Author: Luna
This article is an original submission by the author, and the views expressed are solely those of the author. ETHPanda has edited and organized the content.
Around Kohaku, internal teams at the Ethereum Foundation have recently become more proactive in explaining the direction of this privacy-related work to the broader community. While the name has already attracted significant attention, some confusion remains: is it a wallet, a protocol, or a set of more foundational developer tools? This article aims to clarify the problems Kohaku seeks to solve in a more accessible way.
Kohaku does not refer to a single feature, but rather to a theme in Ethereum’s long-term user experience that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore: privacy. It connects privacy protocols, wallet experiences, developer tools, and everyday user interactions, aiming to move these capabilities beyond research papers and tools used by only a few advanced users.
In one sentence: Kohaku aims to help Ethereum users maintain fundamental information boundaries while using the open web.
First, understand the issue: Why does Ethereum have privacy concerns?
Ethereum's strength largely comes from its "openness." Transactions, contracts, asset flows, and address interactions can all be verified and audited by anyone. This transparency enables open finance, on-chain governance, and composable applications.
However, the same mechanism also brings side effects: on-chain behavior of ordinary users is almost inherently exposed. An address may reveal what assets a user holds, which protocols they have interacted with, when payments were received or sent, which addresses they have interacted with, and even allow inferences about certain social relationships or economic status.
In real life, we wouldn’t post bank statements, shopping records, social connections, or salary information on a public bulletin board. But in the on-chain world, if users repeatedly reuse the same address, similar information leaks can easily occur.
Therefore, Ethereum’s privacy issue isn’t as simple as “whether someone wants to hide something bad.” It’s more fundamentally a question of user rights: as on-chain applications grow increasingly close to real-life interactions, should users still have the ability to decide which information to make public and which to disclose only when necessary?
II. What is the Kohaku Initiative?
Kohaku is a suite of privacy-first tools within the Ethereum ecosystem. It focuses on wallets, privacy protocols, developer integrations, and user experience—not a single consumer-facing app, nor just one protocol.
The Kohaku documentation outlines tooling directions for privacy pool protocols such as Railgun, Privacy Pools, and Tornado, some of which are still in WIP or alpha stages; the GitHub repository has continued integrating related implementations and version updates since the end of May. Therefore, Kohaku is more akin to a set of privacy infrastructure tools under active iteration rather than a fully finalized product.
The question it aims to answer is also very specific: Given that Ethereum already has some privacy protocols and cryptographic capabilities, how can wallets and applications more easily, securely, and naturally integrate them into real-world use cases?
💡 Kohaku’s keyword isn’t “mystery,” but “usability”: turning privacy capabilities into foundational components that wallets and applications can access, users can understand, and the ecosystem can iterate upon.
Three: Why is Kohaku referred to as an "infrastructure remediation"?
Over the past few years, the Ethereum ecosystem has devoted significant effort to addressing scalability, Layer 2 solutions, account abstraction, modularity, and data availability. These efforts have made transactions cheaper, increased throughput, and enabled more flexible application deployment. But for everyday users, another issue is equally important: Will everything I do on-chain be permanently, fully, and contextlessly exposed to everyone?
Privacy technologies are not new. The issue is that many privacy solutions have long remained confined to the protocol level, research level, or among advanced users. Users must understand complex concepts, wallets require additional adaptation, and developers lack convenient integration methods. As a result, while privacy capabilities exist, they have not become part of the default experience.
Kohaku is precisely filling in the middle layer between protocol and experience. Privacy shouldn’t just be a selling point for isolated tools—it can also gradually be integrated into more everyday aspects such as wallet design, account management, RPC access, fund flows, and developer interfaces.
Four: What specific problems might Kohaku be addressing?
1. Wallet-layer privacy: Privacy must enter at the entry point.
Wallets are the primary entry point for the vast majority of users into Ethereum. If privacy capabilities cannot be integrated into wallets, they are unlikely to be genuinely adopted by ordinary users.
Today, when users connect to dApps, they often expose a long-term address that may be used simultaneously for DeFi, NFTs, social interactions, receiving payments, and voting. Once these activities are linked together, the address is no longer just a technical identifier—it becomes a publicly analyzable profile.
The "many accounts, many you" concept mentioned in the Kohaku documentation offers an intuitive perspective: in real life, individuals use different identities in various contexts. Similarly, on-chain experiences allow wallets to enable users to easily create and manage separate accounts for different dApps and purposes, while completing deposits and usage in a more privacy-friendly manner.
2. Transaction Privacy: From "Fully Public" to "Controlled Visibility"
Ethereum transactions are transparent by default, meaning the sender, recipient, amount, and transaction data may all be visible. However, not all transactions require the full context to be permanently disclosed to the entire network.
This does not mean turning Ethereum into a completely black-box system. A more reasonable approach is "controlled visibility": users can prove, disclose, or audit information when necessary, without exposing all data indiscriminately to every observer.
Privacy pool protocols like Railgun and Privacy Pools aim to provide such capabilities. Kohaku’s role is more like helping wallets and applications integrate these protocol capabilities into usable experiences.
3. RPC and Network Privacy: The query itself can leak information
When many people discuss on-chain privacy, they focus only on whether transactions are public, but overlook another issue: when wallets query on-chain data, they may also reveal what users are viewing, searching for, and which addresses they care about.
Wallets typically require RPC calls to retrieve on-chain information. If all requests are routed through centralized RPC services, users' query patterns themselves may be used to build profiles. Therefore, Kohaku's documentation highlights approaches such as private RPC, user-defined RPC, light clients, and verifying responses from untrusted RPCs using light clients like Helios.
This type of work may not sound as eye-catching as "private transactions," but it is crucial to the real user experience. Privacy doesn’t just happen at the moment a transaction is sent—it occurs at every step, from loading wallet balances and browsing history to connecting apps and requesting data.
4. Developer Accessibility: Privacy cannot remain confined to academic papers
For privacy technologies to enter mainstream adoption, developers must be able to understand and integrate them at low cost. Otherwise, even the most advanced cryptographic capabilities can only serve a small number of teams familiar with the underlying mechanisms.
Kohaku breaks down these issues into modular components that are more accessible to developers through toolkits, documentation, and wallets: Which privacy protocols can be integrated? How does the wallet handle accounts? How do users perform shield/unshield operations? How can necessary proof capabilities be retained while preserving privacy?
These tasks require not only code but also an understanding of the ecosystem. The wallet team, protocol team, application developers, and everyday users all need a clearer understanding of what problem Kohaku is solving and how these capabilities will integrate into daily use.
Five: Common Misconceptions—Privacy Is Not Just a Hollow Slogan
Misconception 1: Privacy is a tool for anonymous crime
This is the most common and easiest-to-mislead misconception. In reality, privacy is a basic need for ordinary people: you wouldn’t want strangers to be able to check your payment history, asset status, or social connections at any time. The same logic applies to on-chain privacy.
Of course, privacy tools must address the risk of misuse and explore mechanisms for proof, disclosure, and risk control. However, we cannot dismiss all users' legitimate privacy needs simply because risks exist.
Misconception 2: Ethereum already has a privacy protocol, so the issue is resolved.
There is a significant gap between "having tools" and "users being able to use them naturally." Ordinary users won't study complex protocols for every daily interaction, nor will they willingly take on the security risks associated with high-barrier operations.
Therefore, the real key is integrating privacy capabilities into wallets, default workflows, and developer interfaces. Privacy only enters the product layer when users can make more secure choices without needing to become cryptography experts.
Misconception 3: Kohaku is a standalone product
Kohaku is not a single product, but a set of initiatives centered around privacy protocol toolkits, wallet implementations, best practices, RPC privacy, and developer integrations.
Therefore, evaluating Kohaku isn't just about whether it has launched a standalone app, but also about whether these tools can be adopted by more wallets and applications to become part of the default experience.
Misconception 4: Privacy and compliance must conflict
There is indeed tension between privacy and compliance, but it doesn’t have to be an either-or choice. A more important direction for the future may be minimizing information exposure, selective disclosure, verifiable claims, risk isolation, and user authorization.
In other words, good privacy design isn’t about making all information disappear—it’s about ensuring information is disclosed only in the right context, at the right level of detail, and to the right parties.
Six: What will users experience after these capabilities are integrated into the wallet?
If work like Kohaku is adopted by more wallets, ordinary users are likely to first notice a few changes that are more贴近日常使用, rather than complex cryptographic concepts.
- Wallets may encourage users to manage accounts by scenario rather than tying all activities to a single long-term address.
- The barrier to adopting the privacy protocol may decrease, but this depends on wallet integration, protocol maturity, and progress in security audits.
- Wallets may place greater emphasis on RPC, query, and network layer vulnerabilities, as user protection encompasses not only transactions themselves but also query activities.
- Users may have more choices: when to disclose, to whom to disclose, and to what extent to disclose.
These changes won’t happen overnight, nor do they mean all wallets will immediately incorporate advanced privacy features. But they point in the same direction: the maturation of the Ethereum user experience should be reflected not only in lower costs and faster speeds, but also in greater security and stronger boundaries.
Seven: What should developers pay attention to?
For developers, Kohaku’s focus is not on requiring all apps to immediately shift to a privacy-first approach, but on making privacy capabilities easier to understand, test, and integrate.
In the past, many applications defaultly required users to connect the same address and based all interactions on the assumption that addresses are traceable. As privacy tools mature, product teams can reconsider: Should we support more granular identities? Should we reduce unnecessary data exposure? Should we make privacy protection a natural default flow rather than hiding it in advanced settings?
This is especially true for the wallet team. Wallets are not just signing tools—they are also managers of user identity, assets, permissions, and information boundaries. The value of Kohaku ultimately depends on whether these complex technologies can be translated into simple, trustworthy, low-friction interactions.
Conclusion: Privacy is a crucial piece in Ethereum’s journey toward everyday adoption.
If Ethereum were merely an open ledger used by a small number of developers and traders, the privacy pressures brought by transparency might not be so apparent. But if Ethereum is to support broader payments, identity, social interactions, organizational collaboration, and financial activities, privacy is no longer a peripheral issue.
The importance of the Kohaku Initiative lies here: it doesn't just state that "Ethereum needs privacy," but rather places privacy back where it truly impacts user experience—at the wallet, protocol, and developer tool levels.
Kohaku is still under development and iteration, but it addresses a very real question: In a blockchain world where everything is default public, how can users reclaim their choice?
This may also be a question that the next phase of Ethereum’s user experience must address. A truly mature public infrastructure should not only enable everyone to participate but also ensure that everyone can do so while maintaining reasonable boundaries.