Paul Brody, Global Blockchain Leader at Ernst & Young and Chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, provided his thoughts on the medium-term outlook for privacy developments in the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem. He will highlight the advances state-of-the-art, privacy-centric EVM networks have made in recent years.
Ethereum (ETH) privacy design has become 2,000 times more cost-effective, says Ernst & Young's Paul Brody
Modern privacy-oriented networks process shielded transactions at an incredibly low cost compared to prototypes proven several years ago.
0/ I believe 2026 will be a golden year for Ethereum privacy.
This is especially true when it comes to companies.
Here, we explain how the Ethereum ecosystem is leading the way and why it's important for institutions.
Guest thread by @pbrody of @EYnews and @EntEthAlliance. pic.twitter.com/vCjdcFtsSX
— Ethereum (@ethereum) November 13, 2025
For example, Ernst & Young's Nightfall now spends $0.05 on the same validation tool that cost $100 in gas eight years ago, the platform's global blockchain leader Paul Brody shared in a guest thread on the Ethereum Foundation.
This is not an isolated case, as Aztec, COTI Network, Miden, and other blockchains exploring zero-knowledge (ZK) computation have also achieved notable traction in terms of the speed at which they generate ZK proofs and the amount of gas spent on them, he said.
As a result, Brody expects the entire technology to become mainstream for users, primarily institutions, leveraging Ethereum's (ETH) computational resources in the coming months.
The entire mathematics, which I had zero knowledge of, improved at an amazing speed. I believe that within 18 to 24 months, even relatively complex transactions will become cost-effective for business users and consumers in bulk.
The outcome of this complex workload will be much better in terms of privacy compared to what permissioned blockchains have achieved, as permissioned blockchains remain traceable all the way to the hosts of such private networks.
“Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing”
At the same time, he emphasized that current privacy developments do not target anonymity, but are more focused on fighting unfair competition than obfuscating things for regulators and researchers. The most important moments here may happen next year:
Nigthfall, Aztec, and others are all currently deployed in testnet environments, and I believe 2026 will be a golden year for Ethereum privacy for both consumers and business users.
As U.Today previously reported, Ethereum (ETH) privacy will continue to be one of the main stories for the second-largest blockchain in 2025.
In April 2025, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin made headlines with his privacy roadmap that included both L1 and L2 changes focused on achieving the next level of privacy for the EVM ecosystem network.
