EthSystems, a startup building confidentiality tools for banks and asset managers transacting on Ethereum, launched Tuesday, backed by Ethereum treasury companies Bitmine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming.
The company's founding team spent the past year building and running the Ethereum Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force, or IPTF, holding conversations with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks and asset managers while publishing a year of open-source work: private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private cross-chain settlement, a privacy-preserving identity system, and a reference document called the Ethereum Privacy Map.
EthSystems is the third entity to spin out of the Ethereum Foundation as the nonprofit narrows its own mandate, and the second in three weeks to launch with backing from Bitmine and SharpLink, the two largest corporate holders of ETH. The pattern shows the treasury companies moving beyond accumulating the asset to funding the network's infrastructure and the people building it.
EthSystems, an independent, for-profit company backed by what it calls long-term Ethereum-aligned investors, argues that institutions have adopted Ethereum as an asset class but not yet as settlement infrastructure. Its pitch is that no bank will run billion-dollar flows in full public view, so each party to a transaction must see only what it has a right to see on the public ledger.
