Vitalik Buterin Weighs in on Stealth Address to Deliver Privacy to Blockchain Transactions

Privacy applications have often been heralded as a essential to economic independence in the crypto industry. In the Ethereum ecosystem, discussions encompassing the issue issue have revolved typically all-around privateness-preserving transfers of ETH and mainstream ERC20 tokens.

In a bid to improve the state of privacy on the network, its co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a stealth handle process.

“Last Remaining Problem for Ethereum”

The concept of Stealth addresses applying elliptic curve cryptography was first launched in the context of Bitcoin by BTC main developer Peter Todd in 2014 to obscure transaction specifics. In the latest blog post, Buterin acknowledged that privacy is “one of the premier remaining worries in the Ethereum ecosystem” while highlighting the want for a privateness remedy since “anything that goes onto a community blockchain is general public.”

Stealth addresses, on the other hand, can enable in this regard. Buterin famous that such a mechanism in spot will allow the Ethereum wallet to produce stealth addresses to get cash privately and access them applying a particular code called a “spending critical.”

The proposed stealth addresses can be generated by possibly party, but they can only be controlled by 1 of them. The person receiving the belongings generates the stealth deal with and retains key a paying important, which will then be utilised to generate a stealth meta-handle that can be passed on to the sender.

This enables the sender to execute a computation on this meta-address to initiate a stealth deal with belonging to the receiver. The sender can then send any assets they want to send to this handle, while the receiver will have comprehensive management. Alongside with the transfer, the sender publishes some further cryptographic data on-chain confirming that the stealth handle belongs to the receiver.

Buterin asserted that stealth addresses give the identical privacy homes as a consumer creating a contemporary deal with for each and every transaction.

Stealth Address Vs. Tornado Income

A number of approaches have been utilized in current decades to obfuscate transactional facts. This features Tornado Money which was lately sanctioned by the OFAC. Buterin, for a single, reported the proposed principle of stealth tackle provides a distinctive form of privacy to that of the well known Ethereum-based mostly coin mixer. He discussed,

“Tornado Income can hide transfers of mainstream fungible belongings these kinds of as ETH or main ERC20s (however it is most conveniently practical for privately sending to oneself), but it is really weak at adding privateness to transfers of obscure ERC20s, and it are unable to incorporate privateness to NFT transfers at all.”