Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is proposing the need to work on the privacy options, to oppose the unhealthy tracking from the online sources.
Vitalik Buterin takes a leading role as a privacy advocate
In a recent X post, the crypto innovator reacted to an X post from Rest of World, a non-profit publication platform.
The former reported on how various governments all over the world have been using facial recognition tech to squash any kind of protesting. On the other hand, based on the data of Steven Feldstein, a researcher of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it is found that the governments of 78 countries have been discovered to now use facial recognition systems in public areas.
Privacy is normal.
Railgun uses the privacy pools protocol ( https://t.co/DekkatsMR5 ) which makes it much harder for bad actors to join the pool without compromising users’ privacy.https://t.co/MG0huDzpAu
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 15, 2024
In this respect, Vitalik Buterin confessed that there is a slow but long-standing tendency to lose privacy in public spaces. Therefore, the need for online privacy improvement is important. Moreover, as one of the few tools we have, it can help to restore a little bit of balance. And I would like to encourage everyone to support privacy.
Nevertheless, Buterin’s concern about a decrease in privacy or the lack of it is not entirely unjustified since he has always made it clear that he is not in favor of this issue. Approximately five days ago, the Ethereum core developer found himself in the middle of discussions focusing on privacy on the Ethereum network.
Essentially, the talk was about whether Ethereum, as a basic level of blockchain technology, should already have privacy built-in for transactions. However, Vitalik Buterin said that one of the drawbacks of the default privacy settings is the potential impact on the scalability and efficiency of the network. The Ethereum development team has been focused on resolving the scalability issues as well as the use of ZK-proofs to address some of the most important issues in the long run.
How Is Ethereum Network Helping the Privacy Cause?
There’s a lot of Ethereum protocols that are currently testing the ZK tech. An example is Polygon zkEVM which just a few days ago had to apply a quick fix after an incident which resulted in the blockchain going down for 10 hours. Overall, Polygon ZK-EVM is about to introduce a new phase of development for the smart contract platform as it has teased.
They are planning to add more features to it that will make it more similar to the Ethereum mainnet. This would save developers the time and effort of changing the codes.
Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, also followed suit with the blockchain digital identity with QuarkID and zkSync in order to strengthen the government operations. zkSync is zEthereum scaling tool that also uses ZK-rollups. This technology uses one entity as the proof of veracity of a statement to another entity without revealing any specific information about the statement. In the end, the altimeter of all these systems is to maintain privacy following the severe campaign from Vitalik Buterin.
