Vitalik Buterin donates 700 ETH to enhance privacy on Ethereum

Today, it was discovered that the famous co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, transferred approximately 694 ETH to Railgun, a protocol for privacy on Ethereum.

The amount donated in ETH has a value exceeding 1.8 million dollars, and Buterin also added 341,000$ in USDC. 

Appena In: Vitalik (@VitalikButerin) ha trasferito 693.91 $ETH del valore di $1.83M e $340,931 $USDC a @RAILGUN_Project.

Vitalik ha ricevuto $240,931 $USDC da @mfoundation.

Indirizzo: 0x1810c87a85b1d3aff71f3bd7fe45e4dc03eff10e

Dati @nansen_ai pic.twitter.com/vde99VzVHp

— Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens) 4 giugno 2025

Vitalik and privacy: the 700 ETH donation to Railgun

Ethereum is a completely transparent public protocol, meaning it has a low level of privacy. 

Almost two months ago, Vitalik Buterin published a roadmap for the privacy of Ethereum, which is a technical document primarily aimed at the developer community.

A few days later, he published, instead, a long post on his official blog in which he explained why he supports privacy.

In that post, Vitalik stated that he has been increasingly focusing recently on improving privacy in the Ethereum ecosystem. 

It defines privacy as “an important guarantor of decentralization“, because those who hold the information hold the power, and it is therefore necessary to avoid centralized control over the information.

In particular, it highlights that in the past the crypto system underestimated privacy because there was no way to offer privacy in a decentralized manner, focusing exclusively on other guarantees that could be provided at that time.

Now, however, with the ZK-SNARK things can change.

According to the famous co-founder of Ethereum, nowadays privacy can no longer be ignored, especially because artificial intelligence is significantly increasing the capabilities of centralized data collection and analysis.

In this regard, it is emphasized that highly efficient zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARK) can protect our identities by revealing sufficient information to demonstrate our reliability, and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows us to process data without seeing it. Furthermore, obfuscation might soon offer even more.

Vitalik Buterin gives a boost to privacy on Ethereum by donating 700 ETH to Railgun

The donation was discovered by examining the public transactions of Buterin’s known addresses.

Three outgoing transactions have been detected, two in USDC and one in ETH, directed towards three known Railgun addresses.

For now, there are no official public confirmations, but the transactions are public, and various sources associate them with Buterin and Railgun. 

Note that already in the past the co-founder of Ethereum had made donations to this protocol, so everything suggests that today’s new finding is correct.

It should also be noted that if in the past it was a few dozen ETH, this time it is several hundred, meaning an amount with a value of an entire order of magnitude higher. 

The Railgun protocol 

Railgun is a project that aims to make DeFi anonymous.

His system is indeed based on ZK-SNARK (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge), which is Vitalik’s preferred solution to elevate the privacy level of Ethereum. 

Its goal is to make completely private transactions possible, hiding the transaction details without compromising the security and integrity of the blockchain.

According to Buterin, privacy should be a norm, and Railgun protects users’ privacy while simultaneously preventing access by malicious actors.

Railgun uses smart contracts that can in turn be used by on-chain dApps.

Privacy in the crypto sector

Contrary to common belief, there isn’t much privacy in the crypto sector, unless specific tools are used to enhance it.

Vitalik argues that society, as a whole, has always depended on a balance between privacy and transparency, so much so that in some cases he claims to even be in favor of limiting privacy itself. 

However, it also argues that, from a macro perspective, the most pressing risk of technology in the near future is that privacy is approaching historical lows, and in a strongly unbalanced way. In fact, the most powerful individuals and nations will easily be able to obtain a lot of data on everyone, while everyone else risks obtaining almost nothing from this point of view. 

Adds: 

“For this reason, supporting privacy for everyone and making the necessary tools open source, universal, reliable, and secure is one of the most important challenges of our time”.

All this still needs to be done in the crypto sector as well, because the tools to elevate the level of privacy are still not widespread, and above all, not widely used. 

For example, the basic functionalities of Ethereum and Bitcoin themselves have a very low level of privacy, based practically only on the anonymity of addresses. As this very news demonstrates, once you manage to associate an address with the name of its owner, the privacy disappears.

At this point, it becomes necessary to have tools that, when needed, allow for an elevated level of privacy while maintaining a very high level of security and full decentralization. This is not easy, and that is why Vitalik insists on this point.