Web3Privacy Now Rome meetup // ETHRome 2026

[applause] Maybe before I start, it's coming through. So, I would like for no photos, no doxing. Uh, this is something that I keep like sort of uh reminding people that when someone docks themselves towards you as a as a person, they interested you and and you kind of cross this social contract and they trust that you going to keep that information safe. you uh so I'm I'm just asking everybody to not breach that trust if you are ever entrusted with uh with somebody's privacy uh if you do need to take a photo and you can see that also uh Feder is recording the session uh we are going to use an anonymizer which is a tool that we built uh uh for exactly this purpose um you can just load it down on your phone or and either use it as a camera seat and it's live anonymizing or then use it as a post-production for your photos and then feel free to to share any photos online afterwards. Um, [snorts] so maybe maybe we can take a maybe we can all take a selfie just so we just so we see see it works.

Uh, so let's do this real quick. Let me see. Actually, it's going to be fun experiment. There should Oh, you don't see it? Why you don't see it now?

Yeah.

Yeah. You see me? All right. Perfect. Oh, it's going to be maybe laggy a bit.

Okay, I will still do it. And I think maybe it's going to load at one point. Let's see. It's like I will try to grab everybody. Uh my mouse is somewhere gone.

over here. Okay, we increase the fidelity of it. So, we are really not recognizable here. Uh, let's do like this.

Cool. So now that we have that off the table, uh so basically uh at the end of last year I was working on uh on the zoom forge looking at all the hacker accounts within Ethereum uh and trying to assess uh how many privacy submissions were uh in within those projects. [snorts] So uh tale of two hackathons here we have East Denver on one side happening in February uh with 1 million and only 2.6% of submissions were privacy focused projects out of 200. Uh then we had Tokyo where only $9,000 were in place for the bounties and uh 46% of those submissions were privacy.

[snorts] Um when we are talking about hackathons uh you know the signal there go really is about uh what builders reach for in in the in one weekend. It kind of shows what the the privacy tooling or where the privacy tooling is heading. Um for many developers the sponsor bounty is their first hands-on contact with uh zero knowledge proofs or TES or trusted environments execution or or FH execution for example again uh just to bring uh to bring back uh my memories from one of the ECOM hackathons where I was uh uh working on a project with my buddy and he has never touched uh any of the privacy tooling and it was a I believe at the time uh with a bounty and uh we ended up getting a bounty from them even though it was very first time that we even touched it. So we learned a lot and every time you know there was a uh there's a hackathon it's always cool to to actually learn these new technologies there. Um and yeah from the tooling size 48 hours reveals whether privacy SDKs are usable by newcomers or only by their authors and I guess we can we can test it also uh during this hackathon.

Um so here uh I assessed 40 hackathons that happened in 2025. Again these are Ethereum focus hackathons. Uh there were around 15,000 hackers over 5,000 projects submitted. 31 of those projects were um uh no 417 were privacy projects and 31 of those 40ons had a submission within privacy which is I think a good number. uh $4.

25 million in in bounties altogether. So we can't really say that the funding was not there. Uh so basically eight in every 100 projects put privacy first in their in their uh submission. uh link influencer organizers we can see that is global just thanks to the sheer amount of hackathons that they organize uh they had nine events uh over 3 and a half thousand submissions and only seven I'm going to say only 7.3% of those were were privacy focused uh so here we can see that the volume doesn't necessarily create for uh for the largest density of the privacy projects uh built on the hackathons.

Uh when it comes to independent, when I say independent, I mean uh for example, East Rome, for example, East Warso, East Amsterdam or East Bam or uh is dog, all these other hackathons that are sort of locally organized. Uh so [snorts and clears throat] we had one event uh over 1.3,000 submissions uh with the higher 9.9% of uh of those submissions being privacy focused. uh when we just look at the top six of those uh hackathons uh we can see that the of of those independent the the density of the privacy projects was much much higher than uh for example looking at the east global hackathons uh so here again here we can see those top six hackathons uh if 50% of all the submissions were privacy focus which was really great to see followed byio if done zk hack and of Ether maybe to the charity which I really brought about because it was always uh one of the one of the values that uh that Ethone brought to the table.

Uh so 35.4% were were focused on on privacy and etham uh at the end. So all six are independent in person with price goals of 60,000 or less uh and no east global event actually had over 14% of the privacy submissions. Uh here we can see a price distribution and and yes sort of what we can take from it is that bigger price pool seems to buy volume but not necessarily privacy share of the hackathons. So uh we can we can see that that right here between 10 to $50,000 uh the biggest amount of events uh with uh with the 74 from 566 of those projects being privacy focused.

So around 13% uh the domain distribution also another interesting metric that I pulled from the data uh more than half of privacy projects were about money or people so social but we can see that finance has been very dominant category um what what what I tend to take from from these uh types of statistics here is is to actually look at what's the least amount of uh of um projects representing a specific domain and maybe this is something to consider also for this hackathon uh to build and to contribute more to the space. When it comes to technology landscape uh we can see [snorts] ZK has been uh very much the default when it comes to privacy tech uh and all PE MPC and SOG work together under 7%. Um right [snorts] some of the projects that that I going to highlight here are coming from from different hackathons. We can see here the cyclone cash from his Tokyo worked uh within finance on gas optimized tornado start pool using hash chains and nova folding. Uh then we had mamukash and Russell swap.

Uh both of these were um from the finance domain. Uh we had a project called civilization was focusing on the Dows private civil resistant voting with Z KP passport uh some activist toolkit as well. Uh so this was focused on infra proof of protest deadman switch and secure tools for activists and how do I uh from typo hackathon uh which was showing uh the public onchain behavior and how much it reveals about one. So what what do you think missing on the hackathons? Uh public persistence is definitely one of the things uh that I would like to highlight here.

We had again 316 privacy projects. 355 of those repos are still public and I try to update these numbers uh before before uh coming in here today. Uh so these are as much up to date as as possible. uh 96 um of those projects had commits after the first week, 47 after 30 days. After 90 days, only 6 and a half% and after 180 days only 10 projects from those 400 projects actually maintained any any sort of resistance.

[snorts] Uh which again kind of shows us that a lot a lot of the times on the hackathons we built something and then we never get back to it. um blind spot in the stack. So here's what I was also mentioning before. Maybe these are some of the ideas that could also uh help you guys if you haven't figured out what to build on on this uh E1 hackathon. Uh for example, private RPC uh category uh seem to have been really lacking.

Uh network metadata focus uh all of these like uh we can see on the on the left side uh uh column white matters. It's it's really important when we are talking about privacy that we just don't get stuck on one layer. So okay tornado Kier we have a transactional privacy but then how do you connect to it? What how do you connect to the RPC? What RPC are you connecting to?

Most likely it's chain analysis RPC do you want to um then okay you are maybe running a tour or you are running some VPN. Cool. But still uh when you are doing calls to an RPC um these are specific calls you are never flooding let's say the RPC with all the calls which was one of the ideas that I was trying to maybe explore on one of the hackathons but please if you feel like this would be inspiring to you please do hack on that I think there is a way how to essentially try to to flood the RPC with calls and not uh to to try to obiscate what is it that we are actually needing uh to receive from the RPC See [snorts] and of course we can see also the post quantum and education was been has been very uh very low in the submissions. So again something to consider. Um who the privacy is for 142 projects were focused on finance and trading.

Uh only 13 of them for people at risk. And again this maybe shows us that uh maybe not always we have to focus on on the D5 application and there is much more to be explored. Um again I highlighted here a couple of projects [snorts] uh encrypted whistleblowing building buenosirus uh private aids for refugees uh anonymous recovery support proof of protest tools private humanitarian donations and data wars for journalists. All of these are I think super important and are sure very relevant in the privacy space. Uh not saying that finance is not relevant but there is also much more to the topic than than finance.

Um uh here uh I was looking at uh in real world rides versus virtual hackathons and honestly I don't really know what to what to make of these of these numbers. So maybe maybe you guys had some thoughts here. I think uh uh I personally enjoyed in in real life hackathons much more uh when it comes to the amount of privacy projects. I mean, of course, we can see uh the virtual ones at had at at had smaller uh amount of submissions browsing focused, but also much less of the of the events happened. Submissions of course are almost half as much even though the amount of datons is not not as many because uh once it's online, a lot of people can join in which is uh both great and then probably very difficult for the organizers to actually siphons through the project.

There's also an upcoming hackathon called Colossium if you guys know. uh I think it's from Salana ecosystem they are going to have a even an Ethereum track I believe in their hackathon uh what's interesting about that is when I was speaking to one of the organizers they confessed to me that they expect probably around 30,000 submissions insane I have no idea how are they going to be judging it um but again uh yeah probably need to make it pop to to to get their attention Uh then I looked at the geographic distribution as well. So we can see that Europe is hosting the privacy scene which is uh great to great to see. Uh followed by Latin America, uh North America, two events, $1.3 million in in prices, but only 20 projects out of 500, right?

So So again, uh what's another interesting metric here? on the geographic perspect uh uh perspective what it works um [snorts] privacy tech in the room. So teams built on sponsors privacy stacks oasis ruffle at ebam zama shbm and I expect at ec and zk scored at zik hacking. So once we have the price tech in the room then people are more willing to attribute on top of it. uh problems with the human face.

Eth 10 privacy projects include medical records, genome privacy, addiction support, and a data release tool for journalists. [snorts] So again, this maybe depends more on what the organizers are sort of incentivizing when it comes to topics, but also where geographically it's located and what are maybe the some of the local issues that uh uh that are being uh um that needs addressing. Let's say uh in person midsized. So all six are in real world hackathons with price pools between $9 and $60,000. The bracket where privacy show peaks.

Uh small rooms did work. The six of which around 39 submissions each against 120 across all events. A scale where mentors and sponsors can reach every every team. Uh and I think maybe uh this ether event is going to be uh similar in size. So, so we are a tight tight uh tight community here and and can it should make a difference.

[snorts] Uh here are some of the suggestions that I that I thought of. So when it comes to organizers run uh in real life privacy track again big upon for for doing exactly that. The format alone roughly doubles privacy share of the of the submissions. uh teach before judging preheld ZKT all of which workshops and starter templates are always a great idea uh judge privacy everywhere uh I think it's important to ask what does this project do in every track no matter if it's focused on privacy or not uh and I think this way we can we can then bring a bit more light to to the hackathons u and to the submissions [snorts] uh to the crisis space in general for sponsors uh maybe fun the 90 days after uh so maybe a follow up on the night grants and office hours for promising teams again because we could see that uh events happen and then uh the the GitHub repos stay dormant after after even after first week and then of course longer we wait uh people don't tend to come back to it uh bounty the blind spot so again coming from this research we could see the metro data the private RPC well it's those quantum. So maybe organizers can again and sponsors can look at this report and and find out okay what how we could uh structure our bounty to make it uh most beneficial for the space and the prices 10 to 15,000 uh K uh well 20,000 10 to 50,000 events we don't privacy share so we don't necessarily need those multi-million huge hackathons with tens of thousands of submissions uh because it seems like in the slower ones is where where we can slish more.

And for builders uh pick over problems uh people at risk, health, governance, it generally has less competition as you could have seen on on on the metrics there. Keep the rile allows only 6 and a half% were still active again after the those 90 days and build intense. uh some signals for 2026. Uh one in five projects were were focusing on AI and privacy. Agents need confidentiality.

Priv private uh x42 payments already appeared open when I was again these metrics are from 2025. So I'm actually really curious to see how it progressed uh uh once we are done with this year and then I'll work on the same report again. uh zkyc so compliance privacy if you have signs of blood then uh looking at you that's post with compliance built in for example uh JPYC zkay and mamizu cash at east were addressing this exact issue um confidential compute ts and sh move into weekend demos wful swap got shield uh on shvm and we had also uh two postquantum uh focused projects so it's very tiny today. Uh if you are looking into diving into the topic, I would actually suggest to look up uh ERC2 post quantum. This was a project uh I believe at East Tokyo uh that was still being worked on even after the hackathon.

So really cool.

Um yeah, prototyped every weekend. So um we've seen the VK first sold off as a domain. Finance and social was winning and AI and privacy was on the rise. Uh some of the things that were overlooked uh RPC metadata postquantum and people at the risk uh which again barely appeared uh but how we can strengthen it. It's in person midsized privacy tech and human problems in the room.

And I think again we are such a small community here that it's going to be awesome I think maybe to exchange some ideas to maybe even go out in this beautiful area and ask people what are some of the issues that you are facing and then try to address those instead of um just prompting your your favorite agent because probably a lot of the projects are going to be done the same at the end. uh only six and a 6.5% of policy projects were still being built 90 days later. So then um if you build something that actually matters to you and you and inspires you then there's a hard tendency to actually continue working on it. So don't just hunt bounties try to use the bounties where it matters where it makes sense and then hopefully uh if you are building something inspiring then you can continue building on it uh going forward.

Um yeah, I think that's that's pretty much it from me. Uh we also created a web policy now this uh privacy builder pack. It's at build.vy policy.info where you can find a lot of lot of um a lot of inspiration, some ideas uh and a lot of tools that you can also use either for development or in your daily life.

Uh there's also this GitHub repo where all this data is published that I was uh talking about this presentation. So you can see here uh we have the full report here. So if you really want to dive dive into it, go ahead. Maybe you find something interesting. Uh over here we have the whole data set for the for the hackathons and their press scores and then each and every hackathon uh and their privacy projects.

Uh I think one way of using it on a on a hackathon could be you have some idea and you want to actually check whether this was uh uh already built. Please do that. take it, show it to your agent and just simply ask it all right has this been worked on and then if so okay how I could improve it or does it even make sense right uh maybe somebody has already got it you can get inspired or then maybe just uh just build something else uh if it's if it's uh over on this topic uh as I mentioned this build free privacy.info info site uh is what we built. And maybe to close it off, I [snorts] would like to actually play you this video.

Hopefully the sound is going to work for us and hopefully it will inspire you uh for this hackathon. And then uh yeah, feel free to ask any questions and we can just chat and and continue good vibes. You are being watched not in some paranoid dystopian way in a completely normal everyday. This is how the internet works way, [music] every click, every wallet interaction, every search. And the funny part, most people building web 3 are still leaking like it's 2005.

This is the privacy builder pack. Not a course, not a toolkit, not a product. It's a map. A map for people who have realized something is broken [music] and decided to build differently. [music] So don't just browse this platform, use it, get inspired, learn, build with it, replace [music] your stack with it.

Because the next generation of the internet won't be defined by who can build the fastest, but by who can build without leaking everything. Welcome to the builder side of privacy. That's it. [applause] Thank you so much.