Vitalik Buterin suggests “stealth addresses” to increase the privacy of the Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin suggested a system of “stealth addresses” to improve the secrecy of Ethereum transactions.

Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, has suggested a “stealth address scheme” to enhance the secrecy of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Buterin noted in a research blog that privacy is “one of the greatest remaining obstacles in the Ethereum ecosystem.”

The stealth address system is built on a technology that enables any Ethereum wallet to produce crypto-obscured public addresses known as “stealth addresses” in order to accept cash privately and access them using a specific code known as a “spending key.”

Buterin said that stealth addresses provide the same level of anonymity as producing a new address for every transaction. These suggested stealth addresses are a means to boost privacy on Ethereum by assigning each transaction a new, anonymous address.

Each time a transaction is made, a new stealth address may be generated, making it impossible to follow the transactions or verify who is sending and receiving assets. This implies that the transaction history of each user may stay confidential. Buterin also proposed utilizing ZK-SNARKs, an abbreviation for zero-knowledge proofs, to increase the system’s secrecy and make it impossible to connect stealth addresses.

By default, Ethereum transactions are public, which might represent a privacy risk. There are methods for achieving transactional anonymity on the network, including the use of crypto mixers like Tornado Cash. Nevertheless, such approaches may generate regulatory concerns. This was the case with Tornado Cash, which was sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Treasury Department for possibly criminal actions.

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