rewrite this title Supporting privacy with new funding mechanisms | Ethereum Foundation Blog

The Funding Coordination team is excited to announce a joint initiative with Keyring Network that introduces a new approach to impact funding in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Directly support privacy-focused developers

Keyring’s zkVerified permissioned vaults on mainnet provide compliant and privacy-preserving access to DeFi lending markets. For the first two months, all protocol fees from Keyring’s zkVerified vaults will go to the legal defense funds of Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev, the Tornado Cash developers currently on trial for publishing open-source code.

This model ensures that the first users of a vault directly support the legal protection of privacy-focused developers. By linking the growth of new financial tools with the protection of the people who build them, Keyring demonstrates that communities can strengthen resilience while driving innovation forward.

This design matters. It preserves the economic efficiency of the underlying protocol, while unlocking meaningful resources for a specific cause and period of time. It doesn’t distort participation incentives, and remains entirely market-aligned.

An impact funding blueprint

This is simply not possible with traditional philanthropic contribution models, but it is something that is uniquely enabled by programmable decentralized protocols like Ethereum. To amplify this effort, community members can also create vault campaigns that route rewards directly to the same legal defense funds — feeding a transparent, on-chain flywheel of ongoing support.

What excites the Funding Coordination team the most is that this model is not a one-time initiative. It is an impact funding blueprint that can scale across the broader ecosystem.

With Keyring we will continue to explore how charitable giving can emerge from within the same market mechanisms that govern capital flows, creating impact without relying on external subsidies or one-off donations.

More details here: https://developer-legal-defense-fund.keyring.network/