New funding mechanism supports privacy
The Funding Coordination team is excited to announce a joint initiative with Keyring Network that introduces a new approach to influencing funding in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Direct support for privacy-focused developers
Keyring’s zkVerified permissioned vault on mainnet provides compliant and privacy-preserving access to the DeFi lending marketplace. All protocol fees generated by Keyring’s zkVerified repository for the first two months will be used to fund the legal defense of Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev, who are currently on trial for publishing their open source code.
This model ensures that Vault’s first users directly support privacy-focused developers’ legal protections. Keyring shows that by linking the growth of new financial tools with the protection of the people who build them, communities can drive innovation while strengthening resilience.
This design is important. It unlocks meaningful resources for specific causes and time periods while maintaining the economic efficiency of the underlying protocols. It does not distort participation incentives and is completely market-aligned.
Impact Funding Blueprint
This is not possible through traditional charitable giving models, but is something that is uniquely enabled by a programmable decentralized protocol like Ethereum. To amplify these efforts, community members can also create Vault campaigns that funnel rewards directly into the same legal defense fund, providing ongoing support to the transparent, on-chain flywheel.
What excites the funding coordination team most is that this model is not a one-off initiative. This is a blueprint for impact funding that can be scaled across a broader ecosystem.
Through Keyring, we will continue to explore how philanthropic giving can emerge within the same market mechanisms that govern capital flows, creating impact without relying on external grants or one-off donations.
For more information see here: https://developer-legal-defense-fund.keyring.network/
