Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, believes stealth addresses is a potential way to obscure NFT ownership. He says it would be a lighter-weight solution to private NFTs compared to some alternative methods.
In a post on August 8, Buterin said stealth addresses would be a much lighter-weight solution to private ownership of non-fungible tokens. This statement was a response to the use of Merkle trees or zk-SNARKs for the same. The Ethereum boss also recommended the possibility of generalizing the scheme to smart contract wallets. The idea is that stealth addresses for ERC721s are a low-tech approach to add a significant amount of privacy to the NFT ecosystem. Buterin explained that the user would be able to send the NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone but the new owner being able to see who the new owner is.
However, there would be challenges in working out how to pay fees. One solution is sending enough ETH to pay fees 5 – 50 times to send it further. Buterin said if the user gets an ERC721 without enough ETH, they can tornado some ETH in to keep the transfer chain going. He thinks there could be a better generic solution that involves specialized searchers or block builders somehow.
In regards to the upcoming Merge, Buterin believes pretty much everyone supports the transition to proof-of-stake (PoS). He doesn’t see substantial, long-term adoption of a proof-of-work (PoW) alternative. The Ethereum co-founder also said that he doesn’t expect Ethereum to really be significantly harmed by another fork.
