{"id":58907,"date":"2025-11-17T16:31:31","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T16:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=58907"},"modified":"2025-11-17T16:31:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T16:31:31","slug":"ethereum-pivots-to-privacy-buterin-unleashes-kohaku-at-ecc2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=58907","title":{"rendered":"Ethereum Pivots To Privacy: Buterin Unleashes Kohaku At ECC2"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

At Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2 on November 16, 2025, Vitalik Buterin used his keynote \u201cKohaku: Wallet Privacy On Ethereum\u201d to deliver a sharp verdict on the state of Ethereum privacy: the cryptography works, but the user experience is failing.<\/p>\n

He began by reminding the audience that Ethereum has spent a decade investing in privacy and security infrastructure. He pointed to the elliptic-curve precompiles added in 2018\u2014\u201cEC-add, EC-mul, EC-pairing\u201d\u2014as the foundation for protocols such as Tornado Cash and Railgun<\/a>, and cited the Privacy & Scaling Explorations team\u2019s work on zkSNARK protocols, developer tooling and application-layer experiments.<\/p>\n

On the security side, he called the 2016 DAO hack<\/a> an event that \u201creally catalyzed the ecosystem,\u201d leading to stronger auditing, teams like SEAL, safer Solidity and Vyper, and multisig wallets that were \u201cmostly a dream back in 2015\u201d but are \u201cvery mainstream today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vitalik Pushes Ethereum Toward True Wallet Privacy<\/h2>\n

Despite that progress, Buterin argued that everyday users still struggle to access meaningful privacy and safety. \u201cOn real-world privacy and security delivered to users, we\u2019re still behind where we could be,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that is the thing that could change, and that is the thing that this year can change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Technically, he insisted, the core privacy stack is mature. \u201cThe base layer technology, it\u2019s all great. You can generate a proof within less than one second on a laptop, two seconds on a phone. It\u2019s easy to develop. It\u2019s very well understood. There\u2019s a lot of well-tested circuits.\u201d The breakdown happens at the wallet layer.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsing a privacy protocol requires a separate seed phrase. There\u2019s no multi-sig option. So, if you have your coins in a private pool, your coins have to be controlled by one single key,\u201d he explained. Users generally must open a separate privacy wallet, and \u201cit takes like five clicks to do a private send and withdraw.\u201d Even the infrastructure for broadcasting transactions is fragile. \u201cLast week, I had to fight against public broadcasters. It took about ten tries until eventually I figured out that it works after you turn on a VPN.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in this very last mile stage,\u201d he concluded. \u201cIt\u2019s exactly at that last mile stage where we need to put a lot of really concerted effort into doing better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buterin framed Kohaku within a broader defense of privacy that he developed in an April essay. On stage he summarized it in three lines: \u201cPrivacy is freedom\u2026 Privacy is order\u2026 And privacy is progress.\u201d Privacy, he said, \u201cgives us space to live our lives in the ways that meet our needs,\u201d underpins basic social mechanisms that assume not everyone sees everything, and is essential for using data in fields like medicine and science without creating \u201ca dystopian nightmare.\u201d With modern cryptography, \u201cit can be designed to be privacy first.\u201d For users, \u201cprivacy is not an abstraction. It is a concrete benefit to users. We can show that we have now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Security, in his view, is similarly dominated by tail risk. Referencing a meme, he contrasted DeFi yields with catastrophic loss. Put assets into DeFi and \u201cyou get some APY.\u201d Do nothing and \u201cyou get 0% APY.\u201d But if you lose your private keys, your APY is \u201cminus 100.\u201d The same applies \u201cif Lazarus discovers your private keys\u201d or \u201cif the wrong people discover how much money you have, who you donate to, and where you live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buterin argued that Ethereum\u2019s privacy conversation has focused too narrowly on \u201cwhat can you ZK-proof on-chain.\u201d He expanded the scope to UX (making it easy to keep wallet identities separate), privacy of reads (via better RPCs, \u201cE3T, E+ORAM,\u201d or \u201cthe really cryptographically pure approach, PIR\u201d), network-level privacy through mixnets, and non-financial operations that also need protection.<\/p>\n

On security, he called for \u201crisk-based access control\u201d: \u201cYou should have to press more buttons and get more authorization to move $100,000 than to move $10.\u201d He emphasized account recovery, UI-level security, and \u201con-chain version control\u2026 of software dependencies and of UIs,\u201d arguing \u201cwe should have a world where UIs live on-chain\u201d so attackers cannot silently swap front-ends by hacking a server.<\/p>\n

\n

Today during @web3privacy<\/a>, maestro @VitalikButerin<\/a> highlighted #Kohaku<\/a>, a new Ethereum framework focused on bringing real privacy to wallets. $eth<\/a><\/p>\n

All 8mins here: pic.twitter.com\/W9qeUZcipR<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Tommy B. \"\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8\" (@realtommybibi) November 16, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Summing up Ethereum in 2025, Buterin said it has \u201cstrong security and privacy research,\u201d \u201cstrong security on the L1,\u201d and privacy tooling that has \u201cimproved by miles\u201d since \u201cthe very first version of Zcash<\/a>\u201d where \u201cit took two minutes to sign a transaction.\u201d What remains, he insisted, is to \u201clevel up the last mile,\u201d especially \u201cthe application and wallet layer, the parts of this whole problem that are closest to the user.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kohaku was announced on October 9 by the Ethereum Foundation via X: \u201cThe Ethereum Foundation is proud to build Kohaku, a set of primitives that enables wallets to be secure and to process private transactions while minimizing dependencies on trusted third parties. Privacy is normal. Privacy is for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

At press time, ETH traded at $3,194.<\/p>\n

\"Ethereum<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2 on November 16, 2025, Vitalik Buterin used his keynote \u201cKohaku: Wallet Privacy On Ethereum\u201d to deliver a sharp verdict on the state of Ethereum privacy: the cryptography works, but the user experience is failing. He began by reminding the audience that Ethereum has spent a decade investing in privacy and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-58907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}