Facet’s Tom Lehman Pitches EIP-8182 to Bring Native Private Transfers to Ethereum’s Hegota Upgrade

Tom Lehman, co-founder of Layer 2 network Facet, pitched EIP-8182 Friday for inclusion in Ethereum’s upcoming Hegota upgrade, arguing for a single protocol-managed shielded pool to bring native private ETH and ERC-20 transfers to the base layer without the fragmented anonymity sets that plague existing privacy applications.

The proposal calls for the shielded pool to be deployed as a system contract at a fixed address using a UTXO-based design with no admin key, no proxy contract, and no pause mechanism. The contract would hold the note-commitment tree, nullifier set, and user registries entirely on-protocol, with future changes possible only through Ethereum hard forks. Spends are verified via a fork-managed Groth16 BN254 proof, and a companion ZK proof-verification precompile lets clients efficiently verify private-transfer proofs at the protocol layer.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

EIP-8182’s core design innovation is the unified anonymity set. Existing Ethereum privacy solutions face what Lehman calls a chicken-and-egg problem: pools struggle to gain enough users to create effective anonymity, while users avoid pools that lack sufficient privacy guarantees. By embedding a single shared pool at the protocol level, every wallet and application that integrates EIP-8182 connects to the same anonymity set. Sends work to any existing Ethereum address or ENS name with no privacy-specific address format required, and users can swap on a DEX and reshield funds in one atomic transaction.

The proposal is one of three privacy-focused EIPs now targeting Hegota. EIP-8141 lets privacy pools pay withdrawal fees from withdrawn funds. EIP-8250 adds keyed nonces to unblock shared-sender privacy designs. Developers formally added FOCIL, the censorship-resistance mechanism, as Hegota’s consensus-layer headliner in February. The cumulative effect would be substantial: Vitalik Buterin laid out a near-term privacy roadmap last week that named these EIPs as the path to making privacy a first-class Ethereum feature rather than a third-party add-on.

The stakes are reflected in the data. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 Ethereum transactions were private in 2025, still below the 2020 peak, despite Ethereum’s market cap of more than $250 billion and growing institutional usage. Hegota is targeted for H2 2026 as a portmanteau of execution-layer client “Bogota” and consensus-layer client “Heze.” Lehman first introduced EIP-8182 in March and has spent the past two months refining the proposal ahead of the Hegota inclusion deadline.