Vitalik Buterin Proposes Roadmap to Boost Ethereum User Privacy
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has offered a solution to dramatically increase Ethereum users’ privacy.
In an April 11 article on Ethereum Magicians, the mathematician presented a path for making private transactions and anonymous on-chain interactions more accessible and natural for regular users without requiring large changes to the network’s basic protocol.
According to Buterin, the suggested roadmap addresses four major types of privacy: privacy of on-chain payments, partial anonymisation of on-chain activity within applications, privacy of chain reads, and network-level anonymization.
Better Privacy for Ethereum
Ethereum’s privacy is still inadequate because it is designed to be transparent. While this promotes trust and security, it makes tracking user activities simple. If someone has the user’s Ethereum address, they can view their full transaction history, including balances, app usage, and interactions with other users.
Buterin’s roadmap focusses on addressing this through real, gradual improvements that can be implemented without completely rebuilding the network.
He suggested that wallets such as MetaMask or Rabby integrate features such as Railgun and Privacy Pools by default, providing users with a “shielded balance” and secret send choices.
Wallets should also utilise separate addresses for each dApp rather than a single one for everything, he noted.
“This is a major step, and it entails significant convenience sacrifices, but IMO, this is a bullet that we should bite because this is the most practical way to remove public links between all of your activity across different applications.”
Furthermore, transmitting ETH or tokens between wallets should be private by default in order to support the one-address-per-app model.
Adopting new standards like as FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) and EIP-7701 (native account abstraction) will enable privacy protocols to run without centralised relays, making them easier to maintain and harder to censor, he claimed.
Buterin proposed employing Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) now and Private Information Retrieval (PIR) eventually to provide cryptographic guarantees against data leakage to RPC (remote procedure call) nodes.
To avoid metadata leaks, he suggested that wallets rotate between various RPC nodes and communicate data over “mixnets.” A mixnet, or mixing network, is a privacy-enhancing device that conceals the link between the source and recipient of messages or data, similar to a VPN.
No Need to Wait for the Next Upgrade
Finally, he stated that users should be able to upgrade or change their wallet security, such as private keys, without disclosing the relationships between their various assets or activities.
Vitalik advocated for deeper integration of privacy into wallets, standards, and user habits immediately, rather than waiting for long-term Ethereum enhancements. The next significant upgrade to Ethereum is Pectra, which will feature account abstraction and is expected for mainnet release on May 7.
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