Why Ethereum's Privacy Matters and What's Being Built to Support It

Zero-knowledge proofs: these are just a few of the technologies being leveraged to enhance privacy on the ethereum blockchain.

Privacy for a public blockchain network is a bit of an oxymoron, given that, by nature of the technology's design, data must be shared and widely distributed on the network in order to be considered valid.

Itamar Lesuisse, the CEO and co-founder of crypto wallet tool Argent, describes the matter of privacy on the ethereum blockchain as an issue for even "The most simplest use case" on the platform.

Ultimately, the aim is to encourage greater adoption of the ethereum blockchain by larger groups of people such as enterprise corporations.

"It's fundamentally essential if you want corporations and large scale investors. If you want them to use public blockchains, you've got to provide them with privacy We believe that without privacy you won't have a lot of serious enterprise users."

The blockchain team at EY released code dubbed 'Nightfall' last month on GitHub as an experimental solution to enable anonymous transactions on the ethereum blockchain.

Apart from transactional privacy on the ethereum blockchain, another ethereum-based startup called Enigma is dedicated to creating an off-chain computational environment for any type of data privacy.

In the meantime, Julien Niset, chief science officer at Argent, argues that a basic privacy tool on ethereum ready for deployment immediately is needed.

"There's need for a lot privacy solutions on Ethereum addressing different needs and different requirements," said Niset.

While immediately deployable, Niset warns that Hopper is by no means the ultimate privacy solution for ethereum.