Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, outlined a streamlined roadmap for enhancing layer-1 privacy in blockchain networks.
In a blog post on April 11th, Buterin introduced a framework focused on improving user confidentiality without requiring major changes to the network’s core infrastructure.
The proposal covers four different areas of privacy, including private on-chain payments, partially obscuring user actions within decentralized applications, hiding read access data from the blockchain, and anonymizing network-level communications.
Buterin said that if these upgrades are implemented, it could guide you through new criteria where private transactions will become default.
He continued that individual DAPP activities may continue to be visible, but links between user actions across multiple platforms became obscure.
The co-founder of Ethereum concluded that this approach provides privacy from observer and infrastructure-level threats like compromised RPC nodes.
Important Components
Buterin’s proposal begins by integrating privacy tools such as Railgun directly into Ethereum Wallets. He argued that this would allow users to manage shield balances without resorting to third-party wallets, making privacy more accessible by default.
According to him:
“There is an option to send from Shield Balance and is turned on by default. All this should be designed to feel as natural as possible from a UX perspective. Users do not need to download another “Privacy Wallet.” ”
He also advocated using a different address for each DAPP. This approach could introduce user experience trade-offs, but it significantly limits activity traceability across multiple applications.
To support this, Send-To-Self Transactions must maintain privacy by default. Butaline in the design is looking at it when necessary despite the added complexity.
Enlarging this, Buterin explained that such changes are well in sync with existing efforts in cross-chain interoperability, where users already interact with different chains via separate workflows.
He pointed out that integrating these features into an in-app wallet would help standardize private interactions without major architectural changes.
Buterin called for technical improvements, including using TEE-based RPC privacy as a short-term solution and planning to move to Personal Information Search (PIR) when ready.
Additional recommendations include connecting each DAPP to a separate RPC node, progressing the certification aggregation protocol, and supporting a privacy-enhanced keystore wallet.
