Ethereum Privacy Upgrade: Vitalik Buterin Details 4-Part Roadmap

• Ethereum’s (ETH) Vitalik Buterin has laid down a detailed plan that could significantly enhance privacy in layer 1 without affecting the network consensus.
• This plan suggests the introduction of privacy tools in wallets, such as Metamask, to offer the option to hide key data before facilitating transactions. 

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a new roadmap targeting an improvement of the Layer 1 (L1) privacy. According to the report shared by Wu Blockchain, the details focus on practical ways of achieving this without significantly compromising the Ethereum consensus.

The Details of the Report

Reviewing the document, CNF discovered that Buterin’s plan covers four key areas – privacy of on-chain payments, network level anonymization, privacy of reads to the chain, and partial anonymization of on-chain activity inside applications. However, he highlighted the need to merge this with a long-term roadmap to make a comprehensive change to the L1.

In the report, Buterin pointed out that incorporating privacy tools such as railgun into existing wallets is the first step. According to him, it is important to ensure that wallets have a “notion of a shielded balance.” Such integration presents an option to the sender which, per his suggestion, should be turned on by default. This defeats the idea that users should download a separate privacy wallet which is technically unsafe.

Secondly, the Ethereum co-founder suggests that the ecosystem should be moved towards “one address per application”. According to him, this practically removes public links between all activities across different applications. Meanwhile, he also suggests that the send-to-self privacy-preserving by default feature should be integrated alongside FOCIL and EIP-7701.

Along with EIP 7701’s account abstraction benefits, this allows protocols like PP, Railway, Tornado, etc, to operate without needing relays / public broadcasters, greatly simplifying the development and maintenance of such protocols. FOCIL greatly improves censorship resistance of all transactions, including privacy-preserving transactions.

More About the Privacy Roadmap by the Ethereum Co-Founder

Further reviewing the report, we discovered that boosting privacy in layer 1 could be best done by “incorporating Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)-based RPC privacy into existing wallets.” As noted in our earlier discussion, TEE was introduced in a comprehensive plan that seeks to improve security and finality in Layer 2 networks.

According to Buterin, its integration for the purpose of privacy would act as a short-term mitigation. Above all, specific work was said to be done on privacy-preserving keystore wallets to make sure that users upgrade the verification logic of their accounts in one transaction.

Meanwhile, Buterin suggested the need for wallets to rotate between RPC nodes. With this, data could be sent through mixnets to prevent metadata from leaking. Concluding his submission, he highlighted that users should be able to upgrade their wallet security, which includes private keys while maintaining the privacy of connections between their different activities.

Ethereum is already taking a significant step towards the mainnet launch of its Pectra upgrade as part of the broader initiative to integrate smart contract functionality for wallets, account abstraction, etc. As discussed earlier, this would ensure that Ethereum’s flexibility is significantly enhanced while expanding the accessibility of Decentralized Applications to users.

In a recent update, CNF also discussed the launch of a new Ethereum-based privacy pool to the mainnet. According to that report, this feature depends on Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and the Association Set Provider with an extra layer of compliance.