Ethereum Privacy for Institutions | Mo Jalil and Oskar Thoren

**David** (0:02)
Bankless Nation, I'm here with Mo Jalil and Oskar Thoren. They are the co-founders of ETH Systems, a new spin out out of the Ethereum Foundation, focused on three things, Ethereum, institutions, and privacy, which I think is desperately needed for all of crypto and Ethereum included, obviously, for really elevating Ethereum to the next level. Oskar, Mo, welcome to Bankless.

**Mo Jalil** (0:26)
David, thanks for having us.

**David** (0:28)
Thank you. Why do we need privacy on Ethereum?
Oskar, I'll throw that to you.

**Oskar Thoren** (0:34)
Sure. I would say that Ethereum is great sort of technology and works great as a sort of credibly neutral base layer, but obviously it doesn't have privacy baked in. And that's why you see sort of a lot of people been trying to figure out solutions for that, whether it's on the base layer, but also a lot of application layer. So basically, that's sort of the missing piece, if you will, in the Ethereum land, and that's where we come in.

**Mo Jalil** (0:54)
Anyone that listens to Bankless already will know this, so I apologize if you find me saying the same things you've heard many times, but basically, for us, we care about institutions. They generally have two things that they really care about. One is their business, and the second is that they're compliant.
And because of those two things, they kind of tend towards places that they can control. At the same time, you have public Ethereum, which has deep liquidity, has all these new business opportunities, and great ways of doing things that you've already done, but much better. But you can't get both without cryptography. So for them, they need that in order to basically access the benefits of basically Ethereum.

**David** (1:33)
Can we talk about your guys' backgrounds? Because this is not day one for you guys. This is day one for ETH Systems, or month one for ETH Systems. But this is just the next step on, I think your guys' very long arc that started a while ago. What context do we need to know from you two and the work that you've done in Ethereum, in privacy, and with institutions that you guys are bringing to ETH Systems? Mo, maybe just continue taking that one away.

**Mo Jalil** (1:59)
Yeah, so a bit about myself. So I actually started in traditional finance. I used to build algo trading systems like Goldman Sachs. That's what I did for like five years. So I have a really good understanding of the kind of things that basically these kind of investment banks need. I then spent basically a number of years kind of in the hedge fund world.
And for me, that was like the interesting part of the arc where I was looking at all these different things. I remember reading the Bitcoin white paper being blown away, but like that was too early. That was way too early. And then fast forward a number of years, I joined the Ethereum Foundation, kind of leading a lot of the APAC BD initiatives. This was last year when there was, you know, Tamash was basically the co-executive director. And something became extremely obvious.
In order for any of these organizations to use public Ethereum, they needed privacy, they needed cryptography. And I had known Oskar for a while, actually. So I remember calling him up and saying, hey, look, Oskar, there's something that I think you'd be a great fit for, and we should talk about it.

**Oskar Thoren** (2:53)
So I've been in the Ethereum and crypto space for around a decade or so.
I focused a lot on privacy very early on. Before this was a big talking point, working at Status and also creating an R&D lab. As part of that, we were developing very stuff of peer-to-peer communication protocols that were useful for sensor resistance and privacy and so on. So I've been into protocol design and privacy and resistance, specifically on the protocol infrastructure layer for quite a while now. And then I guess the last five, six years, I've been diving deeper into signal proofs and doing various tooling for it. Including work with some of the early members of PSC at the Ethereum Foundation. And also wrote a little mini book on signal proofs, did some research related to following schemes, and some tooling for making client side proving easier and so on. In the last few years, I've been at the Ethereum Foundation and also advising them when it comes to privacy strategy and now the new access layer. And as Mo mentioned, that's where we met and we kickstarted the Institutional Privacy Task Force. I think for me, one difference is that I used to focus primarily on privacy of individuals. And while that's still something that's very close to my heart, I think one thing that I notice is that there's a massive, massive demand for privacy of institutions.