Ethereum doubles down on privacy with new ‘Kohaku’ wallet ahead of Devcon

Ethereum is putting privacy back at the center of its roadmap.

This November, during the Devcon conference in Argentina, the Ethereum Foundation will unveil Kohaku, a new wallet framework designed to let users transact without exposing unnecessary personal or transactional details.

The project was introduced on Oct. 9 by Foundation developer Nicolas Consigny, who said the Kohaku demo and software development kit (SDK) will be ready for public testing at Devcon. The wallet is being built as both a browser extension and a reference implementation for developers who want to integrate privacy primitives directly into their applications.

These tools are designed to let users complete transactions while revealing only the minimum information necessary for each party involved.

He explained:

“Kohaku aims to ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction, and is exposed to the absolute minimum set of risks needed for that transaction to happen.”

Kohaku is only one piece of a larger Ethereum Foundation initiative to make privacy “a first-class property” of the blockchain.

On Oct. 8, the Foundation announced a new Privacy Cluster, a team of 47 engineers, researchers, and cryptographers dedicated to integrating privacy at every layer of the Ethereum stack.

According to the Foundation, this effort is necessary for the growth of the blockchain because “privacy is normal and necessary to ensure that this infrastructure remains usable, credible, and aligned with human freedom.”

As a result, the new cluster would collaborate closely with the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) initiative to advance protocol-level confidentiality, from private payments to decentralized identity solutions.

Ethereum’s focus on privacy

The privacy cluster work will cover several key areas that together form the foundation of Ethereum’s evolving privacy architecture.

At the research frontier, the PSE teams are pioneering advanced cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs, which enable greater scalability and confidentiality without compromising security.

Insights from this research directly inform the protocol layer, where developers integrate these breakthroughs into Ethereum’s core infrastructure to ensure that privacy features are built into the network’s design rather than added as external patches.

Moving up to the application layer, projects like Semaphore, MACI, and stealth addresses illustrate how privacy can enhance practical use cases, from decentralized governance to everyday payments.

Privacy at scale isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a regulatory one.

To that end, the Foundation has launched an Institutional Privacy Task Force to explore how privacy-preserving technologies can coexist with compliance requirements. The group is expected to publish guidelines mapping privacy tools to real-world frameworks used by businesses, financial entities, and auditors.

This approach echoes Vitalik Buterin’s long-held view that privacy should be a “human right baked into protocol design,” not an optional feature reserved for advanced users.

The market appears to be validating the privacy narrative.

According to data cited by Crypto Rand, privacy-focused tokens have outperformed the broader crypto market by 65.3% over the past 30 days, reflecting growing interest in tools that offer transaction-level confidentiality.

Ethereum’s renewed focus on privacy marks a philosophical shift: from reactive compliance to proactive design. As artificial intelligence expands data extraction and governments ramp up on-chain surveillance, Ethereum is betting that a privacy-preserving base layer will be essential for mainstream adoption.

If Kohaku and the Privacy Cluster succeed, the next iteration of Ethereum could make “private by default” not just a slogan, but a protocol standard.

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