here is the roadmap for privacy by Vitalik Buterin

Today, the renowned co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, published his roadmap for the privacy of Ethereum.

This is a relatively short document, given Buterin’s standards, published on Ethereum Magicians, where it has so far garnered just over 2,000 views. After all, it is a technical document primarily aimed at the developer community, so it is not expected to be read by millions of people.

The privacy roadmap of Ethereum proposed by Vitalik Buterin

The roadmap of Buterin specifically concerns the layer-1 of Ethereum, which is its native base blockchain.

From this point of view, the level of privacy of Ethereum has never been particularly developed, in line with that of the blockchain of Bitcoin.

To achieve greater privacy on Ethereum, it is necessary to use tools either based on smart contract, or on external platforms, and therefore not native.

The idea expressed by Buterin is still to improve the privacy of Ethereum users without making changes to Ethereum’s consensus, that is, with non-deep modifications.

In particular, his reasoning focuses on on-chain payment privacy, partial anonymization of on-chain activity within applications, on-chain reading privacy, and network-level anonymization.

The details of the roadmap: Vitalik Buterin wants to increase privacy on Ethereum

This specific roadmap by Buterin dedicated to the theme of privacy, according to him, can be combined with a long-term roadmap that instead aims to bring deeper changes to layer-1, or the introduction of rollups specific for applications that preserve privacy, or the introduction of other more complex functionalities.

Probably this is the reason why it turns out to be so short, given that often Buterin has accustomed us to much longer and more complex documents.

The objectives of the path envisioned by Vitalik Buterin are to achieve a large portion of private transactions, but with public activities within each individual application with private links between the various activities within different applications, to obtain privacy guarantees that are valid both against adversaries passively observing the chain and against adversaries managing the RPC nodes.

The roadmap for non-deep changes is in fact limited to nine points, without providing timelines.

The nine points

1. Integrate privacy tools, such as Railgun or Privacy Pool, directly into existing wallets.
2. Move the ecosystem towards “an address per application” as the default setting.
3. Safeguard by default the privacy of submissions to oneself.
4. Implement FOCIL and EIP-7701, for account abstraction and to improve censorship resistance of all transactions.
5. Integrate TEE-based RPC privacy into existing wallets.
6. Replace the TEEs with private information retrieval (PIR) as soon as this technology is ready.
7. Connect the wallets to multiple RPC nodes, optionally through a mixnet, using a different node for each dapp.
8. Work on protocolli di aggregazione delle prove to share a single on-chain proof among multiple transactions.
9. Work on wallet keystore that ensure privacy.

The discussion of the community

Obviously, this proposal by Buterin has generated a discussion.

However, the topic seems to interest only the technicians, or those who are attentive to privacy issues, but it does not seem to be generating a particularly broad discussion. Furthermore, ordinary users appear to be very detached, perhaps because these are still very technical subjects.

There is also the possibility that many people struggle to imagine the concrete future evolution of progetti crypto, and therefore they become little passionate about these topics.

Instead, the community of developers is attentive to such issues, both because they obviously require quite a bit of development, and especially because Buterin‘s roadmap, as usual, outlines a fairly precise direction on what needs to be developed.

It should finally be added that it does not seem that the questione della privacy at this moment is commonly considered one of the most important by users, even if it most likely is, especially with the increasing use of transazioni on-chain.