PETs4DeFi — Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for DeFi — Lucas Martin Calderon

Co-led a €3.5M European Innovation Council program (~1% acceptance) that built the ZK toolkit, zk-KYC, and compliance-by-design stack letting DeFi hold privacy and regulation in the same hand.

Selected by the European Innovation Council

PETs4DeFi was selected by the European Innovation Council from a call with a ~1% acceptance rate — €3.5M awarded to a consortium of 16+ universities, research institutes, and industry partners across the EU. Lucas co-led the proposal and co-led the program, with direct lead on the work packages that owned the cryptographic core.

What it built

A three-year EIC research program that built privacy-enhancing technology for DeFi capable of holding privacy and compliance at the same time: confidential lending, private DEX trading, anonymous-but-verifiable DAO voting, and compliance that could be enforced and audited without leaking the underlying user data. Ten work packages, an integrated end-to-end pilot platform, and a published reference cryptographic toolkit for downstream protocols to adopt.

Lucas's work packages

Lucas led the work packages where the cryptography was load-bearing:

Architecture and Cryptographic Toolkit. The engine room: ZK circuits, MPC modules, privacy-preserving signature libraries, the post-quantum migration plan, and the scalability work that proved the stack held up under realistic DeFi load.
Privacy-preserving identity and the Compliance Oracle. A decentralised identity framework with a zero-knowledge KYC process, paired with a privacy-preserving Compliance Oracle that turned ZK primitives into something a smart contract could call atomically.
Private lending and a private DEX. Shielded-pool and zk-rollup techniques applied to lending and DEX prototypes, with the identity and compliance proofs from the identity layer plugged in directly rather than wrapped.
Private NFT marketplace and DAO governance. Anonymous-but-verifiable voting via ZK membership and ballot proofs, plus private NFT transfer with embedded compliance hooks.

Deliverables

The program produced:

A complete cryptographic toolkit — ZK circuits, MPC modules, privacy-preserving signature libraries — with post-quantum integration as a first-class output.
A scalability and performance engineering report covering ZK throughput and latency under realistic DeFi load.
A decentralised identity (DID) framework and a zero-knowledge KYC process prototype.
A privacy-preserving Compliance Oracle and a regulator-facing dashboard.
Privacy-preserving lending protocol and DEX prototypes.
A compliance-by-design smart-contract library.
Privacy-preserving NFT marketplace and DAO governance prototypes with verifiable anonymous voting.
An AI/ML anomaly-detection framework purpose-built for privacy-enhanced DeFi.
A fully integrated end-to-end pilot platform combining every technical component.
A training programme and educational toolkit for developers, regulators, and investigators.

Compliance-by-design

The conventional answer to DeFi compliance was to bolt a centralised KYC checkpoint onto a permissioned wrapper. PETs4DeFi took the opposite view: compliance became a property the smart contract could prove — via zero-knowledge — rather than a permission a custodian asserts. One cryptographic stack, designed end to end, where every claim a user made to a contract was a proof a regulator could independently verify without ever seeing the underlying data.