Vitalik Proposes New Privacy Feature For NFTs: Stealth Addresses
Vitalik Buterin Proposes New Privacy Feature For NFTs: Stealth Addresses.
The Proposed Feature
Today, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin revealed his new concept idea to implement “stealth” addresses and privacy features for NFTs.
This new feature would offer users some level of anonymity when transacting NFTs to a different address, meaning that users outside of those who are directly involved with the transactions will not be able to see who the new owner of the transferred NFT is.
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
“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” Buterin explains in the the ethresear.ch page.
Vitalik also admits that there are still some holes in his proposed idea, stating “one remaining challenge is figuring out how to pay fees. The best I can come up with is, if you send someone an ERC721 also send along enough ETH to pay fees 5-50 times to send it further.“
Concerns From The Community
This proposal for the new privacy feature was praised by many at first for its potential to bring more privacy to the blockchain, bringing forth the vision of more Decentralization to the space.
However, others in the community have also expressed concerns at this new privacy feature, arguing that it can become a security threat and shield crypto & NFT thieves instead, making the action of tracking down and retrieving stolen NFTs more difficult than it already is.
Some in the community have even argued that this “stealth” addresses feature completely goes against the core concept of blockchain technology in which all data is decentralized and can be seen on a publicly accessible record.
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