- Ethereum’s co-founder advocated for more privacy features at the app and overall network levels
- Update didn’t spark significant speculative interest in the altcoin
Vitalik Buterin is in the news today after he unveiled an Ethereum [ETH] privacy roadmap to enhance user safety and anonymity.
According to the exec, the approach would be ‘light’ on Ethereum L1 design changes. For starters, he championed wallet integration with privacy protocols that hide transaction details like Railgun and Privacy Pools.
“Wallets should have a notion of a shielded balance, and when you send to someone else, there should be a ‘send from shielded balance’ option, ideally turned on by default.”
Additionally, he advocated for further privacy features at the application and network levels by hiding app transactions. Buterin believes that when fully adopted, the approach would ensure that,
“Privacy of onchain payments, partial anonymization of onchain activity inside applications, privacy of reads to the chain, ie. RPC calls and network-level anonymization.”
More Ethereum upgrades
That being said, the ecosystem has a pending Pectra upgrade under testnet. Another one, Fusaka, is scheduled to be implemented afterwards.
The Pectra update seeks to streamline staking and enhance privacy (including account abstraction) and overall user experience.
Fusaka, on the other hand, aims to ensure cheaper and faster transactions for L2s. Collectively, these would allow the chain to compete with much faster alternative blockchains like Solana [SOL].
However, it’s worth pointing out that the privacy update or planned upgrades haven’t spurred any significant speculative trading interest in ETH. In fact, according to Coinglass, ETH’s Open Interest (OI) rates in the last 24 hours were down by 1.5%.
Source: CoinGlass
In 2025, ETH’s OI has dropped by 50% from over $31 billion to $16 billion, signaling muted demand in the derivatives market and an overall bearish sentiment.
On the price chart, however, the altcoin was valued at $1.5k and formed a bullish RSI divergence on the 12-hour chart.
In most cases, such a formation often leads to an upward price reversal. However, this remains to be seen for ETH amid the ongoing macro uncertainty.
Source: ETH/USDT, TradingView
