What would a private Ethereum mean for the cryptocurrency ecosystem?

In a recent Cointelegraph report, Vitalik Buterin is exploring making Ethereum more private, arguing that privacy is essential to maintain individual freedom and protect against the growing power of governments and corporations.

Privacy is something I've talked about on different occasions, I've explored it as a human right and as an insurance of security in a hyper-digitized world.

In these different occasions, I've also talked about how Bitcoin and Ethereum's non-private design would make it liable for government attacks on its users so having some discussion on making Ethereum private could potentially set off major shifts in development focus.

As the OG chain when it comes to smart contracts and the leader in developments, Ethereum serves as a source of signal for the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. This means that in a lot of ways, it influences what gets built as developers across the space actively look to not just integrate with it but also potentially win over their users.

As such, the short answer for “what would a private Ethereum mean for the cryptocurrency ecosystem?” is that generally development attention would shift to privacy tech.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined an extensive plan to enhance the privacy of the network he helped create.

In an April 11 roadmap, Buterin argued for incorporating privacy tools into Ether (ETH) wallets and implementing privacy-enhancing norms and features in the Ethereum ecosystem and protocol. He explained that the roadmap in question is a short-term solution that requires limited changes to the base protocol along with supplemental long-term updates.

Buterin recommends adopting privacy-enhancing systems such as Railgun or Privacy Pools by existing wallets, according to the plan. When funds are sent with those wallets, he argues that users should be greeted by an option to “send from shielded balance,” which anonymizes the transaction, and should be “ideally turned on by default. — Cointelegraph report

Privacy tech — the next narrative?

Although what's being discussed here doesn't appear to mean that Ethereum itself will become private, but more about integrating privacy solutions within wallets to enable users perform private transactions.

I still, however, think that it's a welcomed development that can serve as a catalyst to encourage developers to shift their attention to privacy solutions.

So although what Vitalik proposes is for the short term, there's a good chance that eventually, privacy may be built into the chain-level.

I expect that the narrative for the next couple of years will be privacy tech because people will see in real time what governments around the world will do as crypto becomes widely adopted.

Privacy coins and blockchains are already evidently under attack. Binance plans to delist Zcash just a little over a year after delisting Monero.

Moving forward, it will be crucial for the DeFi ecosystem to step up and build liquidity solutions onto privacy coins and generally make DeFi more private.

Fraud, terrorism financing, all of these things that are often discussed by the government whenever cryptocurrencies are mentioned are not enough reasons to give up our privacy. The last time I checked, the government is the most fraudulent organization and is also responsible for terrorism financing, not the citizens whose privacy and freedom is being threatened.

Posted Using INLEO