- Buterin’s simplified L1 privacy roadmap aims for significant improvements without altering Ethereum’s core consensus mechanism, focusing on four key privacy areas.
- The plan proposes using tools like Railgun for private payments and defaulting to “one address per app” to limit cross-dApp tracking.
- Addressing RPC tracking and network-level exposure, the roadmap explores FOCIL, EIP-7701, and network anonymization technologies like Tor/VPNs.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled a concise roadmap for improving the privacy of L1 protocols. This roadmap, even if simplifed, aims to implement major changes to L1, or privacy-preserving application-specific rollups, or other more complex features, without requiring altering ETH’s core consensus mechanism.
The roadmap focuses on four key forms of privacy: on-chain payment privacy, partial anonymization of in-app activity, privacy of on-chain reads, and network-level anonymity.
In on-chain payment privacy, the goal is to make transactions more private, shielding both sender and receiver. Deploying privacy tools like Railgun in wallets allows users to conceal their identity or other details on the public blockchain.
Another notable aspect is to hide user’s activities within decentralized applications (dApps) by offering them a unique Ethereum address for each dApp they interact with (“One Address Per App”). This makes tracking users’ activities a bit harder, even though it does not bring full anonymity.
Move the ecosystem toward “one address per application” by default. 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.
RPC Tracking and Network-Level Privacy on Ethereum
Users also get tracked through their on-chain data activities by RPC. When people interact with the blockchain by viewing account balances or contract states, their IP addresses and the requested data might be potentially logged by RPC, or Remote Procedure Call, providers. Proposed solutions include implementing FOCIL (Free On-Chain Information Layer) and EIP-7701.
In network-level anonymization, the goal is to hide the user’s IP address and network activity when interacting with the Ethereum network. As per Buterin, this prevents network observers from linking on-chain actions to a specific user’s internet identity.
Proposed solutions include exploring and potentially integrating technologies that anonymize network traffic, similar to how Tor or VPNs work at a broader internet level. Specific technologies weren’t explicitly mentioned in the provided roadmap, but it implies investigating solutions that prevent linking a user’s IP address to their Ethereum activities.
