Team Behind Ethereum's Institutional Privacy Push Spins Out For-Profit Firm EthSystems

The group that spent the past year running the Ethereum Foundation’s institutional privacy work has spun out to start its own company. EthSystems launched Tuesday as an independent, for-profit firm building privacy and compliance technology designed to let banks and asset managers transact on Ethereum without exposing sensitive information like trade details or client identities.

The founders, Mo Jalil, Oskar Thorén, and Aaryamann Challani, built and led the Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force, a year-long effort that held hundreds of conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks, and asset managers. Jalil, the CEO, previously worked at Goldman Sachs; Thorén spent “close to a decade” on crypto privacy infrastructure, building peer-to-peer messaging and the Waku protocols now part of Logos.

Ethereum’s privacy gap

The company’s thesis is that Wall Street has embraced crypto “as an asset class, but not yet as commercial infrastructure.” Banks and asset managers are already exploring stablecoins, tokenized assets, and on-chain settlement, but none will run real flows in full public view. On a shared, public ledger, the founders argue, confidentiality is the hard part: each party to a transaction should see only what it has a right to see, and nothing more.

EthSystems launches with a year of open-source work already published, including proofs of concept for private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private cross-chain settlement, hardened shielded pools, and an Ethereum Privacy Map cataloging institutional requirements across the ecosystem. Its business model is bespoke consulting: workshops, architecture reviews, protocol specifications, and production systems, or as the company put it, continuing the work it was already doing, only now charging for it. It says it will keep publishing open-source work alongside the paid engagements.

The latest spin-out

EthSystems is the latest team to break away from the Ethereum Foundation, which has spent 2026 shrinking and restructuring. The Foundation cut 20% of its staff in June, trimmed its budget, wound down its in-house privacy and scaling research unit, and reorganized around a leaner mandate after at least nine senior figures departed over the year.

In the space of weeks, three groups have spun out to take on work the Foundation is stepping back from. Ethlabs, a non-profit, handles core protocol research; Ethereum Institutional, also a non-profit, coordinates outreach to banks and asset managers; and EthSystems, the for-profit, builds the applied privacy technology. EthSystems said it left the Foundation on good terms and sees itself as complementary, focused on “depth over breadth.”

EthSystems is funded by many of the same names behind the other spin-outs: Bitmine Immersion Technologies and Sharplink, the two largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury companies, along with Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin and Asia-focused investment firm SNZ. (Disclaimer: Lubin, through his company Consensys, and Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee are investors in Dastan, Decrypt‘s parent company.)

Those backers have a direct stake in EthSystems’ thesis. Bitmine holds some 5.7 million ETH and Sharplink around 888,000, and both have pitched public-market investors on Ethereum’s role as settlement infrastructure for stablecoins and tokenized assets. Lee framed EthSystems as filling a gap, saying in a launch announcement that “the next $100 trillion of assets won’t migrate on-chain without it.” Lubin, meanwhile, contrasted the team with others that he said had offered institutions privacy technology that amounted to “permissioned systems with extra steps.”

With Ethereum already hosting $16 billion in tokenized real-world assets and $159 billion in stablecoins, according to RWA.xyz, Jalil argued that privacy is “the difference between Ethereum holding billions today and running trillions tomorrow.”