This week, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, proposed a new implementation for Ethereum that would provide a degree of anonymity to ‘one-off’ transactions.

In a recent blog post published on Wednesday, Vitalik Buterin described the current state of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Furthermore, Buterin proposed a new structure that would improve user anonymity for Ethereum.

Vitalik Buterin wrote:

“Currently there are large privacy problems in the Ethereum ecosystem. The default behavior is to do everything through a single account, which allows all of a user’s activities to be publicly linked to each other. It seems like this can be improved by using multiple addresses, but not really: the transactions you make to send ETH to those addresses themselves reveal the link between them.”

Although a good privacy solution for Ethereum has not been added yet, Buterin proposes a simple mixer for sending fixed quantities of ETH from one account to another. To add the privacy part, the transactions will of course not be visible on-chain.

In a follow-up conversation, Vitalik Buterin told Coindesk:

“The main use case I’m thinking of is a one-off send from one account to another account so you can use applications without linking that account to the one that has all your tokens in it. So even though it is a 2m gas cost, it only needs to be paid once per account, not too bad.”

Ethereum is not the first cryptocurrency looking to add privacy features. In an interesting tweet last January, Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, indicated that Litecoin might be heading into a new direction in 2019 by adding confidential transactions.

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