載入圖片中Ethereum Foundation highlights wallet protocols for enhanced privacy

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The Kohaku SDK aims to make private transactions a default wallet feature instead of a specialist add-on

Tue 3 Nov 2026 · 18:33 EST · 3 min read

In Technology

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The Ethereum Foundation wants privacy to stop being a power-user hobby. In a recent post, the EF said formally verified, open-source wallet protocols can make privacy accessible and help CROPS projects carry Ethereum’s guarantees all the way to users.

The centerpiece of that push is Kohaku, an open-source software development kit paired with a reference wallet. The goal is to let ordinary wallets offer shielded transactions without asking users to become amateur cryptographers.

What Kohaku actually does

The feature list is substantial. It includes private sends and receives, stealth addresses, and isolated accounts for each decentralized application a user touches.

Stealth addresses let someone receive funds at a fresh, one-off address, so payments to the same person cannot easily be tied together on-chain.

The per-app accounts work on a similar principle. Your activity in one dapp is walled off from your activity in another, which makes it much harder to stitch together a complete profile of you.

Kohaku also supports integrations with established privacy tools, including Railgun, Privacy Pools, and Tornado Cash. Those integrations are designed to enable shielded balances and keep user activity unlinkable.

Beyond transactions, the kit includes light clients and private state reads. The point is to protect users not only when they send money, but also when they simply check balances or query the chain.

The EF also says Kohaku is structured to be post-quantum secure.

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Not everything is finished. Some components of the SDK, including pieces tied to shielded balances and automatic stealth addresses, are still under development.

The CROPS framework and the road to Devcon

The EF frames this work through an acronym: CROPS. It stands for Censorship Resistance, Capture Resistance, Open Source, Privacy, and Security.

Those values were formalized in the EF Mandate on March 13, 2026. The Foundation’s October 26, 2026 communications leaned on that framework to explain why formal verification and open-source code matter for wallet tooling.

Formal verification is a mathematical method of proving that code behaves as intended. It offers far stronger assurances than ordinary testing, which matters when the software guards people’s money and identities.

A live demonstration is scheduled for November 3, 2026, during the upcoming Devcon event. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and EF researcher Nicolas Consigny are expected to take part.

Ambire Wallet is set to showcase Kohaku integrations at the demo. That gives the project an early real-world test outside the Foundation’s own reference wallet.

The EF has run a dedicated privacy team, Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE), since 2018, and it established a formalized privacy roadmap in March 2026.

That broader roadmap prioritizes private reads and private writes. It also proposes protocol-level changes, such as EIP-8141 Frame Transactions, which is planned for the Hegotá upgrade.

The inclusion of Tornado Cash among supported integrations is worth keeping an eye on. How wallets choose to surface specific privacy protocols to users will likely shape how the broader market receives Kohaku.

In the near term, the Devcon demo on November 3 is the key checkpoint. Further out, progress on EIP-8141 and the Hegotá upgrade will indicate whether the EF’s privacy agenda extends from the wallet layer into the protocol itself.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.