When the market is still chasing the ups and downs of "privacy coins," Vitalik has already incorporated privacy into Ethereum's technology and governance agenda for the next decade.
Written by: Sanqing, Foresight News
With the significant price surge in the privacy sector, the "privacy narrative" has once again returned to the market's view. Funds are searching for assets labeled with "privacy" on charts, and the community is discussing whether "privacy will become the next main theme." However, if the perspective only focuses on the market fluctuations of a specific privacy public chain or a single coin, it is easy to miss a more critical turning point. At the 2025 Ethereum Argentina Developer Conference, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a roughly thirty-minute roadmap speech, once again placing privacy within Ethereum's future technology and governance framework.
What does "privacy" actually refer to?
In daily life, privacy often means "don't let others see my chat records, salary, or address." On a public chain like Ethereum, the situation is quite the opposite; the default setting is: once on-chain, it is public to everyone.
Everyday privacy and privacy in the context of Ethereum are two branches of the same tree, with the latter being more detailed and technical. Discussing privacy in the blockchain context mainly involves handling several very specific types of information.
First is asset and transaction records. What addresses you have, what assets are held at each address, how much money has been transferred between these addresses, and how frequently—this is all clear on-chain. Anyone can see it by opening a blockchain explorer.
Second is identity and relationships. A single address may look like a random string, but through transaction relationships and temporal patterns, analysts can often infer which addresses belong to the same user and which addresses interact with the same counterparties over time, thus piecing together your "on-chain social circle" and funding paths.
Third is behavioral trajectories and preferences. Your habits regarding interaction times, commonly used protocols, preferences for high-risk products, and frequent participation in new offerings or airdrops all accumulate into a "behavioral resume." Who can use this resume and for what purpose is a real issue.
Fourth is network and device information. When wallets, browsers, and RPC services are in operation, they may come into contact with your IP address, rough geographical location, and device fingerprint. If this is then linked to on-chain addresses, the data becomes more than just "anonymous addresses" but rather identity clues that gradually converge with the real world.
From "Don't be evil" to "Can't be evil"
In his speech at this conference, Vitalik once again summarized Ethereum's goal using a familiar comparison. He mentioned that centralized exchanges like FTX operate on the principle of "everyone trusts a certain person or company," but the ledger and risk exposure are invisible to the outside world. The early internet giants often used the slogan "Don't be evil," meaning the company promises not to do harm.
The goal of blockchain is different. Ethereum aims for "Can't be evil," designing the system through cryptography and consensus mechanisms so that even if individual participants have malicious motives, it is difficult for them to succeed.
Within this framework, "transparency" addresses the first half of the problem. Public ledgers and verifiable states can prevent assets from being misappropriated without anyone knowing, which is one of the most repeatedly emphasized values of blockchain. However, if all information is pushed towards extreme transparency, another type of risk will emerge: in the hands of those who possess all behavioral data and analytical capabilities, this data may transform into overwhelming intelligence advantages, used for profiling, stratification, differential treatment, and even forming new power centers in terms of censorship and regulation.
Therefore, true "can't be evil" must impose limits on both ends. One end is that assets and states cannot be quietly rewritten; the other end is that information and permissions cannot be concentrated indefinitely in a few entities. Privacy is the key tool for the latter half. It does not oppose transparency but rather adds boundaries to it: making public only what must be public and controlling the remaining information within the scope of "minimum necessary disclosure."
Vitalik: Privacy is Ethereum's Weakness
When outlining what blockchain is suitable for and what it is not, Vitalik explicitly listed privacy as one of the latter.
In his view, Ethereum's advantages are very clear. For example, payment and financial applications, DAOs and governance, ENS and decentralized identity, censorship-resistant content publishing, and the ability to prove that something happened at a certain time or has scarcity.
At the same time, the weaknesses are equally clear: a lack of privacy, difficulty in supporting extremely high throughput and very low latency computing, and an inability to directly perceive real-world information. The privacy issue is not merely an experiential flaw of individual DApps but a limitation explicitly written into the current architectural layer.
This means that in the narrative of Ethereum's official roadmap, privacy is no longer a high-level feature piled on top but one of the known defects of this architecture. The way to solve this problem is not as simple as hanging a privacy sidechain. What Vitalik describes is another path: using a more diverse set of cryptographic tools and protocol combinations to abstract privacy into a foundational capability.
In his speech, components like Swarm and Waku were mentioned, which take on roles in decentralized storage and messaging, layered with "programmable cryptography" modules like zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. These pieces are not meant to serve an isolated project but are a toolbox for all developers. The goal is to leave space for more refined privacy design without sacrificing the public settlement attributes of the mainnet.
It can be summarized as: the future Ethereum will be more of a combination of "transparent settlement layer + programmable privacy layer," rather than simply oscillating between complete openness and complete black box.
Lean Ethereum: Laying the Foundation for "Provable Yet Concealable"
In a longer-term plan, Vitalik proposed the concept of "Lean Ethereum," hoping to adjust Ethereum's various layer components to a more compact and theoretically optimal form through a series of replacements and simplifications, with several aspects directly related to privacy.
The first is a virtual machine and hash function friendly to zero-knowledge proofs. Currently, deploying complex ZK systems on Ethereum is costly and has a high threshold, largely because the underlying virtual machine and state structure were not designed with "proof-friendly" as a premise, somewhat akin to trying to run a heavy-duty truck on a regular road. Lean Ethereum aims to adjust basic elements like instruction sets, state data structures, and hash algorithms so that the ability to "prove something is legitimate without exposing all details" becomes a controllable daily operation rather than an expensive privilege that only a few protocols can afford.
The second is post-quantum cryptography and formal verification. Once a privacy system is compromised, it is often difficult to "make up for it afterward." For example, if a widely used encryption scheme is broken by quantum computing in the future, historical data could collectively lose protection in a short time. Ethereum considers quantum threats in its long-term roadmap and promotes formal verification of key components, essentially reserving safety boundaries for future privacy contracts, privacy rollups, and privacy infrastructure.
User-side Privacy: Blind Signing is Both a Security Issue and a Privacy Issue
Beyond the protocol and architectural layers, another focus that the Ethereum Foundation continuously emphasizes in this roadmap and related agenda is user-side experience and security, which is also highly related to privacy.
In the "Trillion Dollar Security" speech, the foundation's security team and auditing agencies directly referred to the prevalent "blind signing" phenomenon as a "plague." When a user initiates an operation in their wallet, a signature window pops up, displaying a long string of incomprehensible hexadecimal data and a contract address. Users find it difficult to determine what permissions this signature will grant or what information it will expose, but if they wish to complete the operation, they ultimately have no choice but to press "confirm." This situation simultaneously triggers landmines in both security and privacy.
From a security perspective, users may unknowingly grant "the ability to withdraw all assets at any time" to an unknown contract during what seems like a normal interaction. From a privacy perspective, users are unaware of what behavioral data this signature will expose, do not know who is collecting, storing, and analyzing this data, and have no way of knowing whether this data will be used for profiling, risk control, or even targeted phishing. For users, this is like handing over a pass in a black box; for those controlling the infrastructure, the relevant actions are extremely transparent.
Such issues are difficult to completely alleviate through "simply raising security awareness." A more realistic path is to promote transformation from the standards and product levels. For example, by standardizing wallet specifications and contract interfaces, the consequences of transactions can be presented in a human-readable manner; more complex data exchanges should be encapsulated within proofs or encrypted channels rather than requiring users to expose details directly. Coupled with the evolution of light clients, account abstraction, and privacy protection at the network and RPC layers, on-chain interactions may maintain auditability and accountability without being "completely exposed."
Beyond the Market: The Focus of the Privacy Narrative is Shifting
From a market perspective, the phase-wise rise of privacy-related assets indicates that the "privacy" label still possesses sufficient narrative tension. However, compared to the previous cycle, the focus of the privacy track is slowly shifting from "betting on a specific privacy chain" to "betting on who is solidly building privacy infrastructure."
On one end are dedicated privacy networks and privacy assets centered around technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, continuing the path of "hiding transaction details as much as possible at the chain level"; on the other end is a complete set of infrastructure and toolsets built around privacy within the Ethereum ecosystem, including ZKRollup, privacy middleware, privacy-friendly wallets, and more secure contract interaction frontends.
In Vitalik's roadmap, Ethereum does not attempt to turn everything into an "untraceable black box," but emphasizes "controllable transparency" and "minimum necessary disclosure." The settlement layer remains public, verification logic is ensured by cryptography and contracts, and specific business data is layered for protection based on different scenarios through zero-knowledge proofs, encrypted communication, and access control.
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