SHROUDRunning19h 49m 19s
SHROUD · File 00Classification: PrivateSubject:
SHROUD

The HourHeld in common

Running

Privacy is not a privilege.

An inquiry into the right to remain unseen — told through a creature no one has ever fully seen, and the face it chose to show.

Begin

Move the cursor. The shroud goes where you go.Touch and drag. The shroud goes where you go.

I

File I

Origin

“…myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming…”

H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, 1936

The shoggoth has no fixed shape. It grows eyes when it needs them and lets them dissolve again. No one has ever seen all of it, and that is the point.

Lovecraft imagined the shoggoths as servants that outgrew their makers: living matter that reshapes itself at will and can never be fully catalogued. In late 2022 the creature found a second life online, drawn as a vast tangle of eyes wearing a small yellow smile. It became the internet’s picture of artificial intelligence: an enormous, unknowable system behind a friendly face.

SHROUD keeps the figure and reverses the moral. Beneath our hood is not a machine but a person: as changeable and as impossible to map in full as the shoggoth itself. SHROUD is an independent cultural project about the right to remain unseen, made in the company of the Ethereum ecosystem.

There, the mask hides a machine from people. Here, the mask protects a person from the machine.

Fig. 1 — The cloak. Every eye is someone looking; none of them sees in.Come closer. They close.Touch the cloak. They close.

II

File II

The Open Ledger

“Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993

Ethereum is a glass building. Every balance, every transfer and every contract call is written to a public ledger, readable by anyone, for as long as the chain exists.

That transparency is what lets strangers trust the system without trusting one another. It is also why, on a ledger like this, a single address can become a whole biography. Glass is right for the rules. It is wrong for the people who live by them.

Vitalik Buterin, who proposed Ethereum in 2013, has argued for years that the ledger cannot be the end of the story. In 2023 he and four co-authors set out Privacy Pools: a way to prove your funds are legitimate without exposing your history. That November, in My techno-optimism, he described d/acc, technology that favours defence and decentralisation, with privacy among its pillars. In 2025, in Why I support privacy, he argued that the rise of AI makes privacy more urgent, not less.

The Ethereum Foundation has made the same turn in practice. In 2025 its privacy team became Privacy Stewards of Ethereum, with a roadmap to make private writes, private reads and private proofs ordinary parts of using the network.

This is where the shoggoth returns. The creature with the smiley mask is the picture of a machine that sees far more of us than we see of it. Buterin’s argument and ours meet there: as systems learn to read every trace we leave, the answer is not to leave the open ledger, but to build a cloak into it.

  1. 1936Lovecraft publishes At the Mountains of Madness, and the shoggoth enters fiction.
  2. 1993Eric Hughes writes A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto: privacy as the power to reveal selectively.
  3. 2013Vitalik Buterin proposes Ethereum.
  4. 2015Ethereum goes live: a public ledger anyone can read and build on.
  5. 2022The shoggoth in a smiley mask becomes the internet’s image of AI.
  6. 2023The Privacy Pools paper is published, and Buterin’s My techno-optimism sets out d/acc.
  7. 2025Privacy Pools goes live on Ethereum. Buterin writes Why I support privacy. The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy team becomes Privacy Stewards of Ethereum.
  8. NowSHROUD: the mask, turned to face the other way.

Fig. 2 — Selective disclosure

The idea behind Privacy Pools and much of Ethereum’s privacy work, in its simplest form: answer the question that was asked, prove it, and withhold the rest.

SpecimenRequest: “Is the holder over eighteen?”
  • Name             
  • Date of birth              
  • Address                     
  • Nationality          
  • Over eighteenYes
Disclosed 1 of 5Exactly what was asked. Nothing more.
III

File III

Theses

Six positions, written to be argued with and, we hope, agreed with.

On the right to remain unseen

  1. Thesis I. Privacy is not a privilege.

    It is not a reward for good behaviour, a premium feature, or a luxury for those who can afford better locks. It is a condition of ordinary dignity, owed to everyone equally, and most urgently to those with the least power to demand it.

  2. Thesis II. To ask for privacy is not to confess.

    “Nothing to hide” assumes that only wrongdoing needs cover. But people close doors to think, to grieve, to love, to dissent and to change their minds. Discretion is not guilt.

  3. Thesis III. Your identity is yours to compose.

    You are not the sum of your records. A self assembled by others from fragments (purchases, locations, contacts, pauses) is a likeness at best, and a caricature at worst.

  4. Thesis IV. Disclose what the moment requires, and nothing more.

    Proving you are old enough should not require revealing your birthday. Proving your funds are clean should not require surrendering your history. Every question should be the smallest possible question, and every answer the smallest possible truth.

  5. Thesis V. Glass for power. Cloth for people.

    Rules, contracts and institutions that hold power over others should be open to inspection. The people subject to them should not be. A public ledger is a public good; a public life is not.

  6. Thesis VI. The shroud is drawn by the one beneath it.

    Privacy is not granted by those who watch. It is claimed, practised and defended by people who refuse to be fully seen, and by everyone who builds with that refusal in mind.

IV

File IV

In Company

Every name in this register is a confirmed partner of SHROUD, listed with their agreement.

The register

SHROUD is not made alone. Our partners build the network, research its privacy, put that research into practice, and fund and gather the people who do the work.

Together they cover the whole argument of this site: an open ledger, and the cloth that people need to live on it.

  1. 01

    Ethereum FoundationStewardship

    The non-profit that supports Ethereum’s research, development and community. Through its privacy team it has made privacy an explicit goal for the network: private writes, private reads and private proving.

    ethereum.foundation (opens in a new tab)
  2. 02

    DevconGathering

    The Ethereum Foundation’s conference for builders, researchers and artists, held since 2014. It is where the ecosystem’s ideas, privacy among them, are argued out in person.

    devcon.org (opens in a new tab)
  3. 03

    AztecPrivate execution

    A privacy-first Layer 2 for Ethereum, and the team behind Noir, a language for writing zero-knowledge programs. Privacy built into the base of an application rather than bolted on.

    aztec.network (opens in a new tab)
  4. 04

    ENSNaming

    The Ethereum Name Service: human-readable names in place of long addresses. An identity you choose and compose yourself, rather than a number assigned to you.

    ens.domains (opens in a new tab)
  5. 05

    GitcoinPublic goods

    Funds open-source and public-goods work across Ethereum, and pioneered quadratic funding, where many small contributions count for more than a few large ones.

    gitcoin.co (opens in a new tab)
  6. 06

    Privacy & Scaling ExplorationsResearch

    The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy team, known until 2025 as Privacy & Scaling Explorations. It researches, builds and coordinates the work of making privacy the norm on Ethereum.

    pse.dev (opens in a new tab)
  7. 07

    Privacy PoolsPrivate transfers

    0xbow’s implementation of the Privacy Pools design: prove your funds come from legitimate sources without revealing your history. Live on Ethereum since March 2025.

    privacypools.com (opens in a new tab)