Ethereum Proposes Privacy Roadmap Compliant with EU General Data Protection Regulation

On June 9, Ethereum community member Eugenio Reggianini proposed a new initiative aimed at making the Ethereum network compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through a modular architecture and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), while maintaining its decentralized nature. The proposal suggests pushing personal data to the network's edge (wallets and DApps), utilizing off-chain storage and metadata erasure techniques, and encrypting role segmentation to concentrate GDPR controller responsibilities on a few entities. The technical roadmap includes various privacy protection schemes such as proto-danksharding (EIP-4844), zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), fully homomorphic encryption, and trusted execution environments (TEEs). The proposal also divides the Ethereum network into execution, consensus, and data availability layers to better manage GDPR compliance. The success of this framework will depend on community adoption, developer support, and coordination with EU regulatory bodies.