Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined a simplified privacy roadmap for the Ethereum Layer 1 blockchain in his latest post on the community-driven platform Ethereum Magicians, aiming to enhance privacy for users without making serious changes to the Ethereum consensus.
The roadmap addresses four main aspects of privacy: the privacy of on-chain payments, partial anonymization of on-chain activity within applications, privacy of chain reads (such as RPC calls), and network-level anonymization. This approach is designed to be easily integrated with longer-term plans that could introduce deeper changes to Layer 1, as well as privacy-focused application-specific rollups or other advanced privacy features.
Ethereum’s Privacy Roadmap: Enhancing User Security With Advanced Privacy Protocols
The plan includes integrating privacy tools, such as Railgun and Privacy Pools, into existing wallets. Wallets should feature a shielded balance, and when sending funds, there should be an option to “send from shielded balance,” ideally enabled by default. This design should be seamless from a user experience (UX) perspective, ensuring that users do not need to download a separate “privacy wallet.”
The ecosystem should move towards a “one address per application” approach by default. While this represents a shift and sacrifices some convenience, it is considered the most practical solution for eliminating public links between a user’s activities across different applications. This design also aligns well with in-application wallets, and the required workflows resemble those used for cross-chain interoperability, for example, depositing funds from various sources to a chain.
The plan also suggests making send-to-self transactions privacy-preserving by default, which is essential for the aforementioned system to work effectively.
Further, the implementation of FOCIL and EIP-7701 is proposed, ensuring that FOCIL is EIP-7701-compatible. This, combined with the benefits of account abstraction from EIP-7701, allows protocols like Privacy Pools, Railway, and Tornado to function without needing relays or public broadcasters, simplifying their development and maintenance. FOCIL enhances the censorship resistance of all transactions, including those focused on privacy.
In order to improve privacy, TEE-based remote procedure call (RPC) privacy should be integrated into existing wallets as a short-term solution. Automata has already developed a version of this, which needs to be further tested and hardened. This would allow users to interact with RPC nodes while having stronger assurances that their private data is not being collected.
Once the technology is ready, TEE solutions should be replaced by private information retrieval (PIR), which provides cryptographic guarantees and is stronger than TEEs. However, PIR is not yet efficient enough for large datasets. A hybrid approach may be considered, where TEEs isolate smaller regions of state data, and PIR is used within those, with constants adjusted as PIR technology improves over time.
Wallets should also connect to multiple RPC nodes, optionally through a mixnet, and ideally use a different RPC node for each decentralized application (dApp). By adding security enhancements to RPC nodes, such as light client support, it becomes practical for users to trust a wider range of RPC servers, reducing metadata leakage.
Additionally, there should be a focus on proof aggregation protocols that enable multiple privacy-protocol transactions to share a single on-chain proof, lowering gas costs for privacy protocols.
Work on privacy-preserving keystore wallets is also recommended. These wallets would allow users to upgrade their account verification methods, whether algorithm or keys, in one transaction, with the changes reflected across all private notes they control, both on Layer 1 and all Layer 2 networks, without publicly linking those notes.
Vitalik Buterin concluded that by the end of the roadmap, a portion of transactions will be private, with private sending becoming the default in many cases. Activity within each individual application will remain public, but the link between activities in different applications will be kept private. Privacy guarantees will be upheld not only against adversaries passively observing the blockchain but also against those operating RPC nodes.
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