Devcon Archive logo
Devcon Forum Blog
  • Watch
  • Event
    Event: background logo
    • Devcon 7
    • Devcon 6
    • Devcon 5
    • Devcon 4
    • Devcon 3
    • Devcon 2
    • Devcon 1
    • Devcon 0
  • Categories
    Categories: background logo
    • Cryptoeconomics
    • Devcon
    • Developer Experience
    • Coordination
    • Core Protocol
    • Layer 2s
    • Real World Ethereum
    • Cypherpunk & Privacy
    • Security
    • Applied Cryptography
    • Usability
  • Playlists

Suggested

Loading results..

View all

About Devcon —

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers.

An intensive introduction for new Ethereum explorers, a global family reunion for those already a part of our ecosystem, and a source of energy and creativity for all.

  • Watch
  • Devcon
  • Forum
  • Blog

Get in touch

devcon@ethereum.org

Subscribe to our newsletter

Crafted with passion ❤️ at the Ethereum Foundation

© 2025 — Ethereum Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

devcon 4 / privacy preserving smart contracts

  • YouTube
  • IPFS
  • Details

Privacy Preserving Smart Contracts

Duration: 00:07:33

Speaker: Julian Koh

Type: Talk

Expertise: Intermediate

Event: Devcon

Date: Invalid Date

An overview of the privacy-preserving smart contract landscape. Examines the 3 main approaches: trusted execution environments (TEE), secure multi-party computation (sMPC), and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), and their respective tradeoffs to achieving computation over private data. I talk about the different companies doing each approach and I propose a way to synthesize all 3 approaches coherently.  There is a full blog post about the topic here: http://juliankohtx.com/privacy-preserving-smart-contracts/

Categories

PrivacyTEEZKPzkproofssMPC
  • Related
Keynote: Lessons learned from Tor preview
Devcon
Talk
31:51

Keynote: Lessons learned from Tor

I will share lessons learned during Tor's twenty years as free software fighting for privacy and human rights. We'll talk about distributed trust and privacy by design, how to help people understand the good uses of your tech, getting allies in both cypherpunks and government, why transparency and community-building are so essential to trust, and successes from other spaces. It may seem like the crypto wars never really end, but we all have a part to play in saving the world.

Keynote: Glass Houses and Tornados preview
Devcon
Talk
15:04

Keynote: Glass Houses and Tornados

The Tornado Cash sanctions and criminal prosecutions have challenged longstanding assumptions within crypto about the limits of money transmission licensing, money laundering statutes, and sanctions laws. They've also revealed a longstanding assumption from some in policy and law enforcement circles: that blockchains have always been and must remain transparent. Neither assumption has served us well and the time has come for legal certainty. This talk is about how we get there.

Tending the Infinite Garden: Organizational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem preview
Devcon
Talk
23:47

Tending the Infinite Garden: Organizational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem

This presentation will discuss the findings of the academic paper "Tending the Infinite Garden: Organisational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem" by Dr. Paul-Dylan-Ennis and Ann Brody. Our study examines the decision-making processes fundamental to Ethereum's protocol governance, drawing on interviews with Ethereum's core developers. We identify a central worldview in Ethereum known as the "Infinite Garden" and discuss how Ethereum's social layer is crucial for upholding cypherpunk values.

Keynote: Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again: Why we need privacy preview
Devcon
Talk
26:12

Keynote: Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again: Why we need privacy

The Web3 revolution seeks to address the sins of Web2. However, in doing so, it’s created an even worse outcome for users - users’ data is publicly available and makes them vulnerable to state-level censorship and adverse actions. This talk will address the philosophical as well as practical considerations of privacy in Web3. Privacy is an industry-wide issue and sits at the heart of all that is Web3. Understanding why privacy matters involves recognizing that it is not an isolated concept bu

Keynote: How to Properly Open Source Software:  Lessons Learned from the Linux Foundation preview
Devcon
Talk
25:44

Keynote: How to Properly Open Source Software: Lessons Learned from the Linux Foundation

It can be challenging to properly open source software: there are licenses, IP, security reporting, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In this talk, we will discuss the best practices for open source software development learned from almost 25 years of experience at the Linux Foundation. Attendees will learn about how to set up their projects for a variety of potential goals, including things like maximizing security and community building.

IDEN3: Scalable distributed identity infrastructure using zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee privacy preview
Devcon
Talk
34:14

IDEN3: Scalable distributed identity infrastructure using zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee privacy

IDEN3 is NOT an ICO. It has no token at all. It is an open source permissionless identity layer built on top of Ethereum that we expect many projects will be able to use as a foundational layer for their own identity solution. It is a simple system that allows any identity to make a claim about any other identity. Our talk at DevCon4 will cover these topics: - We will introduce the idea of a decentralised identity management system and the challenges and needs for this solution. We will explain how IDEN3 can deploy millions of identities on blockchain without almost any expenditure of gas, allowing the system to scale to become a global solution with Ethereum as it is today. We will show how the claims are managed off-chain and validated on-chain and off-chain. We will explain how to generate proofs to validate claims that are valid only for a specific recipient and not reusable. We will show how to create proofs of those claims anonymously without revealing unnecessary data by using zero knowledge proofs. Finally we will talk about the status of the current development, our roadmap, milestones, the team, etc.

Penumbra: Building a Private DEX with ZKPs and Threshold Cryptography preview
Devcon
Talk
26:26

Penumbra: Building a Private DEX with ZKPs and Threshold Cryptography

ZKPs allow transactions to prove their state transition was valid, without revealing anything about what it was. But this isn't enough, because useful applications require shared state, which ZKPs can't provide. In this talk, we'll describe how to break this barrier by combining ZKPs with flow encryption, a new threshold crypto primitive, to allow private interaction with public shared state, and how Penumbra uses this technique to build a private DEX.

ZK Proof Performance and Security Characteristics preview
Devcon
Talk
28:39

ZK Proof Performance and Security Characteristics

ZK tech gets almost mystifying treatment from both regular users & devs. However, beyond the moon math, quantifiable differences between the zkps deployed in the Ethereum ecosystem can help users and builders understand what they are interacting with. Join me as I explain our methodology for collecting and quantifying these differences in a format digestible for the non-math professor.

Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem preview
Devcon
Talk
11:05

Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem

Robertas Visinskis gives their talk titled, "Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem"

P4: Private Periodic Payments Protocol preview
Devcon
Talk
23:15

P4: Private Periodic Payments Protocol

P4 aims to solve the problem of subscription services offering end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments. This protocol introduces periodicity to cryptocurrency payments through an ongoing relationship between the merchant and the customer without unintentionally disclosing personally identifiable information. We are creating this protocol to allow us to offer a truely end-to-end private subscription data storage solution built with Tahoe-LAFS. By sharing it, we hope that other subscription services will implement our protocol and further the adoption of cryptocurrency payments in real world retail use cases. Although this protocol is currently a work in progress, we have already specified some design decisions. For periodicity, we are avoiding a payment pre-authorization design to keep the user in control of their keys. And for privacy we are utilizing Zcash shielded transactions and the coming improvements in the Sapling release. This protocol is being created by the Least Authority team with support from the Zcash team.