Private Information Retrieval for Ethereum

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Keewoo Lee

Type: Talk

Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

Light clients should be able to access Ethereum state privately, without revealing what accounts, contracts, or data they are interested in. Today, however, users often rely on RPC providers for this access, exposing a significant privacy gap at the access layer. This talk frames the problem as building a private read access layer for Ethereum, and explores Private Information Retrieval (PIR) as a natural cryptographic primitive for it. We will map out the PIR design space, compare the trade-offs of different approaches, examine their practical performance in Ethereum-relevant settings, and discuss the remaining challenges to making private state access practical.