Vitalik's "Don't Be Evil" Roadmap: Privacy's New Role in Ethereum's Narrative
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Vitalik's "Don't Be Evil" Roadmap: Privacy's New Role in Ethereum's Narrative
While the market is still chasing the price fluctuations of "privacy coins," Vitalik has already placed privacy on Ethereum's technical and governance roadmap for the next decade.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Sanqing, Foresight News
As privacy sector prices surge, the "privacy narrative" is once again thrust into the market spotlight. Capital flows toward assets tagged with "privacy" on charts, while communities debate whether privacy could become the next major theme. However, if attention remains solely on price fluctuations of individual privacy blockchains or tokens, it's easy to miss a more critical shift. At the 2025 Ethereum Argentina Developer Conference, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a roughly thirty-minute roadmap presentation that firmly repositioned privacy within Ethereum’s future technical and governance framework.
What Exactly Is Meant by "Privacy"?
In daily life, privacy typically means "don't let others peek at my chat logs, salary, or address." On public blockchains like Ethereum, the situation is reversed: the default setting is that anything on-chain is publicly visible to all.
Daily-life privacy and blockchain privacy are two branches of the same tree—only the latter is broken down into finer, more technical components. Discussing privacy in the context of blockchains primarily involves handling several specific types of information.
The first is assets and transaction history. Which addresses you own, what assets each holds, how much value has been transferred between them, and how frequently—all of this is fully transparent on-chain. Anyone can view it via a blockchain explorer.
The second is identity and relationships. While a single address appears as a random string, analysis of transaction patterns and timing often allows observers to infer which addresses belong to the same user or consistently interact with the same counterparties, reconstructing your "on-chain social graph" and fund flow paths.
The third is behavioral patterns and preferences. Your typical interaction times, preferred protocols, tendency toward high-risk products, frequency of participating in new launches or airdrops—all form a "behavioral resume." The question of who can access this data and how they might use it is a real concern.
The fourth is network and device information. Wallets, browsers, and RPC services may capture your IP address, approximate geographic location, and device fingerprint during operation. When linked to on-chain addresses, these data points cease to be mere "anonymous addresses" and instead become clues gradually tied to real-world identities.
From "Don't Be Evil" to "Can't Be Evil"
In his conference talk, Vitalik once again used a well-known contrast to summarize Ethereum's goal. He noted that centralized exchanges like FTX operate fundamentally on "trusting an individual or company," where ledgers and risk exposures remain invisible to the outside world. Early internet giants often adopted the slogan "Don't be evil," implying a corporate promise not to act maliciously.
Blockchain aims for something different. Ethereum strives for "Can't be evil"—using cryptography and consensus mechanisms to design systems where even if participants intend to act maliciously, success is extremely difficult.
Within this framework, "transparency" solves only half the problem. Public ledgers and verifiable states prevent assets from being secretly misappropriated—an oft-repeated core value of blockchains. Yet pushing transparency to extremes introduces another risk: when one party possesses complete behavioral data and analytical capabilities, that data can become overwhelming intelligence advantage, enabling profiling, segmentation, differential treatment, and even new centers of power in censorship and regulation.
Thus, true "can't be evil" requires constraints on both ends: one end prevents assets and states from being silently rewritten; the other prevents information and permissions from concentrating excessively in few hands. Privacy is precisely the key tool for the latter. It does not oppose transparency but rather sets boundaries around it—ensuring only necessary parts are public, while keeping the rest within a "minimum necessary disclosure" scope.
Vitalik: Privacy Is Ethereum's Weakness
When outlining what blockchains are good at—and what they aren't—Vitalik explicitly listed privacy among the latter.
To him, Ethereum's strengths are clear: payments and financial applications, DAOs and governance, ENS and decentralized identity, censorship-resistant content publishing, and the ability to prove that something existed or was scarce at a given point in time.
At the same time, its weaknesses are equally apparent: lack of privacy, difficulty supporting ultra-high throughput and ultra-low latency computation, and inability to directly sense real-world information. The privacy issue isn't just a UX flaw in isolated DApps—it's a known limitation explicitly written into the current architecture.
This means that within Ethereum's official roadmap narrative, privacy is no longer a luxury add-on feature sitting on top. Instead, it's recognized as an inherent architectural shortcoming. Solving it won't be achieved simply by attaching a privacy-focused sidechain. Vitalik described a different path: using a broader set of cryptographic tools and protocol combinations to abstract privacy into a foundational capability.
In the talk, components like Swarm and Waku were mentioned—handling decentralized storage and message passing respectively—combined with "programmable cryptography" modules such as zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. These pieces aren't meant for isolated projects but serve as a toolkit for all developers. The goal is to enable fine-grained privacy designs without sacrificing the public settlement nature of the mainnet.
In short, future Ethereum will resemble a combination of "transparent settlement layer + programmable privacy layer," rather than swinging simplistically between full openness and complete opacity.
Lean Ethereum: Laying Groundwork for "Provable Yet Hidden"
In longer-term planning, Vitalik introduced the concept of "Lean Ethereum," aiming to reshape Ethereum's layered components through a series of replacements and simplifications into tighter, theoretically optimal forms—many aspects of which directly relate to privacy.
The first aspect is virtual machines and hash functions friendly to zero-knowledge proofs. Deploying complex ZK systems on today's Ethereum is costly and technically demanding, largely because the underlying VM and state structures weren't designed with "proof-friendliness" in mind—akin to forcing heavy trucks onto regular roads. Lean Ethereum seeks to adjust core elements like instruction sets, state data structures, and hashing algorithms so that proving something is valid without revealing all details becomes a routine, affordable operation—not an expensive privilege available only to a few protocols.
The second is quantum-resistant cryptography and formal verification. Once breached, privacy systems are often irreparable. For example, if a widely used encryption scheme becomes vulnerable to quantum computing attacks, historical data could collectively lose protection almost instantly. By proactively addressing quantum threats and promoting formal verification of critical components in its long-term roadmap, Ethereum is essentially creating secure foundations for future privacy contracts, privacy rollups, and privacy infrastructure.
User-Side Privacy: Blind Signing Is Both a Security and Privacy Issue
Beyond protocol and architectural layers, another focus repeatedly emphasized by the Ethereum Foundation in this roadmap and related sessions is user experience and security—a domain deeply intertwined with privacy.
In the "Trillion Dollar Security" talk, the foundation's security team and auditors labeled the widespread practice of "blind signing" a "plague." Users initiate an action in their wallet, a signature window pops up showing a long string of incomprehensible hexadecimal data and a contract address. They cannot determine what permissions they're granting or what information they're exposing—but to proceed, they ultimately click "confirm." This simultaneously triggers both security and privacy risks.
On the security front, users might unknowingly grant unknown contracts full authority to withdraw all their assets during what seems like a routine interaction. On the privacy side, users have no idea which behavioral data their signature exposes, who collects, stores, and analyzes it, or whether it will be used for profiling, risk control, or targeted phishing. For users, it's handing over an access token into a black box; for those controlling the infrastructure, the actions are highly transparent.
Such issues cannot be fully resolved by merely "raising security awareness." A more practical solution lies in standardization and product-level improvements—such as unified wallet standards and contract interfaces that present transaction outcomes in human-readable formats. More complex data exchanges should be encapsulated within proofs or encrypted channels rather than requiring users to expose details directly. Combined with advances in light clients, account abstraction, and network/RPC-layer privacy protections, on-chain interactions could maintain auditability and accountability without forcing users to operate completely exposed.
Beyond Market Trends: The Focus of the Privacy Narrative Is Shifting
From a market perspective, the periodic rise of privacy-related assets shows that the "privacy" label still carries strong narrative appeal. But compared to the previous cycle, the focus in the privacy space is slowly shifting—from betting on a particular privacy chain—to backing those who are solidly building privacy infrastructure.
On one end are specialized privacy networks and assets centered on technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, continuing the path of hiding transaction details at the chain level as much as possible. On the other end is the growing suite of infrastructure and tools being developed within the Ethereum ecosystem—ZKRollups, privacy middleware, privacy-friendly wallets, and more secure contract interaction frontends.
In Vitalik’s roadmap, Ethereum does not aim to turn everything into an "untraceable black box." Instead, it emphasizes "controllable transparency" and "minimum necessary disclosure." The settlement layer remains public, validation logic is secured by cryptography and smart contracts, while specific application data is protected through layered methods—including zero-knowledge proofs, encrypted communication, and access controls—tailored to different use cases.
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