Ethereum Privacy Mapping (Research)

[Admin-W3PN]

Context

Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem is highly dissconnected. R&D primitives & tooling are there, developers build hackathon demos, but there are almost no end-user privacy apps. Mapping ecosystem will help to highlight existing actors, create connections and foster ecosystem towards delivering practical daily privacy within Ethereum.

Goals

Fill existing knowledge gap: Create an actionable map structuring global players delivering privacy in Ethereum from L2s like Aztec to local Privacy LATAM communities.

Significantly increase privacy impact-metrics: more people building privacy-tooling, apps getting mentors, access to finances and markets.

Approach

Focus on a builder journey from “I never build privacy dapp in my life” to reach privacy-market-fit. Curating available resources, links, people and organizations that can help everyone exploring Ethereum privacy. Research framework aggregate all privacy projects, initiatives & R&D that has been delivered from Privacy & Scaling Explorations to hackathons like ETHRome. structure them in categories and tags (from private voting to privacy-focused events and communities) provide hygine check on link availability (alive post-hackathon like ETHBerlin repos or sunset projects like Nocturne) facilitated unified open-knowledge DB available to all from researchers to product managers

Milestones

Preliminary research (1 month) source existing projects, organizations, tools, communities, individuals, events within a privacy landscape collect all links in 1 place

Ecosystem mapping (2 months)

• 1on1 interviews with key actors + local representation (examples: Aztec, Railgun, 0xbow, Fluidkey, Rotki, Department Of Decentralization, Mask Network (China), Privacy LATAM, 0xParc, Fileverse) total # of interviews: 30

• highlight Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem “stack” (from R&D tech to communities) that will be turned into a map

• collect insights (ammount of privacy demos per hackathon, Railgun operational fees, MACI implementations, ammount of people using privacy tooling etc)

Public delivery (1.5 months)

• Github-friendly PDF report

• Github-friendly repo-as-a-DB

• Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem infographic (jpg)

• Public presentation at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, 16 Nov, Buenos Aires

Deliverables

• Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem research map (PDF report: 30 1on1 interviews; min 100 pages)

• Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem micro-web

Post-reserach

• Open-data maintainance: we comit to maintain Ethereum Privacy Knowledge base by adding new projects, events, research into general DB.

• Advocacy: report will be actively share with every key privacy players within ecosystem, integrated into hackathons, meetups, Cypherpunk Congresses.

[Admin-W3PN]

Useful materials

Ecosystem mapping concept by Mykola
Hackathon snapshot by Jensei

[Mykola]

Useful graphics

[Alisher]

I’d like to share my attempt to present the ecosystem as a living organism in motion: with a funding chain flowing from foundations and grants to applications, passing through research, tools, and infrastructure. Advocacy protects stack from legal risks and political attacks. Communities encourage the use of applications and spark interest, while events generate new ideas and collaborations.

Open to feedback and improvements, original is here: https://www.figma.com/design/en1Q7sSQonMc0JDYxE8IC2/Ethereum-Privacy-Ecosystem-layers-and-life-cycle?node-id=0-1&t=TaqSWD7VzNhis6pC-1

[jensei]

Hello here! As a contributor to the Ethereum Privacy Ecosystem research I want to share the most recent moves on this front.

As @Mykola has previously shared, below is the extended repo for all things hackathon:

research/initiatives/ethereum-privacy-ecosystem/resources/hackathons at main ·...

At the moment there is an overview of some of the hackathons (to be continued; potentially split by year) and framework for the rest of the data.

My next goal is to add up privacy focused projects that came out of these hackathons into the db.

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Since this whole process is super cumbersome,

… at the moment I am simply using UIs of the dorahacks, devpost, devfolio, taikai, and ethglobal - manually rewriting and selecting projects …

I have reached out to all these platforms to provide me with some sort of access or an export to their data. I am waiting for a reply.

If you have any close contact to any of the above mentioned, do hit me up!

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In the meantime, I will continue the research the laborious way. If anyone would like to join me feel free to hit me up or just head straight into the github repo!

[Mykola]

Turning research into infographics. Both for Socials & Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress presentation.