ETH builders develop new POAPrivacy tools ahead of 10 year anniversary

While ETH celebrates its 10th anniversary, it highlights everything that the project has accomplished – allowing Smart, Smart contracts and the germination of a dynamic DAPP ecosystem built on confidentiality.

Like Ethereum (Ethn) Famous his 10th anniversary, he highlights everything that the project has accomplished – allowing DEFI contracts, intelligent and pushing a dynamic DAPP ecosystem. But it also highlights the remaining challenges. One of these challenges is privacy, a cornerstone of digital freedom which remains elusive on a public blockchain.

Despite a decade of innovation, Ethereum is still struggling to protect personal data from users. Chain transparency, formerly praised as a characteristic, is increasingly considered to be a responsibility, especially when applied to real contexts such as health and identity.

This tension was strongly to the point on the Ethcc stage in Berlin earlier this summer, when the defender of private life Migle Rakitaite contested The Ethereum Foundation so as not to finance or prioritize the cryptocurrency tools that protect deeply personal data such as reproductive health.

This exchange not only inspired the creation of PrivyCycle – an application that has been placed among the 10 best ETHCC projects over 334 entries and won three distinct sponsors prizes – but, more importantly, stressed the way the Ethereum ecosystem remains to manage sensitive and non -financial information.

The question of chain confidentiality

The concern of chain privacy is only becoming more urgent in a world of growing surveillance and narrowing of personal borders. The co-founder Ethereum Vitalik Buterin underlined the issues at the end of May, declaring: “At the civilizational level, there is a lot of emergency in us to find intimacy.” He called on developers to focus on four key pillars of confidentiality:: Private money, private identity, private vote and private messaging.

But as the demonstration of Poaprivacy in Ethglobal Cannes revealed, there is another emerging border in the fight for chain confidentiality: Private presence.

Poaps – Abbreviation Protocols of proof of attendance – have been designed as digital memories, allowing users to collect NFT which prove that they have attended specific events. From hackathons to cryptographic conferences, they have become a kind of web memory as well as a signal for participation, community commitment and even admissibility to rewards or governance.

However, under this utility is a risk of silent but serious confidentiality. Each Poap has struck on the chain connects the portfolio of a user to a specific location and time, effectively creating a public track of public breadcrumbs of its place.

“Everyone can mainly follow your steps,” said development during demo. “We love poaps, but they have a cost of intimacy.”

In an environment where portfolio addresses are easily traced and crossed, this can compromise not only privacy, but also security – in particular for activists, public figures or anyone seeking to separate their digital and physical life.

Poaprivacy: protect the presence on the blockchain

To combat this neglected vulnerability, an Ethglobal Cannes team unveiled the Poaprivacy – a tool designed to check the presence on the chain without exposing the real world locations of users or the link between their primary wallet addresses.

At the heart of the system is an intelligent use of furtive addresses – a cryptographic technique that allows users to receive tokens for unique and unique addresses that are unfair for their main portfolio.

How it works:

• Users analyze a QR code during an event.
• Instead of moving to their main address, they generate a random stealth address using a stealthy meta-address derived from their ENS identity (Ethereum Name Service).
• The system generates two cryptographic keys:
  • A key to spending (for subsequent complaint)
  • An observation key (to selectively reveal the poap to trust parts)
• The trial is treated with the main address, which means that observers cannot trace a poap to the user’s wallet.

The project has also demonstrated a private dashboard where users can connect with Passkeys, display their POAP stored in private and recover them if necessary. Main cryptography is based on an underused ethereum standard introduced several years ago but rarely deployed on a large scale.

“Magic and cryptography occur,” said the team, “and you can see your poaps – but others will not.”

Although it is still a prototype, the project was complimentary for having addressed a major confidentiality vulnerability in the PoAP – one of the most used features of Ethereum for the verification of the frequentation of events, community commitment and access to exclusive rewards or governance.

The project was appointed one of the 10 best finalists on 334 entries at Ethglobal Cannes 2025 – alongside other versions focused on confidentiality as previously mentioned Privilege and Privacylinks – highlighting an increasing thrust to strengthen Ethereum’s social layer with an infrastructure preserving privacy.