Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin describes his vision for stealth addresses
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin put forward a general approach to stealth addresses. January 20th.
As Buterin explained, stealth addresses circumvent the fact that public blockchains like Ethereum reveal large amounts of transaction data.
A stealth address essentially hides the recipient of a particular transaction. Stealth addresses also replicate the benefits of standard privacy practices adhered to by some cryptocurrency users. That is, it creates a new address for each transaction received from a new sender.
Buterin said that despite the privacy benefits, stealth addresses don’t offer a way to pay transaction fees. To solve this, he proposed his two approaches. The first approach involves his ZK-SARKS and is costly. The second approach, using a specialized transaction aggregator, seems to be his preferred solution.
Buterin further pointed out that using a stealth address makes it more difficult to create a social recovery wallet (a wallet that can be recovered by a third party if the primary owner loses the private key). Buterin suggested a specific solution, but said developers could “bite the bullet” and realize that wallet recovery can be costly and costly.
Buterin also distinguished stealth addresses with Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash can hide transactions involving ETH and major his ERC-20 tokens, but NFTs and minor he are useless to hide transactions involving ERC-20 tokens, he said. Told. He added that Tornado Cash is the most practical for self-directed coin-mixing.
Buterin has discussed stealth addresses in the past.of March 2020proposed a stealth address scheme compatible with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). In August 2022, he proposed a stealth addressing scheme compatible with his ERC-721 NFTs.
Buterin declined to say when Ethereum would add stealth addresses. However, he said that stealth addresses “can be implemented fairly quickly today” and would have significant privacy benefits for users. He added that native privacy features should be introduced.
at least one existing Ethereum improvement proposal, EIP-5564, advocating a standardized way to create stealth addresses on Ethereum. However, the status of that proposal suggests that it is likely to change in the future.
Various blockchains such as Zcash and Monero already use stealth addresses. Lesser-known projects such as Verge also include this feature.
