Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Suggests Developing On-Chain Ether Mixer

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), has suggested developing an on-chain smart contract-based ether mixer in a remark on partnership development forum HackMD.

Buterin, in his elucidation, stresses the need for more anonymity in the Ethereum ecosystem and highlights that the knee-jerk behavior is to carry out everything using a single account, enabling the linking of all user activities to each other.

He further stated that solution does not line in spreading the ether across several addresses as trades involving the transfer of ETH points to the wallets from where the crypto originated.

Buterin also provided a link to a twitter thread, forwarded by somebody else, calling for users to tweet their Ethereum address for applying for HumanityDAO endeavor.

Twitter user Mooncritic pointed out that “You can now look up many people’s Ethereum balance by their Twitter handle.”

Considering the aforementioned issues, Buterin has suggested “a simple mixer for sending fixed quantities of ETH from one account to another without the link being visible on-chain.”

As per Buterin, even if the mixer is able to handle only minute amounts of ETH, it would still facilitate preserving privacy in cases which involve only small amounts.

Technically, the suggested system would be made up of two smart contracts: the mixer and relayer registry. The mixer, as the name indicates, would “mix” coins, guaranteeing anonymity by employing ZK-SNARKs. Furthermore, the relayer registry would allow user to disclose their IP address for a small charge.

The system would enable users to initiate a trade to deposit, await for anonymity, establish a ZK-SNARK proof and transmit to the addresses provided in the registry. A web based software would permit the use of mixer, requiring users to visit only a web page through their browsers.

Dutch, Luxembourg authorities and Europol have brought down one of the three top cryptocurrency mixers. Back in September 2017, a team of crypto enthusiasts assessed where and how much Ethereum is being processed. The study identified a mixer which managed 65% of the transaction volume.