ARG Community Hub: Privacy on Ethereum

Community Hubs
1

:female_detective: Privacy Community Hub - Devconnect ARG

Summary of the proposal

A welcoming and practical gathering space for people building, exploring, and learning about privacy on Ethereum. The Privacy Hub offers an open format to demo tools, exchange ideas, explore challenges, and connect across teams. It brings together developers, designers, researchers, and users working to make privacy usable, trustworthy, and normal.

  • Showcase real privacy applications built on Ethereum
  • Provide hands-on experience with tools
  • Make privacy approachable and intuitive
  • Encourage interaction across users, devs, activists, researchers, and legal experts

Motivation and Rationale

Privacy is a fundamental property of Ethereum. As the industry grows, more people are realizing that privacy is not about hiding, but about protecting freedom, autonomy, and sovereignty. At the Ethereum World’s Fair, we will see Applications are becoming more integrated into daily life. They are more personal, more social, and more global. This makes the need for privacy more urgent and more obvious.

The Privacy Hub complements this vision through hands-on demos, peer-to-peer learning, and honest discussions about privacy: why it matters and how it works. The goal is to bring more cohesion to the privacy ecosystem, surface practical learnings, and make it easier for others to understand and contribute to privacy efforts.

Implementation

Building on the success of the Hacktivism hub at Devcon Bangkok.

What we’ll offer

  • Live walk-troughs and demos of privacy tools, where attendees can try, experiment and provide feedback
  • Open office hours and round table discussions with projects projects, contributors and teams
  • A stage for informal lightning talks, show & tell
  • A big wall that highlights a timeline of major privacy and surveillance events
  • A feedback wall to prompt privacy discussion
  • Meeting place for privacy builders & enthusiasts - space for connecting dots within an ecosystem
  • Educational materials from privacy stacks from experts like Vitalik Buterin to Starter Kits (autonomous assets)
  • Dive into local privacy ecosystem.

Production requirements

  • Standard Hub support (chairs, whiteboards, power outlets, stationary, etc.)
  • Large wall space or large magnetic/chalk board to create a timeline of major privacy events
  • Big screen/projector for presentations, and talks
  • Additional screen for a digital museum, and showcasing privacy Apps
  • Additional whiteboards for community post-its / matchmaking
  • If possible, being part of the hacker space/basement/cave would be great!
    • Audio was a huge challenge in Bangkok, so somewhat outside of main pathways would be even better

Key themes

Note that this is an example program of topics we’d like to cover. Exact schedule tbd, but key themes include

1. Make Privacy Real & Approachable

  • The majority of users still don’t use privacy tools, due to lack of awareness, trust, or usability.
  • The hub should bridge this gap with apps to try, stories to hear, tools to install, and people to talk to.
  • Create a privacy “starter kit” experience.
  • Visitors leave with apps installed or at least awareness of what they could use.

2. Immersive, Interactive Design

  • “Privacy Museum” concept: timeline of surveillance & resistance, future of privacy, privacy games, reading nook, reclaim-your-data activations.
  • Static + dynamic zones: blend “come learn” and “come do”.
  • Clear maps and QR-coded installations to guide visitors throughout the entire week.
  • When speakers talk, show their stack (live demos, recommendations) of their favorite Apps.

3. Programmable Space (but flexible)

  • Daily themes proposed (see Sample Program below).
  • Static features run throughout the week, but each day highlights specific tracks: activism, tooling, research, legal, stories.
  • Open sessions, lightning talks, matchmaking boards to keep things dynamic.
  • Consistent daily anchor points (e.g. 2pm = expert time, 4pm = office hours).
  • Posters, flyers, schedules, volunteers, live social pushes.
  • Schedule should be tight but not brittle, allowing walk-ins and spontaneous talks.

TLDR: Make it a shelling point for privacy during Devconnect.

Sample program

Day 1 - Mon 17

Roundtable on the current state of Privacy: what does the current landscape look like? What are the main problems areas? Bring in learnings from Cypherpunk Congress the day before.

Privacy meme day.

Day 2 - Tue 18

Practical privacy day: spend day with people who delivered privacy apps from Railway to Fluidkey. Test them out on your device. Are you a builder? Get practical advices how made a sustainable privacy on Ethereum.

Overlap with zkID Day

Day 3 - Wed 19

Research day with an update on the latest developments on ZK, TEE, FHE, MPC and wtf all these terms actually mean.

Overlap with zkTLS Day

Day 4 - Thu 20

Privacy stories: focused on the people benefiting from privacy. Activists, journalists, researchers and startupers share stories how exactly they use privacy tooling, why its matters for them. Focused on personal stories, practical apps, and diverse use-cases.

Also with emphasis on local stories across LATAM.

Day 5 - Fri 21

Hackathon weekend preparations. Help form teams and matchmaking. Generating ideas. Talk with privacy experts. Privacy pill people to build novel projects. Getting a head start on the upcoming hackathon weekend.

Overlap with Privacy Stack event

Day 6 - Sat 22

Privacy legal day. Hear the latest about regulations, legal frameworks and on-going cases from Tornado Cash, and Storm. What can we build. And what to avoid?

Team

This hub is brought together by a diverse group of active privacy builders, designers, and advocates across the Ethereum ecosystem. We’re contributors to core protocols, projects, education and other community initiatives. We all work on different pieces and layers of the privacy stack from tooling to UX to narratives.

Many of us have collaborated before at different events, hackathons, summits, workshops, raves, and other experiments that never made it past Figma. What brings us together is a shared commitment to privacy as a public good, and a belief that privacy must be practical, collaborative, and built in public.

The Privacy Community Hub is for anyone working to make privacy on Ethereum usable, collaborative, and real. Whether you’re building with zk, exploring new tools, or just trying to understand wtf zk-SNARKs, or stealth addresses actually do, this is your space. Everyone’s welcome. Privacy is normal.

12 Likes
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It will be a pleasure to be part of this :person_gesturing_ok:

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Super excited to continue working on bringing privacy to everyone! Would be keen to also do this within DevConnect.

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This is a great proposal!
We are developing Tu Voto Decide app, is a civic-tech app that lets citizens upload and verify polling station reports in real time, ensuring transparent, tamper-proof elections which uses blockchain and AI — starting in Bolivia, made for Latin America.

We would love to be part of this and show what we have accomplished as the app has been used during National Elections in Bolivia, in August and will be in October for the second round.

Would you be open to have us there and share experiences? :raised_hands: :grinning:

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LFG! Let’s make it happen! Can’t wait :slight_smile:

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This is an amazing initiative!

I’m not a privacy expert, but over the years I’ve noticed that newcomers often fall into common misconceptions. I think it would be valuable for the hub to address these, ideally with input from people who have deeper expertise.

One important point to emphasize is the obvious: by default, anyone can trace your transactions. Maddiaa from Aztec gave a great talk demonstrating this, showing how he could view most people’s spending just by looking up their address or ENS on Dune Analytics. For many of us, this is obvious, but it’s worth repeating.

Another crucial aspect is that privacy isn’t only about the tools you use, it’s also about the size of the anonymity set and what level of privacy that size actually gives you. Awa Sun Yin from Anoma explains this very clearly in this blog post:

See you in Argentina! :argentina:

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I think this is a great proposal, i am happy to contribute from standard wise perspective and based on my severa research found here:

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This is great. The Shutter team would love to contribute to this.

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Thanks for posting the proposal! I am very excited and honoured to be able to contribute to this initiative!

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Hello Wesley and co.~ :sun_with_face:

My team (at @Eth_Auckland) and I would like to contribute to this Devconnect Hub! As mentioned to you in DMs, we have done some legwork around this and reached out to a few projects, would love to join forces! We have reached out to a few projects and contacts in the ecosystem and they have indicated preliminary interests in getting involved!

The themes we thought about were “privacy for individuals”, “privacy for businesses”, “privacy projects showcase”, “ERC workshops” and “all about ZK”, and “innovation meets regulations”. Some of these could overlap with the proposed programme, which is awesome to be thinking along the same wavelength :smiley:

For the theme on “privacy for individuals”, the Hub could cover topics such as presentations and workshops on

  • Online privacy: What kind of data you reveal on the web and how to stay safe
  • Hands-on session: BYO mobile device and learn about/install Graphene
  • De-googling workshop: What information Google holds on you and how to de-Google
  • Web3 Privacy tools (could ft. privacy projects here)

One of our team members, Kyle (@pryvitkyle) presented “Privacy in Web3” at our Eth Auckland conference. The presentation was well received and covered a range of privacy problems on Web2 as well as Web3 and tools for mitigations. He is happy to present again at the Privacy Hub.

As for “privacy for businesses”, there could be a panel discussion on the business case for commercial applications of privacy protocols. We are happy to moderate this.

For the ERCs application workshop, we can invite authors to present their privacy-related ERCs and demo how developers can make use of those. It would also work as a source of gathering community feedback for the ERC to move on from the draft stage to final stage. Potential ERCs include:

We can collaborate with ECHInstitute (formerly, Eth Cat Herders) which I am part of, as the Ops and Community Partnerships lead.

I can see that the team has got a lot of ideas around ZK workshops, ZK presentations. Awesome topics. ZK wormholes are a potential topic as well.

As for the last segment on “innovation meets regulations”, we could have roundtable discussions like:

  • Macro trends on regulations around the world; and
  • Understanding the DOJ’s case on Tornado cash

The first session could cover trends on privacy regulations, KYC, surveillance regulations. The second session is more about giving the audience some context around the regulatory reach (or perhaps, overreach) of Tornado’s cash case. As two of our team members have a legal background, we are happy to moderate or speak at these roundtable sessions, alongside Marina!

For each of these themes, the Hub could weave in privacy-related projects. I can see that there are mentions of 0xbow, Railgun/railway. Paul from Unlink.xyz indicated his interest, and Kyle from Brave as well. Happy to make those connections! :smiley:

Anyway, we are really excited for the Privacy Hub and hope to be able to work together! :raised_hands:

With love from,
cyph3rvae
FryCookVC
pryvitkyle
sunhuachuang
fa_async (volunteer, ETHBolivia)

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Hello @wslyvh and co-organizers,

Thank you for applying to organize a Community Hub for Devconnect ARG! Your proposal has now entered the voting phase.

In the coming days, the Devconnect team will review all submissions and select the ones that best reflect the spirit of the first Ethereum World’s Fair. Selected proposals will be announced during the week of September 8. After that, we’ll move into a collaborative phase to refine each Hub’s concept, programming, and production needs.

We appreciate your contribution to shaping the first Ethereum World’s Fair.

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ETHCluj supports this! Looking forward to contribute as much as possible :metal: