Umbra: 2025 In Review and the Year Ahead

We created Umbra, the first implementation of stealth addresses on Ethereum, back in 2020. Since its May 2021 launch it has processed over 350,000 transactions, transacting roughly half a billion USD of assets over that time. That's upwards of $8M a month, all driven by nearly 100,000 unique sender addresses across Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Base and Arbitrum.

This project started as a directional bet on a key building block of our industry, one that has proven correct and increasingly critical. The privacy landscape is quite broad and rooted in heavy R&D initiatives. We believe that it's key to complement such research with user-focused apps in parallel.

In 2026, ScopeLift continues to advocate for the untapped potential of stealth addresses. People still need an easy and convenient way to receive funds without disclosing their identity to the world.

A lot remains to be done, especially when it comes to the perennial challenge of moving funds out of a stealth address in a privacy preserving way. It's often straightforward to find the recipients of Umbra transactions based on their subsequent actions. We need to do a better job making this step easy for our users.

Protecting fund transfers is just one of many steps towards a digital world with native privacy. That's why we wanted to share an update on the challenges we've faced, what we've been building around Umbra v2, and our plan for 2026.

2025 In Review

We completed our last big development push related to Umbra at the end of 2024. This work, funded by a grant from the Ethereum Foundation, was focused on the establishment of stealth address standards and preliminary technical design work on Umbra v2.

Since then, our work implementing Umbra v2 has continued behind closed doors, albeit at a more gradual pace. ScopeLift has funded this work ourselves. There are several reasons for this.

First, as anyone involved in the ecosystem is aware, privacy protocols have long been subject to increased regulatory scrutiny. This was certainly the case in late 2024, and while the regulatory environment has improved over the past year, privacy tools remain an area of ambiguity. High profile cases, wherein the developers of privacy protocols have faced legal consequences, are well known. These concerns have not been merely abstract for us as the stewards of Umbra.

It's also well understood that the past year has been difficult in terms of fundraising throughout the entire crypto industry. While some renewed interest in privacy tools has occurred, it comes largely in the form of speculative investment. We remain convinced that monetizing privacy tools is a fraught prospect. Because we've never monetized Umbra, nor do we plan to, we have also never sought venture capital nor raised funds via a token sale. We have no plans to do so.

We are committed to keeping Umbra a public good, one funded by ScopeLift and community participants via grants. Privacy's importance is only going to become more acute with time, so it's logical to double down on such an approach, notwithstanding the challenges that come with this route.

Our last public update in 2024 focused on preliminary designs for Umbra v2. Since that time, we've been quietly working to implement our vision for Umbra v2. This work has been funded completely by ScopeLift, and while we've worked at a more measured pace, we've made good progress.

Additionally, this past year focused on sustaining Umbra v1. While the contracts for Umbra are completely autonomous and permissionless, we operate a frontend and relayer service for the protocol. We've made upgrades to this infrastructure to ensure it will keep running for the foreseeable future, and Umbra v1 continues to have thousands of users each month.

Our Plan for 2026

The work for Umbra v2 is now roughly 90% complete. As anyone in software will tell you, however, the last 10% can often be the most challenging. As the landscape has shifted over the past year, we've also reevaluated which features of Umbra v2 will be the most useful to the ecosystem where it is today.

Our focus in the next few months will be on supporting one of the fastest growing segments of the Ethereum ecosystem: stablecoin usage. In particular, we want to make it as easy as possible for users to pay or be paid with stablecoins, then move those stablecoins in a privacy preserving way. While we remain committed to the flexible, modular version of the protocol, and its vision of permissionless exploration, we believe a focus on stablecoins has the best chance of increasing adoption of the stealth address standards and providing real value to users today.

We plan to launch v2 this summer. Meanwhile, we're looking to develop partnerships and integrations that can extend the impact of Umbra—and stealth addresses more broadly—in light of the decision to move forward without clear funding sources. We've initiated conversations with wallet providers, infrastructure companies and a few DAOs. If you're interested in adopting stealth addresses to provide better privacy for your users, please reach out!

Last but not least, Umbra wouldn't have been possible without the generous support of various stakeholders, large organizations and individuals alike. Grants are key to funding the future of crypto and we hope to pay it forward and play a significant part in making Ethereum cypherpunk again.