When the US government sanctioned the cryptocurrency mixing service based in Ethereum Tornado Cash in 2022, it lit a debate within the cryptographic community that continues three years later.
Tornado allowed users to transfer cryptographic anonymously. The Government argued that the service facilitated money laundering, which caused some of Ethereum’s validates and block builders to take measures to avoid interacting with transactions linked to tornadoes, which caused the service to be slower and more expensive to use.
The defenders argued that complying with the sanctions amounted to censorship, undermining a fundamental cypherpunk principle. President Donald Trump supported the Cypherpunks and lifted Tornado cash sanctions in March this year, but for some Ethereum developers, the situation highlighted a failure within the network that still exists today: Why should users depend on third -party applications to make transactions in private network?
“Public access transactions graphics allow anyone to track the flow of funds between accounts, and balances are visible to all network participants, undermining financial privacy,” said Crypto Pascal Security researcher Coversaccio in a blog post on Wednesday. “While the transparency of the Ethereum network encourages trust confidence, it also opens the door to the possible surveillance, orientation and exploitation.”
Perhaps emboldened by the recent developments of cash tornadoes, Ethereum developers and researchers have begun to discuss once again ideas to make the Ethereum network private in their nucleus.
“Privacy should not be an optional characteristic that users must consciously enable: it must be the predetermined state of the network,” said Coversaccio, whose publication described his vision for an Ethereum roadmap oriented to privacy. “Ethereum’s architecture must be designed to ensure that users are privately deprived, not by exception.”
The publication of Cersaccio identified several potential interventions, some new, other old ones, which could, according to him, make Ethereum more private for end users. An idea is to encrypt the public memory of Ethereum, where transactions are sent before they are permanently registered. Another implies making Ethereum transactions confidential through the cryptography of zero knowledge, new transaction formats and other methods.
“Today, Ethereum operates in a partial privacy model, opting, where users must take deliberate measures to hide their financial activities, often at the cost of usability, accessibility and even effectiveness,” wrote caversaccio. “This paradigm must change. Privacy preservation technologies must be deeply integrated at the protocol level, allowing transactions, intelligent contracts and network interactions to be inherently confidential.”
In response to the publication of Coversaccio, the co -founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Butein, left a comment on the main developer forum of the network with its own shortest Ethereum roadmap shorter.
Buterin suggested focusing on the privacy for payments in the chain, anonymizing the activity in the chain within the applications, communicating in the anonymous network and privatizing readings in the chain.
To achieve all this, Bugerin listed several steps such as integrating certain privacy characteristics of third parties into the central network.
One of the most substantial interventions suggested by Bugerin implies moving the network towards a “application by application” model: a diversion of the current system, where a single application can use dozens of wallets for different characteristics. “This is an important step, and implies sacrifices of significant convenience, but in my opinion, this is a bullet that we must bite, because this is the most practical way to eliminate public ties among all its activity in different applications,” Bterin wrote.
According to Bugerin, if all their suggestions are implemented, private transactions could be breach in Ethereum.
The privacy discussion occurs a few weeks before the next important update of Ethereum, Pin, which does not have an important approach to privacy. Ethereum developers are also planning the current network update to Fusaka. The changes that will be included in that hard fork are not yet established in stone.
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