TL;DR
- Buterin warned that a data breach affected clients of JPMorgan, Citi, and Morgan Stanley and argued that privacy must be treated as basic hygiene.
- The Kohaku toolkit integrates privacy from the design stage, reducing operational risk without relying on patches.
- Vitalik warned that large institutions may pressure protocol changes and discourage developers, undermining Ethereum’s neutrality.
Vitalik Buterin reacted to a new data breach that affected clients of JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley.
The three institutions were notified by SitusAMC that third parties might have accessed banking information, an episode that once again exposes structural weaknesses in the traditional financial system’s data protection model.
Privacy Is Basic Hygiene
Buterin published a short but forceful message: privacy is not a feature added later, it is basic hygiene. His statement was interpreted as an indirect response to the way banks continue handling the sensitive information of millions of users.
A few days ago, Buterin introduced Kohaku, a new toolkit designed to ensure that applications in the Ethereum ecosystem integrate privacy from the start. This proposal rejects the idea that users must install add-ons or activate optional settings to achieve a minimum level of confidentiality.
In a public demonstration, Kohaku used Railgun to conceal visible funds with a single action, showing an operating standard in which user protection emerges from the architecture itself rather than from patches added after problems appear. For Vitalik, this approach reduces operational risk and avoids reactive solutions that depend on vulnerabilities becoming visible first.
Buterin Warns About the Influence of Large Institutions in Ethereum
Buterin also warned at Devconnect that Ethereum is facing governance issues. The growing presence of large financial players, he said, creates two threats: the potential withdrawal of key developers and the risk that major capital holders may push for protocol adjustments tailored to corporate needs.
Vitalik argues that institutions do not require a faster network or one tailored to their infrastructure, because they already have high-performance internal systems. What they seek instead is to shift the rules toward a framework aligned with their business interests. Ethereum, he states, only retains its value if it remains global, neutral, and outside the logic of corporate control.
The banking sector data breach offers a concrete example: when storage is centralized, risk becomes inevitable. Privacy must be standard from the initial design, not a commercial feature or an optional improvement reserved for those who know it exists.
