Vitalik Butein from Ethereum Co -Founder (ETH) has presented a roadmap proposal for the development of the major tier (L1) of its ecosystem.
In an essay published on the Ethereum Magicians Forum on April 10th, “Privacy Route L1 has been easily maximized”Buterin details his focused plan With four pillars: Chain payment privacy, partial anonymity of applications, protection of RPC consultations, and network level anonymity.
The roadmap uses intelligent contracts and existing technologies to provide privacy, according to Buitter itself. “Light of Change in Consensus” Esreum.
Chain Payment Privacy: Protected Transactions
One of the central points of Butaline’s proposal is to ensure that payments made within Ethereum’s main network are personally taken away.
Currently, each transaction in Ethereum Registered in public accounting bookswhich means that everyone can track the origin, destination, and amount of ether or other token transfers. This puts users at risk, such as analyzing financial patterns by third parties.
To address this issue, Buterin proposes to integrate privacy tools directly into Ethereum wallets such as Railgun and Privacy Pool. These tools allow users to maintain a “protected balance.” This is because transactions made from that balance They do not reveal any confidential informationaddress, amount of operation, etc.
Buterin’s text explains, “Transactions created from this balance are private by default, simplifying the experience so that users do not need a specialized wallet to ensure confidentiality.”
When someone sends ether from that protected balance, the transaction hides the details using encryption techniques such as Zero Knowledge Test (ZK). These tests allow users to ensure that their operations are valid, such as not discovering who sent, who receives, or how much is transferred. The result is the transactions that appear on the network, There is no data to easily link to your identity.
Partial anonymity of the application: Breaks traceability between activities
The second pillar of the roadmap addresses privacy within a decentralized application, or DAPP running on Ethereum. These applications generate public records of user interactions ranging from decentralized finance platforms (defi) to ineffective token markets (NFTs).
For example, if someone uses dapp to lend ether or buy NFTs, then they Actions are linked to your public managementmaking it easier to track your activities through various platforms.
Buterin proposes a “partial anonymity” approach that breaks this traceability. The idea is that activities within a particular application are displayed, but there is no obvious link to what users do in DAPP. “The activity within an individual application is public, but the link between activity in application A and activity in application B is private,” he writes.
To achieve this, Buterin proposes the use of techniques such as “mixer” and “anonymous pool”. A mixer is an intelligent agreement that confuses funds from multiple users before redistributing them. It makes it difficult to tell who sent what to who.
If 10 users deposit one ether each in the mixer to place the case, the contract can send one ether to 10 different addresses.
The implicit challenge in the butaline proposal is the integration of the mixer. The tool ensures partial anonymity of the application, but has been used in the past. Hide illegal funds by malicious actors. This association can generate concern among users and complicate the mass adoption of these solutions.
RPC consultation privacy: protecting network interactions
The third aspect of the proposal focuses on RPC consultations. This is a little known but important factor for interacting with Ethereum. The acronym for RPC means “invoked to a remote procedure,” refers to an application that the user or its wallet sends to a node to read network data, such as account balance and transactional status.
Today, many users can rely on external RPC suppliers such as Infura to provide these consultations and present confidential information such as IP addresses and interacting contracts.
Buterin notes that the agency represents a significant “privacy leak.” “Even if the chain transaction is private, RPC consultations can reveal usage patterns that compromise user confidentiality,” he says. To solve that, he proposes the use of technologies such as “anonymous light clients.” Light customers are a simplified version of Ethereum nodes that do not store the entire network, but refer to the information they need from other nodes.
By doing so, you can avoid RPC suppliers anonymously Link consultations to a specific identity or location. In reality, this means that users can see the balance of their wallets or see the transaction without knowing who is looking for what. These solutions not only protect privacy, but also potentially It will benefit greater diversification By reducing the dependence of centralized services.
Network-level anonymity: Shields to surveillance
The fourth and final pillars of the proposal address privacy at the network level, namely protecting users. Monitors connections between nodes Esreum.
Whenever a user sends a transaction or interacts with the network, his node can communicate with other nodes and expose data such as IP addresses. These data are possible Used by attackers for external entities To track user activity even if the chain transaction is private.
To combat this risk, Bugelin advocates the use of anonymous networks such as TOR, or specific traffic mixing protocols such as dandelions. The TOR works by sending a user’s Internet connection through multiple intermediate nodes and hiding its origin. Dandelions, which informed Cryptonotics that they had previously linked to Bitcoin (BTC) proposals, are techniques that gradually spread transactions at random, making it difficult for observers to identify the original issuer.
«Privacy should not be limited to the transaction layer. It needs to be extended to the way data passes through the network,” concludes Bugelin.
Possible issues of the pigeon’s proposal
Bugerin’s proposal could delay adoption as it faces challenges such as privacy tools such as Railgun and technical complexity to integrate privacy tools such as wallets and node privacy pools. If the developer is missing resources.
Furthermore, the key to privacy zero knowledge test increases computing power that can overload nodes with limited hardware, and It affects decentralization.
Also, private transactions, heavy, Compromising Ethereum’s scalabilityincrease in processing time or gas costs.
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