Vitalik Buterin Proposes Ethereum Privacy Roadmap to Enhance User Security

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a plan to enhance user privacy on the Ethereum blockchain, shared on April 11 via the Ethereum Magicians forum. The proposal addresses weak privacy features and aims to improve everyday user experience.

Key Aspects of Buterin's Privacy Roadmap

Focus on four areas: private onchain payments, limited anonymity in decentralized applications, private data reads, and network-level protections.
Current public design exposes user activity; a single wallet can disclose full transaction history and interactions.
Recommendation for wallets like MetaMask and Rabby to implement privacy tools such as Railgun and Privacy Pools for shielded balances.
Proposes using different addresses for each app to unlink user actions while allowing transfers between wallets to be private by default.
Avoids changes to Ethereum’s underlying protocol; suggests developers integrate these features into user experience.

Immediate Actions Suggested for Enhanced Privacy

Users can protect data by rotating between multiple RPC nodes and using mixnets to obscure metadata.
Initial implementation of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for short-term privacy, moving to Private Information Retrieval (PIR) later.
Proof aggregation to reduce costs while maintaining privacy across transactions.
Encouragement for new standards like FOCIL and EIP-7701 to enable decentralized privacy protocols.

Buterin emphasized the urgency for developers and wallet creators to act before significant protocol changes. The upcoming Ethereum upgrade, Pectra, scheduled for May 7, will introduce native account abstraction but is not directly linked to the privacy roadmap.