Key points to remember
- Vitalik Buterin discussed in a recent blog post how Ethereum stealth addresses could help network users further protect their privacy.
- “Stealth addresses offer the same privacy properties as…generating a new address for each transaction, but without requiring any interaction,” he said.
- Stealth addresses could finally unlock the privacy of transactions involving POAP, NFT, or ENS domains.
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Always keen to provide privacy tools to Ethereum users, Vitalik Buterin has come up with a new mechanism that may prove easy to use: stealth addresses.
New addresses at every turn
Vitalik Buterin studies how to increase privacy on Ethereum.
The creator of Ethereum describe in a new blog post a tool that could allow network users to better protect their privacy: stealth addresses. These would essentially be wallet addresses that are cryptographically linked to its public address, but can only be discovered by the parties involved in the transaction. As Buterin put it: “Stealth addresses give the same privacy properties as…generating a new address for each transaction, but without requiring any interaction”.
Buterin said the system would allow more digital assets to be transferred from one user to another while respecting privacy. The Ethereum-based privacy protocol Tornado Cash, he noted, only allows the transaction of major cryptocurrencies. Stealth addresses would provide the ability to privately send any ERC-20 token, regardless of project size, as well as POAPs, NFTs, ENS names, and other digital assets.
He said the technology was simple and could be implemented relatively easily, except for a few details. One of the main hurdles would be gas costs. A newly generated stealth address would contain zero ETH, meaning it would be unable to transmit any cryptocurrencies 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-SNARKs (cryptographic proofs), which unfortunately cost a lot of extra gas. Another would involve specialized transaction aggregators, which could offer network users the ability to pay for multiple transactions at once and then “spend” those prepaid transactions whenever they want.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing this article, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.
