Vitalik Buterin’s Vision for a Perfect Crypto Wallet

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, published an essay where he expressed how he believes a crypto wallet should look – secure, private, user-friendly and above all, in accordance with Ethereum’s decentralization. 

It would also likely be user-friendly enough to integrate with the large ecosystem of Ethereum, including L2s, dApps, and Identity systems for example. Buterin is proposing to streamline the crypto usage patterns and optimize them for security and ease of use at the same time. 

Another problem that Buterin plans to address in his essay is the challenge of asset transfer from different chains to Ethereum, with the likes of Optimism and Arbitrum.

Right now, most users struggle with manually swapping assets or checking balances across chains. Buterin wants to create a wallet that does all this automatically. With his ideal wallet, users could share a simple address like vitalik.eth@optimism.eth, and the wallet would handle technical details, such as converting assets or paying gas fees, keeping the users away from worrying about the same.

Security is another big focus for Buterin. Currently, if a user loses the private key, there is a loss of access to all the funds. To fix this, Buterin suggests using social recovery and multi signature wallets. These systems would involve trusted “guardians” to approve important actions, like transferring large amounts of crypto. 

In addition, the wallet would have a primary key for small transactions and a group of guardians for bigger ones. He also recommends a simple two-of-three recovery system for beginners, which can later be upgraded for advanced users.

Buterin is also concerned about users’ privacy,  Buterin wants a wallet to automatically protect the privacy, making transactions private by default. He envisions a wallet that uses privacy pools and stealth addresses to hide transaction details.

Each app a user interacts with could create a unique address, keeping their on-chain activity separate and untraceable. For identity verification, Buterin suggests using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), allowing users to prove their identity without sharing personal information.

Buterin also wants to improve the infrastructure behind the wallets. Currently, wallets rely on RPC providers to fetch blockchain data, which could compromise privacy. He advocates light clients and private information retrieval (PIR) technology to protect user data. 

Lastly, Buterin imagines future wallet interfaces to use AI or even brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), allowing users to control their wallets with their voice or thoughts.