# Privacy Aware Mechanism for Public Goods Funding - Panel || Ethereum Privacy Stack, Devconnect 2025

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2026-01-09
- Duration: 23:15
- Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, privacy stack, devconnect, 2025, eps25, pse, privacy stewards of ehtereum, ethereum foundation, ef, Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-HF2m5HXT3rU
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF2m5HXT3rU

## Description

Feat. Camila Rioja, Thomas Humphreys, José Ignacio Trajtenberg, Tanisha Katara and Beth Mccarthy, this Panel discussion about how privacy tooling impacts society and one's work, ZK permissioms and what do guests see as the biggest emerging technology that can have positive impact on future. 

Ethereum Privacy Stack is a global privacy summit during Devconnect 2025 bringing together Ethereum builders, protocol maintainers, and advocates. 
Featuring Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, Andy Guzman, Polymutex, Ameen Soleimani, and 30+ speakers on 2 stages, celebrating privacy acceleration.

Ethereum Privacy Stack: 
http://eps25.web3privacy.info

Organized by 
Web3Privacy Now & Privacy Stewards of Ethereum

Web3Privacy now collective: http://web3privacy.info
Privacy Stewards of Ethereum: https://pse.dev/

## Transcript

[applause] Should I give you the mic? Do you have Okay. >> So, um, hi, I'm Beth, uh, program director at Web3 Privacy. Um, it has been really exciting throughout, uh, the process of this week to, um, meet a lot of folks that are exploring privacy as a public good. So building tooling infrastructure um working with uh community mechanisms like voting in a private and secure way um and then also folks that are working with public goods and quote the real world or in a civic tech environment using some of those toolings and infrastructures to really make a difference in a way that is emergent and working closely with the needs of those communities. So we have some really cool folks today uh exploring both of those angles and I will let them each introduce themselves, share a little bit about their work and then we'll get into the discussion. >> Sure. I'll go first. Um my name is Thomas. I'm part of the funding coordination team here at the EF and I lead our um I'm leading public goods research mechanism and uh last month I worked on our privacy RFPs to internally scope them which will later go live later this year. Um we are our ESP's new grants program. >> Good afternoon. My name is Camila Yokoha. I'm from Brazil and I'm the founder and executive director of Plexus Institute. Plexus is an institute of science and technology whose mission is to give access to the benefits of emerging tech to the end user. >> Hey everyone, um my name is Tanisha. I am a consultant. I work with multiple protocols like filecoin on governance uh with Mina protocol on designing their treasury and PGF mechanisms and it's fully on chain uh and with aail on DA and designing their staking mechanism. >> Hi everybody, my name is Jose Tract. I'm the CEO and co-founder of XCapit. We have been uh working in digital public goods since 2021 along with organizations as UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, IDB mainly breaching uh real use cases as financial inclusion, access to credit, energy transition uh and uh lately uh pushing aid dispersement so as to be transparent, traceable and private. >> Awesome. So really inspiring what all of you are working on. So I would love to double click on uh those topics a little bit. may be first hearing from you and from Camila about your experience uh working closely with community and um how uh privacy preserving and privacy aware tooling um informs your work with community currencies with decision- making um in governments and maybe uh starting with you and then um hearing from Camila as well. >> Okay. So I think that we do have two uh valuable experiences. The first one is that actually we work with humanitarian aid and there are uh some situations when uh people like runs from uh country because of political issues uh at that time uh keeping the privacy could keep their lives. So uh those insights turn into something really powerful uh and uh having the chance to disperse funds but at the same time keeping the privacy of the end beneficiary becomes something like really important. um and about uh community support and uh bridging the gap that exists mainly because of the lack of technological infrastructure, the lack of internet access. Just having in mind that 2.6 billion people still don't have access to internet, smartphones or or they do not have a good uh internet connections. um that kept time kept in our minds as a way of just solving the problem the other way around listening to the end beneficiaries the needs and uh the the technological literacy too becomes something uh really important when you have to build a product. So all in all uh we have worked with uh an infrastructure that enabled those dispersements keeping the privacy making it useful for the end beneficiaries so as to work almost on worst case scenarios and uh at the same time as as said keeping the privacy as a way of uh saving their lives and uh other experience that was Something interesting uh was that we've built the first DAO for UNICEF so as to fund public goods uh and that became really valuable for them and mainly for donors and the community so as to have the traceability of their funds. So they allocated funds and from the inception and from the early beginning from the donors till the impact on their uh grantees or uh companies that were supported. you have the the whole process tracked, transparent and hopefully that will become a whole new standard in the way that decisions are being taken and at the same time uh information is public. >> Super cool. And what would be your response about uh how your work also fits into this framework? We have a very interesting use case that we are developing through a pilot. Um, and I'm just very fortunate for the whole like agenda in this event because we have just been through like important discussions but also understanding uh next steps forward and some of the primitives necessary for managing like treasuries and community treasuries. How do I see the work that we are doing in Brazil? We are proposing adopting some of this tooling and some of these mechanisms to manage real world individuals challen uh individuals treasury in Brazil. So in Brazil specifically one there's a public treasury composed by tax money that gets allocated to the individuals. Web two systems are used nowadays to manage the dispersement of this goods and they allow for what web two web two uh tooling allows for right. What are we exploring at this moment? One there are 180 communities within um a total addressable community opportunity of 5,400. They're related to the municipalities that exist in Brazil that already receive this benefits not in fiat money but in community currencies with a web two uh tooling. We are exploring with a partnership that my institute is now part of using a as part of the stack a permissioned blockchain from the federal government that is composed by 10 validators and is transparent and auditable for any individuals in the sense of like managing the dispersement. And now taking a look at this primitives that are being discussed in this conference and this new tooling to see whether the transactions could theoretically happen in a second chain in another layer respecting the privacy of the individuals. What are we looking for by doing this experiments? We are looking at one giving transparency to the management and putting full transparency on the governmental part of this equation. Secondly, guaranteeing to the individuals the privacy that they need while having their individuals transactions. Thirdly, evolving the system to a point where maybe individuals could participate in the real world in the allocation of their treasury with the real world public goods. So this is the work that we have been developing and I'm more than happy to uh continue this conversation and this conference or afterwards because we are very much invested as the Brazilian community in different realms to push this initiative forward. >> Super cool and having watched your work evolve over the past years, it's in such an exciting place right now. So going to um to you guys I I think there's um two different responses I would be interested in hearing and I don't know which one feels more resonant with you. One would be as folks who are developing some of the tooling that is used by these systems, you know, such as decentralized file storage, such as privacy preserving wallets, like how do you see um the tools that you guys are building as um informing some of this work and how do you um yeah, how would uh you hope to be working with this type of project or you guys are also in the angle of um doing this type of governance and decision making and fund dispersement yourself within your organizations. So yeah, I don't know which of those is kind of more exciting for you to talk about, but I'm very happy to hear about either. >> Yeah, I'll go I'll go first here. So I think um I think when when I've been speaking to a lot of projects and protocols around around funding, right? I think that there's a consistent pattern I get which is how do how do we actually get started, right? So they already have the capital ready and and ready to allocate to fund public goods. But when it comes to actually figuring out what the process is and how to actually allocate it, where and the how, that's where I think things start getting a little bit complex for them. So for me, like I'm I have a background in building infra. So I've built everything from account abstraction with product to onchain payment rails. So I see things from a developer lens. And when it comes to actually talking to some of these projects, I need to I we need to make it as easy as building like integrating a payments API, right? So when these projects are um when they want to actually have when they want to allocate funding, we need to make it as easy for them as possible. So I tend to think of it from that lens. >> Um yeah, I think for me it's like a spectrum. there are certain things in the governance process that should be private and there are things that are explicitly not meant to be private. Uh so for instance there is enough evidence that if you take a DeFi system there's a corruption market on top where if you prove that you have voted for a certain option you get financial incentives and the financial incentive game is very aligned there. You ask for a grant, you allocate 10% of your grant to bribing and then you create a beautiful bribe market where there's a verifiability of your vote. Now with privacy, you're removing this whole can I actually verify whether I voted yes or no. And that's necessarily a layer that if designed with ZK primitives can very beautifully be removed. And I think for me like from a governance ROI or a financial ROI perspective having bribe resistance there with privacy is um is is is where I see like a huge application and I'm very excited to see tooling by Macy and a bunch of those folks at that intersection >> and we will have a really cool panel going into that in a few hours so stick around for that. Um so yeah I think you perfectly opened up the next thing that I um am interested to hear from you guys um about what are the uh attack vectors that you are controlling for that you see the most often and you know on a certain level whether it's working with governance within um this system of builders and maintainers and uh funders or whether you're working with um communities of folks on the ground like a lot of um you know things come down to social engineering civil resistance distance a lot of these kind of challenges. So what are uh some attack vectors you see um and that you are optimizing for >> uh maybe I should go first. So one attack vector that we're like looking very closely with is definitely civil resistance. So given that you have these ZK primitives, can I get parameters like you are a member of this community, you are 18 years above, you are in fact a citizen of a country without actually storing your underlying private data and then being able to allocate voting power to that specific identity is amazing. So you're moving from a wallet token level based way voting to now a slightly higher primitive to a more mature system like identity and civil resistant kind of voting. So one primitive that I see could be like the biggest use case is that and the second is also in terms of authoring proposals. So you know there's this span prevention where I can keep putting like proposal saying give me 5k and I can keep doing it from multiple addresses. It's a pain and KYB KYC often comes very much later down the game in the current governance life cycles. So having privacy element and identity layers initially will ensure that that funnel is kind of cleaner as we go down. >> Yeah, I don't really have like a strong like answer for this but I I guess from from my perspective like from the developer perspective and just having spoken to a lot of projects there's like I'm I'm looking at it from like an institutional protocol point of view, right? So there isn't per se like a lot of civil attacks but I think of it as like when priv when we're talking about privacy here it's there's two layers right you have the participation layer and then you have the outcome layer and I think when it comes to transparency balancing transparency and privacy we tend to put transparency more on the outcome layer and then privacy on the participation layer. So for institutions or protocols that actually want to allocate capital, they care more they care more on the participation level because they may not want to know how much of the treasury is being allocated where the source of funds are coming from um or may want to disclose anything to their competitors right and on the outcome level I think it's important to actually remain transparent there because that's all about where the money is being distributed what impact is being had on that money and how funds are being spent. So that's that's that's it on my end basically. >> And do you see a lot of um similar challenges coming up in your work? >> Yeah, I think that it's always like a trade-off in which uh privacy and transparency uh what are the benefits of it in each case. So uh he was mainly speaking about impact. uh if you are allocating funds actually you want to know if that was useful that ended up being received by the people that you meant to benefit. Uh and over there transparency wins the the the battle against privacy and on the other hand there are some cases that privacy becomes a primary status for many that want to push something and they are in threatened. So uh that balance should be kept and it's not uh like or privacy or transparency. So I see that we should push for that balance into giving light for those things that even can uh strengthen the trust on the protocols on the processes on the Dows on the governance in order to allocate funds and on the other side keeping privacy for those cases uh that have something really not only personal data but something isn't threatened. So that would be like my personal perspective in order where to push privacy and where to push transparency. So the decision would be making a a right balance in order to gain the the better objectives of or or what you're aiming to. So from our perspective and trying to summarize or bring together elements of uh DAK and also some specificities of the case we need to look at the human aspect. What happens in the end with the humans who are receiving right um this benefits or this dispersements is that sometimes corruptions occur in the level of like cash out or somebody that doesn't know how to deal with uh the app and needs help from somebody and then gets access to the fund right there are very human things that can happen in one level but I also wanted to stress something super interesting that I have been thinking the past days and talking to friends because in our specific situation We are dealing possibly with like a permission chain that has full transparency and a permissionless chain that wants to go private and within like this dichotomy, right? What are the values that we are pushing forward and what for are we optimizing? So things that we care about optimizing individuals privacy, their data protection, the protection of this public goods, because if it's a system that is functioning well and it's optimized to bring more benefits to the ones that are using, it's a way to resist the attacks that this type of system may suffer either from politics, either from technology, either from ideology and so many other things. So this is a little bit that of what we have been facing and thinking about lately. >> Yeah, I think uh you summarized really beautifully this um tension between the vulnerability that's required for trust and the um yeah how that openness can also uh open you up to attack. So I am we are running way too short on time because I have so many more things that I want to ask. So I guess I'll just do a quick kind of popcorn last question. We are at a time where um unprecedented uh abilities to do stuff with CK to um to scale some of these technologies we've been working on for so long. What do you see as the biggest emerging technology that can have a positive influence on your work? Um yeah, leading into the near future. Um, so I think like what I think of is like forward thinking ideas here. Like I I think from like a product perspective, users should be able to when they're interfacing with when when we're creating interfaces and UI like the beauty of being on chain and having frontends is that front ends can be decentralized and you can have an array of them. So if we like I think when we when I think about like Amazon Smile, did anyone here remember about Amazon Smile? So I think I think that was like a great charity donation page where you could basically allocate you could go on a special website on Amazon and actually allocate after your purchase a small percentage of those fees to the designated charity that you chose. So I tend to think of like public goods as like a mechanism where we can actually start putting it on as a consumerf facing product so that protocols don't have to spend it from their own revenue but that can can actually pass that on to the user and I think from that perspective we need to be improving our developer tooling but possibly also educating protocols on how to best approach public good. >> So again more to the human aspect civic text and uh collaboration. So Vitalik just talked about that of having allies in different places, right? The governments and the governance and attack it's done by people okay with the help of AI but it's still that in the end of the road. So I believe we're entering an area where we're going to be challenging some of the definitions. What does it mean? What does it mean like to have or to deal with the public good? Where is this money coming from? Oh, it's coming from taxes. It's coming from donation. is coming from like a wild fund, a sovereign fund in participation or collaboration with a a um a foundation of a blockchain, right? What does it mean to do something in private or in public with transparency and with open source and with all these questions that we need to answer? Again, my bet it's on uh emotional intelligence and collaboration amongst uh individuals being the highest tech we should be focusing on. >> Definitely. Okay, maybe we'll just sneak in an answer from you two before we reach the end. >> Just two words being human centered. I think that the the technology is already there. Uh and we know that many improvements can be done but uh never forget why we are doing them uh why why we are doing the themes why we are tooling why we are building infrastructure and it's to solve real life. Uh so many times technology uh is put in front uh but we should never forget that we need to still solve uh historical problems. So being human- centered uh that will make the things easier. >> Uh quickly I know we're out of time. Uh in the short term, I'm excited about privacy preserving prediction markets that allows institutions and big players to enter our worlds and also take bets on which goods should be like publicly funded. Uh very bullish on that long-term super bullish on value acrals, public good funding mechanisms that are self- sustaining financially um and mechanism design around that is going to be very exciting for me. >> Awesome. Well, really looking forward to seeing how all of those things emerge and uh what you are able to build with them. So, thank you so much, guys. [applause]