Vitalik Buterin Raises Fresh Calls For Online Privacy Support

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has made an open call for support towards promoting online privacy. 

Vitalik Buterin Assumes Privacy Advocacy Role

In a recent X post, the crypto innovator reacted to an X post from Rest of World, a non-profit publication platform. 

The latter reported on how different governments across the globe have been leveraging facial recognition technology to crack down on dissent. According to data gathered by Steven Feldstein, a researcher with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, government agencies in 78 countries have been discovered to now use public facial recognition systems.

To this end, Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that there has been a gradual decline in privacy available in physical space. This, therefore, calls for the need to improve privacy online as “one of the few tools we have to restore a little bit of balance,” he said while urging his followers to support privacy. 

Buterin’s grievance about a lack/decreased privacy online is not unfounded considering that he has always voiced his displeasure on the subject. About five days ago, the Ethereum frontline developer found himself in the middle of conversations regarding privacy on the Ethereum network. 

Precisely, the discussion was centered on whether Ethereum, as a foundational layer of blockchain technology, should inherently provide transaction privacy. Vitalik Buterin made it clear that the implementation of default transaction privacy may impact network scalability and efficiency. 

The Ethereum developer team has been working on fixing scalability and the use of ZK-proofs to solve some of these major concerns over time. 

How Is Ethereum Helping the Privacy Cause

Many protocols on Ethereum are exploring the use of the ZK technology. There is Polygon zkEVM which recently received an emergency fix after an incident that saw the blockchain go down for 10 hours. Overall, Polygon zkEVM has teased a new upgrade poised to introduce a paradigm shift for developers building on the smart contract outfit.

Its future upgrade is expected to enable it to act more related to the Ethereum mainnet and developers can just copy and paste their codes without additional modifications. 

Similarly, Argentina’s Capital Buenos Aires introduced blockchain digital identity with QuarkID and zkSync enhancing government operations. zkSync is an Ethereum scaling tool that also utilizes ZK-rollups. This technology enables one entity to validate the truth of a statement to another without disclosing any specific information about the statement.

In the long run, the altimeter goal of each of these systems is to maintain privacy in line with the unrelenting advocacy from Vitalik Buterin.