Good Monday, friends of privacy!

Amidst the last week full of news about conflict escalations and other terrible news for people, there has been at least quite a few nice innovations, updates and events worth mentioning and keeping track of. To up your morale a bit and not to fall into doomer mood, you can check out the Winners of Privacy Award 2025, now finally live.

And checkout Aleo, our Tool of the week. Privacy first L1 blockchain trying to enable private and secure decentralized applications.

Tool of the week

• Check out Aleo, privacy-focused Layer-1 blockchain platform built around advanced cryptography

Insights

• Aleo chain is now live on NEAR Intents
• and NEAR Protocols launched their Confidential Intents
• Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum needs a binary state tree and replacing EVM with RISC-V overhauls
• Step Finance, a decentralized finance platform on the Solana blockchain, has officially announced the immediate wind-down
• LLMs can deanonymize internet users based on their past comments
• Recap of PSE activities and accomplishments for February

Knowledge

• Web3PrivacyNow's community Privacy Awards 2025 have Winners!
• Take a look at ZCash Z3 updates
• Proton's guide to Deepfake prevention and how to stay in control of your identity
• After it's community backlash, Discord delays age verification rollout
• EFF says Tech Companies Shouldn’t Be Bullied Into Doing Surveillance
• OpenAI reveals more details about its agreement with the Pentagon

Inspiration: Going On(Line) an offering of media from the web

• Rollup podcast episode with Illia Polosukhin from NEAR Protocol about The Next Era of AI being Onchain
• Check out the W3PN Academy Shorts
• Take our new Academy Course - ZK for not tech, done in collaboration with Oskarth
• Web3 Privacy Now courses in our Academy

Inspiration: Going Off(Line) an offering of IRL events

(new/changes in bold)

• Mar 1–2 - Crypto Expo Europe - Bucharest, Romania
• Mar 4-6 - HandyCon White
• Mar 6-7 - Logos Network's Parallel Society Lisabon
• Mar 12-15 - ETHMumbai Mumbai, India
• Apr 15–16 - Paris Blockchain Week - Paris, France
• May 5-8 - RightsCon Zambia
• May 8-10 - ETHPrague Prague, Czech Republic
• May 13-14 - ETHCluj Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• Jun 16-17 - Dapcon 26 Berlin, Germany
• Jun 18-19 - Web3 Summit Berlin, Germany
• Jul 8-12 - DWebCamp Berlin, Germany
• Nov 2 - Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress #3 Mumbai, India