Vitalik Buterin Shares Plan to Strengthen Ethereum’s Layer-1 Privacy

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared a detailed vision to enhance privacy at the core of the blockchain network, known as Layer-1.

In a blog post published on April 11, 2025, Buterin outlined a practical roadmap designed to prioritize user confidentiality while maintaining the network’s existing framework. His proposal addresses growing concerns about traceability in blockchain transactions, offering a path toward making private interactions a seamless part of the Ethereum onchain experience. By focusing on accessibility and integration, Buterin aims to ensure privacy becomes a default feature for users without requiring complex changes to the platform.

The roadmap emphasizes four key areas of improvement. First, it seeks to make onchain payments private, allowing users to conduct transactions without exposing sensitive details. Second, it proposes partially obscuring user activity within decentralized applications, known as dApps, to limit visibility across platforms. Third, it explores ways to hide data accessed from the blockchain, protecting user interactions at a deeper level. Finally, it addresses network-level privacy, aiming to anonymize communications to safeguard against external observers.

Buterin believes these changes could establish a new standard where private transactions are the norm, significantly reducing the ability to link a user’s actions across different applications or services.

Simplifying Privacy for Everyday Users

A cornerstone of Buterin’s plan is the integration of privacy tools directly into wallets, making them intuitive and widely accessible. He specifically highlighted tools like Railgun, which could allow users to manage shielded balances without relying on specialized third-party wallets.

Buterin envisions a future where wallets include a “send from shielded balance” option enabled by default, designed to feel natural and straightforward. This approach eliminates the need for users to navigate separate privacy-focused applications, streamlining the experience while prioritizing security.

Beyond wallets, Buterin advocates for assigning unique addresses to each dApp a user interacts with. While this could introduce minor inconveniences, it would significantly reduce the ability to trace activity across multiple platforms. To complement this, he emphasized the importance of ensuring send-to-self transactions remain private by default, a feature he views as essential despite its technical complexity. These changes align with ongoing efforts to improve cross-chain interoperability, where users already manage interactions across different blockchain networks. By embedding privacy features into in-app wallets, Buterin believes Ethereum can standardize secure interactions without requiring major overhauls to its architecture.

The proposal also includes technical recommendations to support long-term privacy goals. In the short term, Buterin suggests leveraging trusted execution environments for remote procedure call privacy, a practical solution to enhance security. Looking ahead, he envisions transitioning to private information retrieval systems as they become viable.

Additional measures include connecting dApps to independent nodes, advancing proof aggregation protocols, and supporting wallets with enhanced privacy features. Together, these steps aim to protect users from infrastructure-level threats, such as compromised nodes, while maintaining Ethereum’s efficiency and accessibility.

Buterin’s roadmap reflects a careful balance between innovation and practicality, addressing privacy concerns without disrupting the network’s core functionality. By embedding these features into familiar tools like wallets and dApps, the plan ensures users can adopt privacy measures effortlessly. As Ethereum continues to evolve, this focus on user confidentiality could set a new benchmark for Ethereum and privacy allowing it to compete with other privacy focused projected such as Zano and Monero.