A team that spent the past year running the Ethereum Foundation’s institutional privacy effort has left the Foundation and launched a for-profit company called EthSystems. The startup — announced July 14, 2026 — aims to give banks and asset managers the privacy and compliance tooling they need to transact on Ethereum without exposing trade details or client identities.
Who’s behind it
- Founders: Mo Jalil (CEO), Oskar Thorén, and Aaryamann Challani. The trio led the Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force, a year-long program that held hundreds of conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks and asset managers.
- Backgrounds: Jalil is an ex-Goldman Sachs banker; Thorén has nearly a decade of experience building crypto privacy infrastructure, including peer-to-peer messaging and the Waku protocols now part of Logos.
What EthSystems is building
EthSystems’ core argument: Wall Street has accepted crypto as an asset class but not yet as commercial infrastructure — and on a public ledger, confidentiality is the bottleneck. Their goal is modular privacy that ensures each counterparty sees only what it’s entitled to see.
The company already ships a year’s worth of open-source proof-of-concepts, including work on:
- private bonds,
- confidential stablecoin transfers,
- private cross-chain settlement,
- hardened shielded pools,
- an Ethereum Privacy Map that catalogs institutional requirements across the ecosystem.
Business model and open-source stance
EthSystems will operate primarily as a bespoke consulting and engineering shop: workshops, architecture reviews, protocol specs, and production deployments. The team says it will continue publishing open-source research while charging for tailored implementations — essentially commercializing the advisory and production-grade work it was already doing inside the Foundation.
Funding and strategic backers
EthSystems is backed by some of the same names behind other recent Ethereum spin-outs: Bitmine Immersion Technologies and Sharplink (described as the two largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury companies), Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and Asia-focused investor SNZ. Bitmine holds roughly 5.7 million ETH and Sharplink around 888,000 ETH — stakes that give those backers a direct commercial interest in making Ethereum usable for institutional settlement.
Industry voices
Bitmine chairman Tom Lee framed EthSystems as filling a key missing piece, saying “the next $100 trillion of assets won't migrate on-chain without it.” Lubin contrasted EthSystems’ approach with other offerings he described as “permissioned systems with extra steps.” Jalil adds that privacy is “the difference between Ethereum holding billions today and running trillions tomorrow.”
Context: Ethereum Foundation reshuffle and spin-outs
EthSystems is the latest team to spin out as the Ethereum Foundation retools. In June 2026 the Foundation cut roughly 20% of staff, trimmed its budget, wound down an in-house privacy and scaling research unit, and reorganized around a narrower mandate after at least nine senior departures. In recent weeks three groups have separated to continue work the Foundation is stepping back from: Ethlabs (non-profit core protocol research), Ethereum Institutional (non-profit outreach to banks and asset managers), and EthSystems (for-profit applied privacy).
The company says it exited the Foundation on good terms and intends to be complementary to the broader Ethereum ecosystem, focusing on “depth over breadth.”
Why it matters
Ethereum already hosts large pools of tokenized assets and stablecoins — current figures cited by RWA.xyz show about $16 billion in tokenized real-world assets and $159 billion in stablecoins — but institutional flows require privacy and regulatory controls that public chains don’t natively provide. EthSystems is betting that practical, modular confidentiality will be a prerequisite for the next wave of institutional adoption on-chain.
Disclosure: Joe Lubin (via Consensys) and Bitmine chairman Tom Lee are investors in Dastan, the parent company of Decrypt.
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