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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article titled “Why I Support Privacy” on Monday, in which he urged the Web3 community to treat privacy as a core part of decentralization, amid growing concerns over AI-driven surveillance and data misuse.
He explained that his shift toward privacy advocacy stemmed from a core belief: information is power—and when that power becomes centralized, it risks distorting democratic balance.
Recent advances in cryptography, combined with increasingly sophisticated AI systems, have made the call for stronger privacy more urgent than ever. Buterin emphasized that privacy today is about more than just hiding secrets—it is about maintaining personal agency in systems that are trending toward surveillance by default.
He referenced the early 2000s optimism around transparency—such as David Brin’s The Transparent Society and Scott McNealy’s infamous “privacy is dead” comment—and argued that such views had aged poorly. Instead of promoting fairness, he wrote, transparency has increasingly allowed powerful institutions to operate without oversight, while individuals lose control over their own lives.
In his article, Buterin framed privacy as a basic component of freedom in the digital age.
He warned that building backdoors—even for well-intentioned reasons—creates long-term risks of abuse, corruption, and unchecked power. The scale of data being collected today, he wrote, dwarfs that of previous generations, and the potential for harm has grown accordingly.
In a future where AI can comb through years of digital records, even seemingly harmless data can be weaponized.
The roadmap focused on four areas: anonymous payments, privacy at the application level, secure data reads, and obfuscation at the network layer. He suggested that wallets adopt tools like Railgun and Privacy Pools to create “shielded balances,” enabling private-by-default transactions.
On April 11, Buterin released a roadmap outlining how Ethereum could build in stronger privacy protections without modifying its Layer-1 consensus model.
With this roadmap, Buterin reinforced his belief that privacy should be a design principle—not a secondary consideration—in building resilient Web3 systems.
Buterin’s ongoing influence over Ethereum’s direction highlights how Vitalik Buterin continues shaping the blockchain’s approach to individual privacy.
Additionally, Buterin advocated for generating a unique address per dApp to prevent linkability and for supporting standards such as FOCIL and EIP-7701 to reduce reliance on public transaction relays.