Opinion: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology

A novel consensus is forming in the Web3 world. For years, privacy has been treated as a compliance issue, a developer liability issue, and at best a niche issue. It is now becoming clear that privacy is actually what digital freedom is built on.

The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement of the Privacy Cluster – a multi-team effort focusing on private reads and writes, confidential identities and zero-knowledge proofs – is a sign of a philosophical redefinition of the importance of trust, consensus and truth in the digital age and a deeper awareness that privacy must be built into infrastructure.

Regulators should take note of this. Privacy-preserving designs are no longer just experimental; they are now the standard approach. They are a step forward for decentralized systems. The question is whether laws and regulations will embrace this change or get stuck in an obsolete logic that equates visibility with safety.

From joint observation to joint verification

For a long time, digital management has been based on the logic of visibility. The systems were trustworthy because they could be observed by regulators, auditors or the public. This “shared observation” model is behind everything from financial reporting to blockchain explorers. Transparency was a means of ensuring honesty.

However, a more powerful paradigm is emerging in cryptographic systems: shared verification. Instead of each actor seeing everything, zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-preserving designs allow you to verify whether a rule was followed without revealing the underlying data. The truth becomes something you can prove, rather than something you have to debunk.

This change may seem technical, but it has profound consequences. This means we no longer have to choose between privacy and responsibility. Both can coexist, embedded directly in the systems we rely on. Regulators also need to adapt to this logic, rather than fight it.

Privacy as infrastructure

The industry realizes the same thing: privacy is not a niche. It’s infrastructure. Without this, Web3’s openness becomes its weakness, and transparency turns into surveillance.

Emerging architectures in ecosystems show that privacy and modularity are finally coming together. Ethereum’s privacy cluster focuses on confidential computation and selective information disclosure at the sharp contract level.

Others go deeper, integrating privacy into network consensus itself: sender-unlinkable messaging, verifier anonymity, private proof of stake, and self-healing data persistence. These projects rebuild the digital stack from the ground up, aligning privacy, verifiability, and decentralization as mutually reinforcing properties.

This is not a gradual improvement. It’s a novel way of thinking about freedom in the age of digital networks.

Politics lags behind technology

Current regulatory approaches continue to reflect the logic of shared observations. Privacy-preserving technologies are being scrutinized or restricted, and visibility is being confused with security and compliance. Developers of privacy protocols are under regulatory pressure, and policymakers still think so encryption is an obstacle to observability.

This perspective is obsolete and hazardous. In a world where everyone is surveilled and where data is collected, bought, sold, leaked and exploited on an unprecedented scale, the lack of privacy is a real systemic risk. It undermines trust, puts people at risk and weakens democracies. In contrast, privacy-preserving designs enable proof of integrity and enable accountability without exposure.

Lawmakers must begin to see privacy as an ally, not an adversary – as a tool for enforcing fundamental rights and restoring trust in digital environments.

Management, not just control

The next stage of digital regulation should move from control to support. Legal and policy frameworks should protect privacy-preserving open source systems as critical public goods. The position of management is a responsibility, not a political choice.

Related: Compliance shouldn’t cost you any privacy

This means providing developers with legal clarity and distinguishing between statutes and architecture. The law should punish misconduct, not the existence of privacy technologies. The right to maintain private digital communications, associations and economic exchanges should be treated as a fundamental right, enforceable through both law and infrastructure.

This approach would demonstrate regulatory maturity, recognizing that resilient democracies and law-abiding governments rely on infrastructure that protects privacy.

Architecture of freedom

The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy initiative and other novel privacy-first network projects share the view that freedom in the digital age is an architectural principle. It cannot be based solely on promises of good management or supervision; it must be built into the protocols that shape our lives.

These novel systems, private rollups, state-based architectures, and Sovereign Zones represent a practical synthesis of privacy and modularity. They enable communities to build independently while maintaining a verifiable connection, thus combining autonomy with accountability.

Policymakers should see this as an opportunity to support the direct embedding of fundamental rights in the technical underpinnings of the Internet. Privacy by design should be understood as lawfulness by design, a way to enforce fundamental rights through a code, not just constitutions, charters and conventions.

The blockchain industry is redefining the meaning of “consensus” and “truth,” replacing shared observation with shared verification, visibility with verifiability, and surveillance with sovereignty. As the novel beginning of privacy takes shape, regulators face a choice: confine it within the venerable control framework or support it as the basis for digital freedom and a more resilient digital order.

Tech is getting ready. Laws need to catch up.

Opinion: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology.

This article is for general information purposes and is not and should not be treated as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.