an opportunity to support the direct integration of fundamental rights into the technical foundation of the Internet. Privacy by design should be embraced as legitimate by design, a way to enforce basic rights through code, not just through constitutions, charters, and agreements.
The blockchain industry is redefining the meaning of “consensus” and “truth,” replacing shared monitoring with shared verification, visibility with verifiability, and oversight with sovereignty. As this new dawn of privacy takes shape, regulators face a choice: either restrict it within old frameworks of control, or support it as the foundation of digital freedom and a more flexible digital order.
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 is not intended and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
