Privacy tools have always been heralded as a key to financial freedom in the crypto industry. In the Ethereum ecosystem, discussions surrounding the subject matter have revolved mostly around privacy-preserving transfers of ETH and mainstream ERC20 tokens.

In a bid to improve the state of privacy on the network, its co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a stealth address system.

The concept of Stealth addresses using elliptic curve cryptography was first introduced in the context of Bitcoin by BTC core developer Peter Todd in 2014 to obscure transaction details. In the latest blog post, Buterin acknowledged that privacy is “one of the largest remaining challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem” while highlighting the need for a privacy solution because “anything that goes onto a public blockchain is public.”

Stealth addresses, on the other hand, can help in this regard. Buterin noted that such a mechanism in place will enable the Ethereum wallet to generate stealth addresses to receive funds privately and access them using a special code called a “spending key.”