In an enlightening post on Ethereum Magicians on April 11, the esteemed mathematician Vitalik Buterin laid out a strategic roadmap aimed at enhancing the privacy of Ethereum users. His privacy-enhancing proposals are designed to be user-friendly and do not require significant alterations to the Ethereum network’s fundamental protocol.
Buterin’s roadmap delves into four critical types of privacy: onchain payment privacy, onchain activity partial anonymization within applications, the privacy of chain reads, and network-level anonymization.
Ethereum’s transparency, although beneficial for security and trust, currently poses a challenge to user privacy. The entire transaction history of a user, including balances, app usage, and interactions with other users, can be tracked if their Ethereum address is known.
The proposed roadmap by Buterin intends to mitigate this issue through feasible, progressive enhancements that can be implemented without a complete network revamp. He suggests that wallets like MetaMask and Rabby should incorporate tools such as Railgun and Privacy Pools, providing users with “shielded balance” and private send options as standard.
Buterin also advises that wallets should employ distinct addresses for each dApp rather than a single address for all activities. Furthermore, transactions between a user’s wallets should be private by default to foster the one-address-per-app design.
New standards such as FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) and EIP-7701 (native account abstraction) should be adopted, according to Buterin. These would enable privacy protocols to operate without centralized relays, making them more challenging to censor and easier to maintain.
Buterin also recommended the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and eventually Private Information Retrieval (PIR) to prevent data leaks to RPC (remote procedure call) nodes. He proposes that wallets should rotate among multiple RPC nodes and transmit data via “mixnets” to prevent metadata leaks.
The mathematician further suggested the utilization of “proof aggregation,” where multiple transactions can share a single on-chain proof, reducing costs for users.
Lastly, Buterin emphasized the importance of allowing users to upgrade or change their wallet security, like private keys, without exposing connections between their different assets or activities. He urged the immediate integration of privacy into wallets, standards, and user habits instead of waiting for future Ethereum upgrades.
The next significant Ethereum upgrade, Pectra, is set to introduce account abstraction and is slated for mainnet deployment on May 7.
