Ethereum Moves Toward Default Privacy with New Roadmap

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a forward-looking roadmap aimed at significantly improving user privacy on Ethereum, focusing on pragmatic solutions that avoid major consensus changes. The proposal addresses four core areas of concern: on-chain payments, application-level anonymization, privacy in chain reads (RPC calls), and network-level obfuscation.

The roadmap is built around a central principle: improving privacy through modular, user-friendly enhancements rather than protocol-level overhauls. Buterin emphasizes that while deeper, long-term changes to Ethereum’s base layer remain on the horizon, there is substantial ground to be gained through ecosystem-wide coordination and tooling upgrades today.

A Shift Toward Application-Level Privacy

One of the most impactful recommendations is a move toward the “one address per application” model. This approach is designed to minimize the ability to link user activity across decentralized applications. While this model introduces certain convenience trade-offs, Buterin argues it is a necessary step to establish robust, default privacy for end users. The model also aligns naturally with emerging workflows for cross-chain interoperability.

Supporting this shift, the roadmap calls for send-to-self transactions—often used for internal fund management—to be private by default. This is essential for preventing unintentional leakage of identity or usage patterns across applications, further reinforcing privacy boundaries.

Integrating Privacy Into Everyday Wallets

Buterin also proposes embedding privacy features directly into mainstream wallets. Rather than relying on separate privacy-focused tools, wallets would natively support a “shielded balance” and offer private sends as a default option. Tools like Railgun and Privacy Pools would be integrated seamlessly, creating a user experience where private transactions feel as effortless as public ones.

This approach seeks to normalize privacy in the Ethereum ecosystem and eliminate the need for users to opt into separate, specialized tooling—a critical step for mainstream adoption.

Strengthening Privacy Infrastructure

On the infrastructure level, the roadmap recommends implementing EIP-7701 in conjunction with a compatible version of FOCIL (Fully On-Chain Intermediary Layer). These upgrades would allow privacy protocols like Tornado Cash, Railway, and others to function without public relayers or broadcasters. This would not only enhance censorship resistance but also simplify protocol development and reduce the surface area for attack or monitoring.

RPC privacy is also addressed. In the short term, Buterin advocates for using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)—such as those offered by Automata—to protect user data during RPC interactions. As a longer-term solution, the roadmap anticipates a transition to Private Information Retrieval (PIR), a cryptographic method that offers stronger privacy guarantees. Hybrid solutions combining TEEs and PIR could be adopted in the interim as the technology matures.

Wallets would also be encouraged to route requests through multiple RPC nodes, ideally using mixnets and different endpoints for each dApp. This would reduce metadata leakage and limit the ability of any single node operator to track user behavior.

Reducing Costs and Expanding Utility

In addition to user-facing privacy enhancements, the roadmap addresses developer concerns around efficiency and cost. One key area of focus is proof aggregation, allowing multiple privacy transactions to share a single on-chain proof. This would significantly reduce gas costs and make privacy protocols more scalable.

Buterin also introduces the concept of privacy-preserving keystore wallets. These would allow users to upgrade their account logic or keys in a single transaction—across L1 and L2 ecosystems—without publicly linking the accounts. This improves long-term flexibility and protects user anonymity during critical updates.

Toward a Privacy-Respecting Future

The broader vision is a future where a significant portion of Ethereum transactions are private by default, where user activity within individual applications remains transparent but unlinked across services, and where adversaries—whether passive observers or infrastructure operators—cannot easily compromise privacy.

Buterin’s roadmap builds on previous work by Ethereum researchers, including pcaversaccio’s “Ethereum Privacy: The Road to Self-Sovereignty”, and complements ongoing efforts around application-specific rollups and modular scaling solutions.

While not requiring immediate consensus changes, the roadmap sets the stage for a privacy-first Ethereum—achievable through collaborative action across wallets, dApps, and infrastructure providers. It is a call to developers, product designers, and users alike to embrace privacy as a foundational design principle for the next generation of Web3 applications.