The EIP-8182 standard was introduced, enabling native private transfers on Ethereum at the protocol level by creating a shared shielded transaction pool based on ZKP technologies.
Tom Lehman, Ethereum Developer, presented an initiative that could add native private transfers to the network. The proposal aims to address the issue of full transaction transparency, despite annual transaction volumes reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.
According to the document, nearly every operation on Ethereum today is public, allowing anyone to see transfer amounts, transaction participants, and their balances. At the same time, the share of private transactions remains extremely low — in 2025, fewer than 1 in 10,000 transactions had enhanced privacy.
The EIP-8182 initiative proposes implementing privacy at the protocol level by creating a shared shielded pool of transactions using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). This would allow users to send funds confidentially without having to choose between multiple solutions that are often incompatible.
The key issue with current solutions is the anonymity-set chicken-and-egg problem — privacy improves as more users join a single pool, but new services struggle to gain adoption until they can provide sufficient privacy. As a result, the market remains fragmented, and overall privacy levels decline.
EIP-8182 proposes a unified standard where all wallets and applications use a shared anonymity pool. This means that each new user strengthens the privacy of the entire system. Additionally, the solution doesn’t require separate address infrastructure, since funds can be sent to regular Ethereum addresses and ENS names.
The proposal also introduces a separation between transaction authorization and the generation of cryptographic proofs. This allows the use of external services for computation without transferring control over funds. At the same time, the protocol itself doesn’t charge additional fees for private transfers, users only pay standard network fees.
Unlike existing solutions such as Tornado Cash or Privacy Pools, the new standard is designed not only to obscure the link between sender and recipient but to enable fully private transfers within the network. Governance of updates is proposed to be handled through Ethereum hard forks, without a separate token or centralized control.
EIP-8182 is currently in the draft stage. If adopted, it could significantly change the approach to privacy on Ethereum, bringing it closer to the standards of traditional financial systems, where transactions are not fully public.
In October 2025, the Ethereum Foundation announced that privacy should become a core property of the blockchain ecosystem for all users and initiated the formation of a dedicated development team to work on relevant solutions.
