In a tweet, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a new low-tech approach to add privacy to the NFT ecosystem. Through the use of stealth addresses for ERC721s, users would be able to exchange NFTs without anyone except the new owner finding out.
In a Monday post on the Ethereum research channel, Buterin said that users can mask their address to third-parties using this method. He explains: “The reason why you don’t need Merkle trees or ZK-SNARK-level privacy is that each ERC721 is unique, so there’s no possibility of creating an “anonymity set” for an ERC721.”
He added: “Rather, you just want to hide the link to the sender and recipient’s highly visible public identity (so, you can send an ERC721 to “vitalik.eth” and I can see it, but no one else can see that vitalik.eth received an ERC721; they will just see that someone received an ERC721).”
The only downside to this is that senders would need to include “enough ETH to pay fees 5–50 times” through the transfer chain until specialized searchers or block builders found a better solution.
Buterin will be speaking at Korea Blockchain Week from Sunday Aug. 7 through Sunday, Aug. 14.
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