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.