Facet co-founder Tom Lehman has pitched EIP-8182 for inclusion in Ethereum’s H2 2026 Hegota upgrade, aiming to introduce native private transfers for ETH and ERC-20 tokens directly on the base layer. The proposal, first introduced in March, seeks to address structural flaws in the current crypto privacy landscape.
Lehman’s rationale centers on a structural flaw in existing privacy solutions. "New pools cannot offer meaningful anonymity without a critical mass of users, and cannot attract those users without anonymity already in place," Lehman said. Competition among pools fragments anonymity sets, weakening privacy guarantees for all participants, he argued.
The proposal calls for a protocol-managed shielded pool deployed as a system contract. It uses a UTXO-based design with no admin key, proxy, or pause mechanism, and spends would be verified via a fork-managed Groth16 BN254 proof. EIP-8182 would give every wallet and application on Ethereum a single shared pool to build on, and sends would work to any existing Ethereum address or ENS name.
If accepted, EIP-8182 would join two other privacy-focused proposals, EIP-8141 and EIP-8250, targeted for the Hegota upgrade. The move aligns with a broader push to build a more "cypherpunk principled" Ethereum, as described by Vitalik Buterin, by baking privacy features into the core protocol and potentially increasing confidential transaction adoption on the world's largest smart contract platform.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
