key takeaways
- Vitalik Buterin outlined in a recent blog post how stealthy Ethereum addresses could help network users further protect their privacy.
- “Stealth addresses provide the same privacy properties as…generating a new address for each transaction, but without requiring any interaction,” he said.
- Stealth addresses could finally unlock privacy for transactions involving POAP, NFT, or ENS domains.
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Always concerned with providing privacy protection tools to Ethereum users, Vitalik Buterin has come up with a new mechanism that can be easy to use: address cloaking.
New directions at every step
Vitalik Buterin is researching how to increase privacy on Ethereum.
The creator of Ethereum border in a new blog post, a tool that could allow web users to better protect their privacy: stealth addresses. These would essentially consist of wallet addresses that are cryptographically linked to one’s public address, but can only be discovered by the parties involved in the transaction. As Buterin said: “stealth addresses provide the same privacy properties as … generating a new address for each transaction, but without requiring any interaction.”
Buterin claimed that the scheme would allow a larger amount of digital assets to be transferred from one user to another in a privacy-focused manner. The Ethereum-based privacy protocol Tornado Cash, he noted, only allows major cryptocurrencies to be transacted. Stealth addresses would offer the opportunity to privately send any ERC-20 token, no matter how small the project, as well as POAP names, NFTs, ENS, and other digital assets.
He said the technology was simple and could be implemented relatively easily, were it not for a couple of details. One of the main obstacles would be gas tariffs. A newly generated stealth address would contain zero ETH, meaning it would be incapable of forwarding any cryptocurrency or NFTs sent to it. Sending ETH to the stealth address from another address would defeat the purpose of using a stealth address in the first place.
A solution to the problem could be to use ZK-SNARK (cryptographic proofs), which unfortunately cost a lot of extra fuel. Another would involve specialized transaction aggregators, which could give network users the option to pay for multiple transactions in one go, and then “spend” these prepaid transactions whenever they want.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and various other crypto assets.
