Vitalik Buterin proposes enhanced security features for crypto wallets

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH), has shared a comprehensive wish list for improving cryptocurrency wallets in a recent 4,000-word blog post.

He emphasized the necessity for wallets to incorporate robust privacy and security features, arguing that these elements are essential for users to fully benefit from Ethereum's decentralised capabilities.

“A user only benefits from any decentralization, censorship resistance, security, privacy, or other properties that Ethereum and its applications offer to the extent that the wallet itself also has these properties,” Buterin noted.

Among his suggestions are enhancements such as using the Waku secure communication protocol to improve transaction privacy and implementing ZK-SNARK technology to bolster account security.

Buterin highlighted products like Myna and zkemail, which utilise zero-knowledge proofs to convert traditional IDs into Ethereum addresses for secure transactions.

He clarified that his proposals could be integrated into existing infrastructure and are not exhaustive.

“The goal of this post is to give my own views of some of the properties that an ideal Ethereum wallet would have,” he explained.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong responded positively on social media, indicating interest in adopting some of Buterin’s ideas regarding social recovery methods for managing private keys.

Social recovery involves using trusted individuals or devices to help regain access to wallets in case of lost keys.

Uniswap (CRYPTO:UNI) also expressed intentions to implement some of Buterin’s recommendations.

In addition to immediate improvements, Buterin discussed long-term visions for wallets that include artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces, although he cautioned against relying on such immature technologies at present.

“These more radical ideas depend on technology that is extremely immature today,” he stated.