Author: Luna

This article is an original submission by the author, and the views expressed represent the author's personal understanding. ETHPanda has edited and organized the content.

Regarding Kohaku, the relevant internal teams of the Ethereum Foundation have recently started to explain more actively to the outside world the direction of this privacy-related work. The community has already shown considerable interest in this name, but there is also some confusion: is it a wallet, a protocol, or a set of more fundamental developer tools? This article will outline the problems that Kohaku aims to solve in a more comprehensible way.

Kohaku does not point to a single functionality but rather to a theme that is increasingly difficult to avoid in Ethereum's long-term user experience: privacy. It connects privacy protocols, wallet experiences, developer tools, and daily user interactions, attempting to make these capabilities no longer confined to research papers or a few advanced user tools.

In one sentence: what Kohaku aims to achieve is to allow Ethereum users to maintain basic information boundaries while using an open network.

1. First, understand the problem: Why is there privacy anxiety in Ethereum?

The power of Ethereum largely comes from its "public" nature. Transactions, contracts, asset flows, and address interactions can all be verified and audited by anyone. This transparency makes open finance, on-chain governance, and composable applications possible.

However, the same set of mechanisms also brings side effects: the on-chain behavior of ordinary users is almost default exposed. An address can reveal what assets a user holds, which protocols they have participated in, when they send or receive payments, and which addresses they have interacted with; some social relationships or economic statuses can even be inferred.

In real life, we do not put our bank transaction records, shopping history, social relationships, and salary income on a public bulletin board. But in the on-chain world, if a user continues to reuse the same address over time, similar information exposure can easily occur.

Therefore, the privacy issue in Ethereum is not as simple as "Is there anyone wanting to hide bad behavior?" It is more like a fundamental user rights issue: As on-chain applications become increasingly close to real life, can users still decide what information should be public and what information should only be disclosed in necessary scenarios?

2. What is the Kohaku Initiative?

Kohaku is a set of privacy-first tooling in the Ethereum ecosystem, which means a "privacy-first" toolkit. It revolves around wallets, privacy protocols, developer integration, and user experience; it is not a standalone consumer-grade app, nor is it just one specific protocol.

The Kohaku documentation lists tool directions targeting privacy pool protocols such as Railgun, Privacy Pools, Tornado, among which some are still in WIP or alpha stages; the GitHub repository continues to merge relevant implementations and version updates at the end of May. Thus, Kohaku is more like a set of privacy infrastructure tools that are still in iteration, rather than fully formed products.

The questions it aims to answer are also very specific: Given that Ethereum already has some privacy protocols and cryptographic capabilities, how can wallets and applications more easily, safely, and naturally connect them to real usage scenarios?

💡 The keyword for Kohaku is not "mystery," but "usability": turning privacy capabilities into fundamental components that wallets and applications can invoke, and that users can understand, paving the way for ecological iteration.

3. Why is Kohaku considered a "catch-up on infrastructure"?

In recent years, the Ethereum ecosystem has spent a lot of energy solving scalability, L2, account abstraction, modularity, data availability, and other issues. These efforts have made transactions cheaper, throughput higher, and application deployments more flexible. But for ordinary users, another issue is equally important: Will what I do on-chain be permanently, completely, and contextlessly exposed to everyone?

Privacy technology did not emerge today. The problem lies in the fact that many privacy solutions have long remained at the protocol level, research level, or advanced user level. Users need to understand complex concepts, wallets require additional adaptations, and developers lack sufficiently convenient integration methods. Thus, although privacy capabilities exist, they have not become part of the default experience.

Kohaku is thus filling in the "middle layer from protocol to experience." Privacy should not just be a selling point of an independent tool; it can gradually enter wallet design, account management, RPC access, fund flows, and developer interfaces, which are more everyday aspects.

4. What specific problems could Kohaku be addressing?

1. Wallet-level privacy: Privacy must enter the entry point

The wallet is the first entry point for most users into Ethereum. If privacy capabilities cannot enter wallets, they will be hard for ordinary users to adopt.

Today when users connect to dApps, they often directly expose a long-term used address. This address may be used simultaneously for DeFi, NFTs, social interactions, payments, and voting. Once these actions are linked, the address is no longer just a technical identifier; it becomes an analyzable public record.

The concept of "many accounts, many you," mentioned in the Kohaku documentation, offers an intuitive idea: in real life, a person uses different identities in different scenarios. Correspondingly, in the on-chain experience, wallets can also allow users to more easily create and manage different accounts for different dApps and purposes, and complete deposits and usage in a more privacy-friendly way.

2. Transaction privacy: Moving from "fully public" to "controllable visibility"

Ethereum transactions are transparently visible by default; the sender, receiver, amount, and transaction data can be seen. However, not every transaction needs to have its complete context permanently exposed to the entire network.

This does not mean turning Ethereum into a completely opaque system. A more reasonable direction is "controllable visibility": users can prove, disclose, or audit when necessary but do not have to indiscriminately expose all information to all observers.

Privacy pool protocols like Railgun and Privacy Pools try to provide such capabilities. Kohaku's role is more about helping wallets and applications integrate these protocol capabilities into usable experiences.

3. RPC and network privacy: Queries can also leak information

Many people discuss on-chain privacy, focusing only on whether transactions are public, while neglecting another issue: when wallets query on-chain data, they may also reveal what users are looking at, what they're checking, and which addresses they're concerned about.

Wallets typically need to use RPC to retrieve on-chain information. If all requests go through centralized RPC services, a user's query behavior itself may form a profile. Therefore, the Kohaku documentation mentions private RPC, user-customizable RPC, light clients, and verifying untrusted RPC return results through light clients like Helios.

This kind of work may seem less striking than "private transactions," but it is crucial for the real user experience. Because privacy happens not only at the moment of making a transaction but also at every stage, such as when wallets load balances, browse history, connect applications, and request data.

4. Developer usability: Privacy cannot stay only in papers

For privacy technology to enter mainstream applications, developers must be able to understand and integrate it at a low cost. Otherwise, no matter how strong the cryptographic capabilities are, they will only serve a few teams familiar with the underlying mechanisms.

Kohaku breaks these issues down into modules that developers can more easily engage with through toolkits, documentation, and wallet implementations: which privacy protocols can be integrated? How do wallets handle accounts? How do users complete shield/unshield? How can necessary proof capabilities be retained while protecting privacy?

Such work requires not only code but also ecological understanding. Wallet teams, protocol teams, application developers, and ordinary users all need to know more clearly what problems Kohaku is addressing and how these capabilities will enter everyday use.

5. Several common misconceptions: Privacy is not a flimsy slogan

Misconception 1: Privacy is a tool for anonymous crime

This is the most common and easily misguided misconception. In reality, privacy is a basic need for ordinary people: you wouldn't want all your payment records, asset status, and social relationships to be queryable by strangers at any time. The same logic applies to on-chain privacy.

Of course, privacy tools need to face the risk of abuse and need to explore proof, disclosure, and risk control mechanisms. But the existence of risks cannot justify denying all reasonable privacy needs of users.

Misconception 2: Ethereum already has privacy protocols, so the problem is solved

There is a significant distance between "having tools" and "users can use them naturally." Ordinary users are not going to study complex protocols for every everyday interaction and will not voluntarily undertake the security risks arising from high-threshold operations.

Thus, what is truly critical is to incorporate privacy capabilities into wallets, default processes, and developer interfaces. Only when users do not need to become cryptographic experts to make safer choices can privacy be said to have entered the product layer.

Misconception 3: Kohaku is a standalone product

Kohaku is not a single product, but a series of works centered on privacy protocol toolkits, wallet implementations, best practices, RPC privacy, and developer integration.

Therefore, evaluating Kohaku is not just about whether it has launched an independent app; it must also consider whether these tools can be absorbed by more wallets and applications and become part of the default experience.

Misconception 4: Privacy and compliance must conflict

There is indeed tension between privacy and compliance, but it does not necessarily have to be one or the other. A more important direction in the future may be minimizing information exposure, selective disclosure, verifiable claims, risk isolation, and user authorization.

In other words, good privacy design does not mean making all information disappear; rather, it means disclosing information only in appropriate scenarios, at appropriate granularity, to appropriate subjects.

6. What will users feel when these capabilities enter wallets?

If work like Kohaku is adopted by more wallets, ordinary users may first feel the changes not in complex cryptographic concepts but in several changes closer to daily use.

• Wallets may encourage users to manage accounts by scenario instead of binding all behaviors to one long-term address.
• The usage threshold for privacy protocols may decrease, but this depends on wallet integration, protocol maturity, and security audit progress.
• Wallets may pay more attention to RPC, query, and network layer leak issues, where user protection encompasses not just the transaction itself but also the querying behavior.
• Users may have more choices: when to disclose, to whom, and to what extent.

These changes will not happen overnight, nor do they imply that all wallets will immediately implement complex privacy features. However, they point in the same direction: the maturity of the Ethereum user experience should not only be reflected in lower costs and faster speeds, but also in being safer and having a better sense of boundaries.

7. What should developers pay attention to?

For developers, the focus of Kohaku is not to demand that all applications immediately turn to privacy-first but to make privacy capabilities easier to understand, test, and integrate.

In the past, many applications defaulted to requiring users to connect to the same address and built all interactions based on address traceability. As privacy tools gradually mature, product teams can rethink: Should they support more granular identities? Should they reduce unnecessary data exposure? Should they make privacy protection a more natural default process instead of hiding it in advanced settings?

This is particularly relevant for wallet teams. Wallets are not only signing tools but also management layers for user identities, 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 piece of the puzzle for Ethereum's normalization

If Ethereum is merely an open ledger used by a few developers and traders, the privacy pressures from transparency might not be so pronounced. But if Ethereum is to support a wider range of payments, identities, social interactions, organizational collaboration, and financial activities, privacy can no longer be a marginal topic.

The importance of the Kohaku Initiative lies in its not just proposing "Ethereum needs privacy," but placing privacy back into the wallets, protocols, and developer tools that truly impact user experience.

Kohaku is still in construction and iteration, but the questions it addresses are very real: In a world where everything is publicly visible by default, how can users regain their choices?

This may also be a question that the next phase of Ethereum's user experience must answer. Truly mature public infrastructure should not only enable participation for everyone, but also allow everyone to maintain reasonable boundaries while participating.

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