Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested that there may be a “low-tech approach” to incorporating privacy features into non-fungible token transactions, or NFTs.
In a Monday post on the Ethereum research channel, Buterin hinted that Merkle Trees and Succinct Non-Interactive Knowledge Arguments, or ZK-SNARKs, were a more complicated method for stealth addresses of ERC-721 tokens, while also proposing his own solution.. Instead, the Ethereum co-founder suggested that smart contract wallets could include a method that allows the sender to essentially mask his address from third parties.
“You could, for example, send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is,” Buterin said.
Idea: stealth addresses for ERC721s.
A low-tech approach to add a significant amount of privacy to the NFT ecosystem.
So you would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is.https://t.co/UdqK6NAYjn
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 8, 2022
Buterin posited that, using this method, senders would need to include “enough ETH to pay fees between 5 and 50 times” through the transfer chain. Nevertheless, he added that “perhaps there is a better generic solution involving specialized search engines or block builders in some way”.
Finding the balance between semi-anonymity and transparency on the blockchain has been a challenge for many as the cryptocurrency space continues to grow. In January, Cointelegraph reported that there were cases of users spoofing IP addresses from the OpenSea NFT marketplace as well as from Metamask.
Buterin will speak at Korea Blockchain Week from August 7-14.
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