The post Can Ethereum Be Truly Private? Developers Push for Encrypted Mempool, Default Privacy appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

When the U.S. government sanctioned the Ethereum-based crypto mixing service Tornado Cash in 2022, it ignited a debate within the crypto community that continues three years later. Tornado enabled users to transfer crypto anonymously. The government contended that the service facilitated money laundering, prompting some of Ethereum’s validators and block builders to take steps to avoid engaging with Tornado-linked transactions, which made the service slower and costlier to use. Advocates argued that complying with the sanctions amounted to censorship — undermining a fundamental cypherpunk principle. President Donald Trump supported the cypherpunks and lifted the sanctions on Tornado Cash in March of this year, but for some Ethereum developers, the situation highlighted a flaw within the network that still exists today: Why should users depend on third-party apps to transact privately on the network? “Publicly accessible transaction graphs allow anyone to trace the flow of funds between accounts, and balances are visible to all participants in the network, undermining financial privacy,” crypto security researcher Pascal Caversaccio explained in a blog post on Wednesday. “While the Ethereum network’s transparency fosters trustlessness, it also opens the door to potential surveillance, targeting, and exploitation.” Perhaps emboldened by the recent Tornado Cash developments, Ethereum developers and researchers have once again begun discussing ideas for making the Ethereum network private at its core. “Privacy must not be an optional feature that users must consciously enable — it must be the default state of the network,” said Caversaccio, whose post outlined his vision for a privacy-oriented Ethereum roadmap. “Ethereum’s architecture must be designed to ensure that users are private by default, not by exception.” Caversaccio’s post identified several potential interventions — some new, some old — that could, according to him, would make Ethereum more private for end-users. One idea is to encrypt Ethereum’s public mempool —…

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Filed under: News - @ April 12, 2025 7:19 am