If we’re lagging behind how our privacy policy is changing, this week we’ve brought some big news as Vitalik Buterin dropped what he calls his “current idea” about plans to increase privacy in the Ethereum ecosystem.
The goal is to protect user activity from unnecessary attention while making changes to the main protocol that do not cause much trouble.
Instead of proposing major changes to the consensus layer, Buterin’s roadmap is designed to present a set of small application-level wallet-integrated improvements, each one being designed to fix certain notable issues regarding how current privacy works now.
My own current privacy roadmap (much lighter in L1, but the results are more limited): https://t.co/gbtrac4ou7
I highly recommend that people read both! https://t.co/vnw0ubnped
– vitalik.eth (@vitalikbuterin) April 11, 2025
One of the main ideas that are new to privacy advocates is that you don’t need to make special efforts to choose your privacy, such as switching to a niche wallet or adjusting complex settings, to avoid broadcasting your financial activities.
New norms
Instead, tools like Privacy Pool and Railgun should be available within mainstream wallets, with features like balanced and private transmissions that are ideally turned on by default, according to Buterin.
This is not just about hiding individual transactions, but also about unlocking the user’s footprint across the app.
Using a different ETH address for each app may seem like a step back to usability, but it is a tradeoff that the ecosystem should start accepting, especially as wallet and cross-chain use cases within applications are already driving similar changes in the way users’ addresses are managed.
It is not a complete shift towards anonymity, but it shows that privacy, which has always been an optional feature, has gradually become the norm.
