Author: Bankless
Translation: Plain Talk Blockchain
The "full transparency" of public blockchains was once Ethereum's most proud banner, but it has now become a fatal shackle preventing trillions in traditional capital from entering. On-chain, a single large transfer can instantly expose an entire institution's trading strategy to front-running across the entire network.
How can Wall Street giants embrace Ethereum without exposing their commercial playbooks while still meeting stringent compliance requirements?
Offering the decentralized world's ultimate solution is EthSystems, a project officially spun out from the Ethereum Foundation. In this article, its two founders—whose backgrounds span top-tier investment banking and the cutting edge of cryptography—will deeply reveal how they use modern zero-knowledge proofs to break the paradox that "privacy and transparency cannot coexist," charting a future blueprint for trillions in institutional assets to comply and go on-chain.
Origin and Mission: Why Ethereum Needs Institutional-Grade Privacy
David: Welcome to Bankless. With me today are Mo Jalil and Oscar Thorne. They are the co-founders of EthSystems. This is a new team officially spun out from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on three core things: Ethereum, institutions, and privacy. I believe this is extremely urgent for the entire crypto industry, Ethereum included, because it's the key piece needed to truly elevate the Ethereum ecosystem to the next level. Oscar, Mo, welcome to Bankless.
Oscar: Thanks for having us, David.
Mo: Thanks David.
David: Let's get straight to the point: Why is privacy so desperately needed for Ethereum? Oscar, I'll start with you.
Oscar: Ethereum is excellent as a foundational technology and runs remarkably stably as a credibly neutral, decentralized base layer. But it doesn't have privacy mechanisms built into its protocol layer by design. So we see many people trying to fill this gap, exploring at the base layer or developing various solutions at the application layer. It's safe to say that privacy is currently the most critical missing piece in Ethereum's, and indeed the entire public blockchain, landscape. And that's precisely where we come in.
For us, the team's core focus is on institutions. Large institutions typically care deeply about two things: first, the continuity and security of their core business, and second, strict compliance requirements. It is precisely because of these constraints that, for a long time, traditional institutions have preferred private networks or consortium chains where they could maintain full control.
However, the public Ethereum blockchain offers deep global liquidity, new opportunities for commercial collaboration, and huge potential to optimize their existing business models. Without modern cryptography as a bridge, institutions cannot meet compliance and trade secret protection requirements while enjoying the liquidity of public chains. They must have these privacy computing capabilities to truly embrace the significant benefits offered by the public Ethereum chain.
David: Could you talk about your professional backgrounds? For you, EthSystems might be a new entity just over a month old, but this is clearly a natural evolution of your long-term work along a technological arc. We need to understand what experience you've accumulated in Ethereum, cryptographic privacy, and traditional financial institutions, and how that converges into EthSystems. Mo, you first.
Mo: I started in traditional finance, building quantitative algorithmic trading systems at top-tier investment banks like Goldman Sachs for about five years. That experience gave me an inside look at the real needs and pain points of such large banks in terms of system architecture, matching and clearing, risk management, and compliance. I then worked in the hedge fund industry for a few years. That cross-industry experience was very interesting to me.
I was always following emerging technology. I remember being blown away the first time I read the Bitcoin whitepaper, but at that time, using public chains for core financial operations was clearly too early. Years later, I joined the Ethereum Foundation, leading much of the application-layer business development work. Tomas was serving as co-executive director at the time. During that work, one thing became crystal clear: privacy protection and modern cryptographic solutions were non-negotiable prerequisites for any large traditional organization wanting to truly use public Ethereum. I had known Oscar for years, so I called him directly: 'Oscar, there is something critical for the future of the entire ecosystem that perfectly fits your background. We need to sit down and have a deep discussion.'
Oscar: I've been deep in crypto for about a decade. I started focusing on privacy technology very early, when privacy wasn't yet a hot topic in the community. I worked at Status in the early days and later founded a research and development lab. During that time, we led the development of various peer-to-peer communication protocols, focusing on censorship resistance, data availability, and communication privacy as foundational infrastructure. So I have extensive hands-on experience in protocol design, cryptographic privacy, and censorship-resistant network architecture.
For the past five to six years, I've fully immersed myself in the zero-knowledge proof space, developing various developer tools and infrastructure, including deep collaboration with early members of the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy & Scaling Explorations (PSC) team. I wrote a small book on proof systems, conducted research on polynomial commitment schemes, and led tool development to reduce client-side proof complexity. Over the past few years, I served as a privacy strategy advisor at the Ethereum Foundation, primarily focusing on new access layer architecture. As Mo mentioned, we launched the institutional privacy working group during our time together at the Foundation.
For me personally, my focus had long been on individual sovereignty and user-level privacy, which remains a core principle for me. But in recent years, I've clearly observed that the need for privacy by institutions is not only real but, in many business contexts, even more urgent than for individual users. This is directly related to the gradual clarification of global regulatory frameworks in recent years. Many leading institutions are deeply concerned about the commercial blowback from exposing on-chain data. For the past year, we've been building this solution openly within the Foundation and officially spun it out into an independent entity about a month ago.
Mo: Adding to that. When we spun out to form EthSystems, we didn't start from scratch. We brought a year's worth of solid research and delivery: including multiple closed-door workshops, practical collaboration cases with numerous financial entities, released public goods (like a market map mapping various real-world financial use cases to Ethereum privacy solutions), and deep technical architecture analyses on topics like confidential distribution and comparing public ledgers versus private execution lanes. The EthSystems brand may be young, but it's built upon years, even a decade, of cryptography and financial engineering accumulation.
Strategy and Current State: Transitioning from Theory to Engineering Practice
David: Oscar just mentioned two key points: first, the Foundation's privacy strategy, and second, the fundamental difference between institutional privacy and personal privacy. Let's start with the privacy strategy. What exactly is a privacy strategy? How did you define it in your implementation?
Oscar: This relates to the research environment the PSC team was in at the Ethereum Foundation. We were trying to bring advanced cryptographic work more deeply into the Foundation's broader vision, systematically considering which privacy research directions the Foundation should prioritize. Of course, many teams in the ecosystem are now pushing forward, and I don't want to over-represent the Foundation's position unilaterally.
As the leads of the institutional privacy working group, our core mission was to connect two long-separated worlds: on one side, large traditional institutions, and on the other, the native Ethereum ecosystem. In early conversations with financial institutions, there was often a huge information gap—they generally thought Ethereum was 'just a completely transparent public chain with no business privacy.' But in reality, the Ethereum ecosystem has amassed an incredibly rich set of solutions in underlying cryptographic primitives, specialized security vendors, and various layered privacy protocols.
Our work involved systematically deconstructing the full landscape of Ethereum's privacy tech stack for institutions on one hand, and on the other, clearly translating for crypto teams and protocol engineers within the ecosystem: what these real trillion-dollar commercial users are actually looking for. So we created a detailed privacy market map, systematically categorized traditional institutions' specific needs in particular business processes, legal/compliance constraints, and transaction scenarios, then precisely mapped them to existing technical solutions like zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, or homomorphic encryption. Through proof-of-concepts and architectural whitepapers, we pointed the industry to missing components and how to assemble these cryptographic building blocks.
Mo: I'll quickly add something. Oscar mentioned PSC; some listeners might not be familiar. The Ethereum ecosystem has been deeply involved in privacy and scaling technology for many years. Although privacy protocols have become a capital and technical hotspot again recently, the Ethereum Foundation has long had a lab dedicated to cryptographic research, namely the PSC. They can be seen as Ethereum's privacy stewards, a group of core builders long focused on cryptographic theory and privacy protocol implementation.
David: From your observations, does the industry already have ready-made code solutions where institutions just need to know they exist and can use them off-the-shelf? Or does building enterprise-grade confidential systems on Ethereum still have significant foundational gaps? Where exactly are we on this technology evolution curve: still needing breakthroughs in underlying cryptographic theory, or is the infrastructure largely in place, mainly lacking standardization and module assembly?
Oscar: That's a profound question. I think the current reality is a mix of both. Over the past decade, the Ethereum Foundation, the Zcash ecosystem, and numerous independent cryptography teams have successfully engineered many advanced cryptographic primitives, turning pure theory into usable code. Around these foundational breakthroughs, a number of technical service providers have emerged to lower integration barriers. For many standard scenarios, we already know the technical path.
However, when facing the complex constraints of specific institutions, a significant engineering gap remains. Many traditional institutions have incredibly stringent and counterintuitive business constraints; generic standardized solutions often don't directly fit. Outsiders might simplistically think 'deploying a privacy Layer 2 for the institution solves everything,' but once you delve into real transaction flows, generic Rollups often come with trade-offs in latency, liquidity fragmentation, or compliance permissions that institutions find unacceptable.
In our engagements with these institutions, we find a huge disparity in digital maturity: leading institutions may have built in-house R&D labs with dozens of people, including top cryptography PhDs who have been tracking zero-knowledge proofs for years; meanwhile, other traditional institutions have zero Web3 R&D capabilities and simply want to procure white-label, compliant infrastructure off-the-shelf. Different clients have vastly different demands in terms of throughput performance, deterministic settlement times, and security assurance levels, which means we cannot adopt a one-size-fits-all approach.
Mo: From the in-depth institutional cases we've followed, the current bottleneck is essentially no longer a pure theoretical cryptography research problem, but an extremely complex system engineering implementation and architecture adaptation problem. The Ethereum ecosystem is ahead in research; the hardest remaining task is to assemble these building blocks solidly into modern financial infrastructure.
The Real Battleground: Investment Bank Pain Points and the Path to Customized Solutions
David: Since the core challenge is engineering, can you break down a typical real-world institution case you've encountered? What are the most common privacy demands when large institutions connect to Ethereum? Is it confidentiality of corporate stablecoin account balances, preventing position visibility during Real World Asset (RWA) issuance, or private B2B supply chain settlements? Which type of demand do you handle most frequently in practice?
Mo: The institutional use cases we encounter daily are extremely broad. Frankly, our team tends to focus our energy on the hard problems that existing market solutions haven't yet cracked. Use cases like the basic confidential transfers or tokenized deposits you mentioned already have some initial solutions in the market and have been partially addressed in some compliance-friendly jurisdictions or within specific organizations. We focus more on systemic pain points that are massive in the traditional financial world but haven't been seriously addressed in the public chain space.
Here's a representative real case: we once deeply explored the 'inter-dealer compression' business with a top-tier global investment bank. In traditional derivatives and foreign exchange markets, massive bilateral exposures occur daily between major banks. At the end of each trading day, to reduce capital charges and counterparty risk, all participating banks send their vast transaction data to a centralized clearing service provider trusted by all parties. For this, these top financial institutions pay tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars annually in expensive service fees.
This centralized third party sees each bank's sensitive transaction details and real-time positions, performing multi-party netting and position compression in the backend. While no major bank wants to fully expose its underlying trading positions to a third party, the industry has had to compromise because position compression significantly reduces capital adequacy requirements and the number of trades that need actual clearing.
The executives from this investment bank approached us with a request: Is it possible to use cryptographic technology to completely remove this centralized intermediary? The immutable, shared global state of a decentralized network like Ethereum is the ideal foundation for solving this problem. But the core obstacle is: if these sensitive datasets are submitted directly to the transparent public Ethereum mainnet, competitors worldwide would have a clear view of each bank's real positions. This is a typical real-world scenario with hundreds of billions in potential value that has received little attention from native crypto teams.
In the confidential payments and clearing & settlement space, we've also conducted multiple architecture discussions with large institutions in various sovereign jurisdictions. As Oscar said, while confidential payment concepts sound standardized, specific national financial regulations, anti-money laundering requirements, and foreign exchange controls impose multi-layered complex constraints on what would otherwise be simple cryptographic models.
Oscar: Building enterprise-grade confidential systems is far more than just introducing a zero-knowledge proof. Beyond data privacy, institutions are deeply concerned with system high availability, deterministic security boundaries, censorship resistance, and compatibility with existing settlement systems. Often, our work elevates the entire Web3 industry's rigor in engineering specifications and system delivery.
These traditional giants have validated product-market fit (PMF) in their existing businesses, with internal systems handling billions of dollars daily. When they consider migrating operations to the Ethereum ecosystem, their primary demand is for 100% system determinism. This is fundamentally different from the early industry's intuitive, rapid-iteration experimental development logic. Privacy is the most technically challenging part, but it's just one core attribute within a larger high-availability distributed system. We must provide technically rigorous specifications that comprehensively cover edge cases.
David: Is there a case that has completed the entire journey from requirement discussion, technical validation to actual implementation? Can you share the full story of an institution successfully connecting to Ethereum using your privacy solution?
Mo: Under strict non-disclosure agreements, I can share a real case involving national-level financial infrastructure. In many developed economies, peer-to-peer payment logic is straightforward, but in certain jurisdictions, the regulatory logic is entirely different. A major financial institution in one country wanted to deploy a blockchain-based underlying payment network nationwide. They fully recognized the efficiency of public chains for cross-institutional settlement, but the system had to support high-concurrency transactions for tens of millions of people while meeting the country's unique compliance audit architecture.
In standard cryptographic privacy payment models, typically only bilateral confidentiality and verification between sender and receiver are needed. However, this country's financial regulations explicitly required that each transaction must cryptographically support the collaborative interaction of four entities: the fund sender, the fund receiver, a licensed compliance auditor, and the national regulatory authority.
Over two to three years, this institution tried nearly every mainstream privacy protocol and scaling network on the market. None could simultaneously guarantee controlled disclosure to these four parties while meeting throughput, deterministic latency, and manageable on-chain computation costs. They even produced a detailed technical assessment report dozens of pages thick, arguing why it was impossible under existing public chain systems.
The turning point came when our team, during our time at the Ethereum Foundation, publicly released a series of research articles and proof-of-concept code on multi-party confidential state transitions. The institution's technical lead saw this open-source work and reached out to us, saying this breakthrough from the Foundation made them see the technical feasibility of building a national-level clearing network on Ethereum. They are now advancing deployment based on our open-source architectural blueprint. This case not only breaks the bias that public chains cannot meet complex sovereign compliance but also prevents the country from reverting to a completely closed, fragmented traditional private chain system.
Oscar: The business and technical validation cycles for this type of institutional engagement are very long, often involving lengthy compliance reviews, legal assessments, and security audits. During our Foundation work, many institutions we engaged with deeply expressed willingness to procure more in-depth architectural support commercially, but the Foundation, as a neutral non-profit, couldn't accept commercial contracts, causing many potentially implementable projects to stall at the final mile. This is a core reason we chose to spin out the team as an independent for-profit entity: to engage traditional institutions with mature commercial contract structures while continuing to give back to the public chain ecosystem through open source.
The Scalability Paradox: Balancing Deep Customization with Universal Standards
David: Hearing this, a core concern arises: If you must do a lot of highly customized development for each jurisdiction and each unique compliance requirement, how does the business achieve network effects and scale? The industry often says a glove perfectly fitted for one hand often only fits that hand.
Another evolutionary path would be: If we build native privacy directly into Ethereum's core infrastructure—making Uniswap, Aave, basic EOA account systems, and Ledger hardware wallets have high-fidelity, out-of-the-box privacy by default—could institutions simply adapt to this unified standard? If everyone operates under the same universal standard, the overall privacy liquidity of the Ethereum ecosystem could experience explosive growth. How do you balance this scalability contradiction between deep customization and universal standards?
Mo: This is a profound industry question. First, customized implementation and advancing underlying universal standards are not mutually exclusive opposites; the strength of the Ethereum ecosystem lies precisely in its ability to evolve flexibly across multiple layers. Second, what people typically consider 'specific customized markets' are often themselves massive, independent industries worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the traditional financial world.
We absolutely do not advocate endless, purely outsourced customization; that's not a healthy business model. EthSystems' core strategy is: first, go deep into the front lines and thoroughly understand the most challenging vertical scenarios, because only by fully grasping business details can we design truly usable cryptographic architectures; then, immediately abstract highly versatile underlying cryptographic building blocks and protocol standards from these high-barrier scenarios.
For example, the 'inter-dealer compression' protocol mentioned earlier, once proven at a leading investment bank, can have its underlying cryptographic state machine horizontally reused by all major investment banks globally. The 'multi-party controlled compliance disclosure protocol' developed for sovereign-level payments can also be abstracted into standard modules serving compliant stablecoins in various regions worldwide.
Our long-term path is very clear: All battle-tested core algorithms and generic interfaces will be contributed to the Ethereum community under the most permissive open-source licenses, completely eliminating institutional concerns about proprietary technology lock-in. At the same time, we package these audited components into high-performance, plug-and-play modular kits. This approach is similar to the Silicon Valley startup methodology of 'navigating the maze of knowledge': in the early stages, the team must get their hands dirty doing seemingly unscalable work that accumulates the highest knowledge barriers.
Facing traditional financial giants with systems running stably for over a century, the public chain ecosystem cannot arrogantly demand they completely rebuild to fit Web3. Instead, we must build smooth transition bridges from their existing business interfaces and legal frameworks.
Oscar: I completely agree with Mo. The crypto industry has historically followed an idealist logic: 'Just build the universal underlying infrastructure well, and applications and users will naturally come.' But reality shows that facing strictly regulated, operationally complex institutional users, this logic often fails.
First conquering extremely complex specific scenarios, then refining and generalizing them into universal standards is a path with immense engineering value. We achieve this precisely by releasing open-source code libraries, modular protocol blueprints, and highly extensible technical specifications. Of course, we desperately hope to see Ethereum's base layer (L1) natively support more privacy primitives in the future, which would greatly expand the application boundaries of the entire decentralized world. But for now, our primary strategic focus remains: remove all obstacles and safely bring trillions in real institutional assets onto the Ethereum ecosystem.
David: In terms of business model positioning, is EthSystems more like a consulting studio providing customized technical delivery for traditional financial institutions, or closer to product-focused tech companies like Uniswap Labs or Aave Companies that capture scale value by building standardized on-chain products?
Mo: Our self-positioning is very clear: we are unequivocally a pure product company. In my previous role as CTO, my entire career has been about building scalable software products; Oscar also has a long background in product architecture and protocol development. We know that only standardized products can deliver exponential network effects.
But the path to a great product involves a necessary spectrum of evolution. At the intersection of Ethereum and traditional finance, you cannot sit in an ivory tower and imagine requirements. The team must act as front-line deployment engineers, going deep onto Wall Street trading desks and into compliance offices, observing firsthand how traders interact with clearing systems. The ultimate goal of all customized exploration is to distill standardized infrastructure products that can be distributed at scale.
Oscar: Traditional institutions' procurement and decision cycles are inherently very long. Through early deep technical collaboration, proof-of-concepts, and joint architecture reviews, we gain unprecedented insight into the real world's rigid demands, ensuring we have extremely high competitive barriers when deciding to bet on core products. This deep feedback loop is inaccessible to purely external teams.
Endgame and Future Ecosystem: Redefining the Boundaries of Transparency and Trust
David: Looking at the broader cycle, how has traditional institutions' willingness to truly adopt decentralized public chain ledgering changed? In your daily business conversations, are you mostly pitching Ethereum, or are institutions proactively seeking compliant on-chain solutions?
Mo: In reality, the vast majority of demand comes to us proactively. First, global mainstream financial institutions have, over the past few years, fully understood the immense value of decentralized shared ledgers in eliminating reconciliation costs and enabling real-time atomic settlement. Second, credit must be given to the entire native DeFi ecosystem: when traditional institutions saw the remarkable resilience and capital efficiency demonstrated by decentralized lending and trading protocols like Aave, Uniswap, and MakerDAO through years of extreme market volatility, they developed a strong desire to participate. Their core request is simply how to enter in a manner compliant with current laws and regulations.
Especially as digital asset compliance legislation in regions like the US and Europe has gradually clarified, the internal drivers within traditional institutions have fundamentally shifted. In past years, most institutional engagement was led by peripheral 'innovation labs' conducting low-risk PoCs. In the past year, we've frequently seen CEOs or business line heads at large institutions directly instructing their tech teams: stop pure lab toy development, and start building real business loops on public chains.
David: Does this mean the evolution will go through a transitional phase first: the emergence on-chain of cryptographically protected, compliant institutional sandbox networks, where financial institutions run their business logic in a controlled environment; then, as liquidity and infrastructure mature, bridging via cross-chain and zero-knowledge proof technology to compliantly connect to the deep liquidity of native DeFi protocols like Morpho and Uniswap?
Oscar: That's precisely the implementation path we clearly foresee and are advancing. Many highly forward-looking large asset management institutions are already deeply planning how to integrate tokenized funds with on-chain lending protocols in a composable way.
But there is a multi-year 'cognitive and legal translation period' in between. Many multinational banks have over a century of history; their internal risk control manuals and legal compliance frameworks are written entirely based on traditional central counterparty settlement systems. Translating these compliance frameworks precisely into Ethereum's smart contract logic requires joint efforts from technical experts, legal advisors, and policymakers. The more knowledgeable and decisive mature capital is currently racing to capture this historic transition period.
David: Let's look seven years into the future. Assuming by 2033, EthSystems has achieved all its initial strategic objectives, and traditional institutions' migration on-chain is in full swing. In the most ambitious scenario you're building, what would the future on-chain financial system look like?
Mo: I believe the best technology in its final form should be completely 'invisible.' Ordinary users shouldn't even need to be aware of blockchains, cryptographic algorithms, or decentralized ledgers to naturally enjoy the underlying security and free-flowing capabilities they provide.
Through decentralized identity (DID) and zero-knowledge proof systems, an ordinary investor could compliantly invest in global quality assets and receive real-time settlement while fully controlling their sovereign data, without submitting sensitive privacy to centralized intermediaries. We hope to see not just trillions in traditional assets minted onto Ethereum, but more importantly, global assets flowing while fully retaining DeFi's permissionless composability advantage, eliminating data exposure risks for innocent individuals and businesses. Within the next seven years, the migration of mainstream global financial infrastructure to decentralized public chains like Ethereum will become a certain reality.
David: This leads to a classic and sharp native philosophical divide: a core pillar the crypto community has long been most proud of is 'complete data openness, globally verifiable, on-chain auditable.' If future asset flows, Total Value Locked (TVL), and institutional holdings are all hidden by zero-knowledge cryptography, how can the community ensure the underlying system isn't secretly over-issuing or creating bad debt? How do we balance privacy protection with public trust?
Mo: Many industry observers mistakenly equate privacy narrowly with completely unknowable data hiding. Privacy in the modern cryptographic sense is precisely defined as: under strictly controlled conditions, clearly defining *who*, *at what point in time*, *in what mathematical proof manner*, can access *which specific dimensions* of information.
In real life, when you make an everyday bank transfer, only you, the recipient, and your bank know the transaction details. This business-level data isolation is the basic order ensuring normal commercial society function. The public's demand for complete transparency is essentially to gain deterministic trust that the system isn't misbehaving. But if modern cryptography allows us to provide deterministic verification of solvency to the entire network without exposing individual transaction counterparties and business secrets, this is clearly a more advanced, more elegant paradigm of trust—selective verifiable disclosure.
David: That's precisely the ideal state I envision. The on-chain auditability we want to preserve is macro-level metrics: total transaction volume, aggregated pool sizes, overall network TVL, and system-wide liquidation triggers.
When institutions deposit large confidential assets into lending protocols like Morpho, the system should still be able to output the total asset volume in real-time, verified by zero-knowledge proofs, to the entire network. When large orders trade on a decentralized exchange, the public can confirm the trade happened and settled without exposing specific institutional holdings and real-time strategies to front-running arbitrage bots (MEV).
On traditional mainnets, when top whales perform large token swaps, the entire network often front-runs and snipes them within seconds. This is not how a serious modern financial system should operate. Institutions cannot bear having their entire transaction footprint constantly monitored. As long as we can mathematically verify the authenticity and compliance of the master ledger, we can fully balance transparency and commercial privacy.
Oscar: Exactly. There's no irreconcilable contradiction between the two at the cryptographic level. Using modern zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic commitment schemes, we can design elegant layered systems: keep macro indicators related to public safety and system stability globally transparent and verifiable, while providing ironclad privacy at the micro level for specific account subjects, transaction details, and business strategies. Ethereum's Turing-complete programmability provides the best ground for this architecture that optimizes for both ends.
David: For developers and core protocols within the ecosystem, how should they collaborate to accelerate this process? Whether it's native DeFi blue-chips like Morpho, Uniswap, or researchers at the Ethereum Foundation, how can they better clear obstacles for institutional-grade privacy?
Mo: For the broader DeFi ecosystem protocols, our call is very direct: If you are building innovative lending, trading, or asset management infrastructure, please feel free to reach out to EthSystems. We are eager to collaborate with native teams on how to architecturally adapt battle-tested DeFi protocols for institutional-grade compliant privacy use cases.
At the same time, our team systematically open-sources the latest technical specifications and code libraries every three to four weeks. Many executives and architects at international financial institutions closely follow these technical outputs. If the native community builds highly innovative privacy or scalability tools, please submit them directly to our open-source repositories for collaborative evolution.
Oscar: Participants in the Ethereum ecosystem need to adopt a more open mindset when considering our potential user base. We hope to encourage developers not only to focus on native retail user experience but also to think deeply about what technical interfaces large entities constrained by compliance actually need. Breaking down the cognitive barriers between the Ethereum ecosystem and traditional institutions is a systematic project requiring long-term collaboration across the entire ecosystem.
Mo: Ultimately, our core mission can be summarized in one sentence: to be translators and bridge-builders moving between top-tier boardrooms and cyberpunk circles. These two groups have often misunderstood or even opposed each other in the past, but we firmly believe that only by writing truly individual-rights-defending, commercially-freedom-upholding decentralized technology into the foundational system specifications of the highest decision-making layers can we truly reshape the future of global financial infrastructure.
David: This reminds me of an insight shared by Ethereum core researcher Danny Ryan. As a staunch decentralization advocate, when he sat with architects from top Wall Street banks, though they used completely different professional vocabularies, their underlying demands were highly aligned: cyberpunks advocate for decentralization and censorship resistance, while traditional bank executives discuss eliminating single-point counterparty default risk. It's like the horseshoe theory, where the ultimate demands at both ends are completely isomorphic at a deep level.
Oscar: That's exactly right. Whether individuals or institutions, the core attributes people truly care about at the foundational level are always highly consistent: security, censorship resistance, transparent rules, and privacy sovereignty.
The most fascinating aspect of Ethereum is its immense inclusivity: it can support completely decentralized, identity-less native crypto experiments while also building next-generation financial systems with both privacy and compliance for trillion-dollar entities under strict legal and business constraints. Understanding this deeply, we realize these two are never truly separate.
David: Mo, Oscar, you're advancing groundbreaking work critical for the entire Web3 industry. Thank you for the profound insights shared on Bankless, and best wishes to EthSystems in the journey ahead of bringing institutions on-chain.
Oscar: Thank you very much for the invitation, David.
Mo: Thanks David, great to be here.
