Ethereum’s privacy paradox
When Vitalik Buterin walked on stage at Devcon 2025 to demo Kohaku, he summed up Ethereum’s situation bluntly. The network has strong security and privacy research and solid layer-1 security. But it still hasn’t “leveled up the last mile,” the wallets and apps people actually use.
On paper, Ethereum has spent a decade leading the way. Elliptic-curve precompiles in 2018 opened the door to zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and privacy tools like Tornado Cash and Railgun. The DAO hack in 2016 pushed the ecosystem toward serious audits, helped drive demand for robust wallets such as Gnosis Safe and turned multisigs from a niche idea into standard practice.
Yet everyday private use in 2025 still feels clumsy. People juggle extra seed phrases, install special wallets, hope public broadcasters don’t fail and often fall back to centralized exchanges because they are simpler.
Kohaku is Ethereum’s solution.
Did you know? The Ethereum Foundation’s new Privacy Cluster already includes about 47 members, from protocol engineers to wallet teams, all tasked with pushing “privacy by default” into the ecosystem.
Why privacy is back on the front burner in 2025
So, why is Ethereum treating privacy as a core priority again instead of a niche feature for power users?
In his April essay “Why I Support Privacy,” Buterin described privacy as freedom, order and progress at the same time:
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It’s freedom because people need space to act without every move being logged and judged.
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It’s order because many social and economic systems quietly rely on the fact that not everyone sees everything.
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And it’s progress because we want to use data for medicine, science and finance without turning daily life into a permanent surveillance feed.
Meanwhile, onchain life is more exposed and has higher stakes than ever. Real-world assets, larger decentralized finance (DeFi) positions and public identity increasingly overlap. Transparency is useful, but it also means your balances, donations and counterparties can be traced with a few clicks.
Kohaku arrives at exactly this point: Ethereum already has the cryptography it needs for privacy, but it now needs a way to make that privacy safe, usable and acceptable in a world that cares about regulation.
Did you know? A recent study of 53 Ethereum wallets found that address poisoning and fake token transfers have already cost users over $100 million largely because wallet interfaces don’t clearly flag suspicious activity.
What is Kohaku, in layman’s terms?
Kohaku is best understood as Ethereum’s new privacy-and-security toolkit for wallets.
For developers, it’s an open-source framework from the Ethereum Foundation that includes a modular software development kit (SDK) plus a reference wallet. The SDK provides reusable components for private sending, safer key management and recovery, and risk-based transaction controls, so teams don’t have to build an entire privacy stack from scratch.
For users, the first version is a browser extension wallet aimed at power users, built as a fork of Ambire. It supports private and public transactions, separate accounts per decentralized application (DApp), peer-to-peer broadcasting instead of centralized relays and tools to hide internet protocol (IP) addresses and other metadata where possible.
Under the hood, Kohaku plugs into existing Ethereum privacy tools like Railgun and Privacy Pools instead of inventing a new mixer or layer-2 (L2) network. That lets it focus on what has truly been missing: a coherent wallet architecture where privacy, recovery and security are built in from day one instead of bolted on as experimental extras.
How Kohaku works
Under the hood, Kohaku is less “one big app” and more a stack of Lego bricks for building private, safer wallets.
First comes the wallet architecture
The SDK defines how a Kohaku-style wallet should handle keys, transactions and recovery from day one. Instead of a single all-powerful key, it is designed for multiple keys with different roles, risk-based approvals and recovery flows that don’t depend on a single seed phrase written on a piece of paper.
Moving $100,000 can trigger extra checks and confirmations that a $10 transfer never sees. This is the kind of risk-based access Buterin has been pushing for.
On top of that sits opt-in shielding
Kohaku doesn’t push every transaction into the dark. It lets wallets offer public and private modes side by side. When you choose privacy, the wallet can route through protocols like Railgun or Privacy Pools, generate fresh and unlinkable addresses for receiving funds and keep the onchain footprint as small as possible. Tools like association lists are built into the design so teams can block clearly illicit flows without stripping privacy from everyone else.
Lastly, network privacy
Finally, the roadmap goes beyond what you write to…
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