From Foundation to For-Profit: Ex-EF Privacy Trio Banks on Bespoke Secrets

The team that ran the Ethereum Foundation's institutional privacy work for the past year has launched an independent company, EthSystems, to build confidentiality and compliance tools for banks and asset managers transacting on Ethereum. The firm announced its launch Tuesday, positioning itself around the view that institutions want to use Ethereum but need modular privacy to keep sensitive transaction details off public view.

EthSystems is led by Mo Jalil, Oskar Thorén, and Aaryamann Challani, who founded and ran the Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force, a year-long effort that included hundreds of conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks, and asset managers. Jalil, the CEO, previously worked at Goldman Sachs, while Thorén spent "close to a decade" on crypto privacy infrastructure, building the peer-to-peer messaging and Waku protocols now part of Logos. The company says its thesis is that Wall Street has embraced crypto "as an asset class, but not yet as commercial infrastructure."

EthSystems is publishing a year of open-source work alongside the launch, including proofs of concept for private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private cross-chain settlement, hardened shielded pools, and an Ethereum Privacy Map cataloging institutional requirements across the ecosystem. Its business model is bespoke consulting covering workshops, architecture reviews, protocol specifications, and production systems, which the founders describe as continuing work previously done for the Foundation, now on a paid basis.

The spinout is the latest in a string of departures from the Ethereum Foundation during 2026. The Foundation cut 20% of its staff in June, trimmed its budget, wound down its in-house privacy and scaling research unit, and reorganized around a leaner mandate after at least nine senior figures left over the year. Within weeks, three groups had separated to take on work the Foundation is stepping back from: Ethlabs, a non-profit handling core protocol research; Ethereum Institutional, a non-profit coordinating outreach to banks and asset managers; and EthSystems, the for-profit building applied privacy technology.

EthSystems said it left the Foundation on good terms and described itself as complementary, focused on "depth over [breadth]" relative to the other spinoffs. The company did not disclose funding, headcount, or pricing for its consulting engagements in the launch announcement.