The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is pushing to make privacy a standard feature of crypto wallets rather than a niche add-on. In a recent post, the EF said formally verified, open-source wallet protocols can make privacy accessible and help CROPS projects extend Ethereum’s guarantees to users.
The centerpiece of that effort is Kohaku, an open-source software development kit (SDK) paired with a reference wallet. The goal is to let ordinary wallets offer shielded transactions without requiring users to become amateur cryptographers.
What Kohaku does
Kohaku’s feature set includes private sends and receives, stealth addresses, and isolated accounts for each decentralized application (dapp) a user interacts with.
Stealth addresses allow someone to receive funds at a fresh, one-off address, making it difficult to link payments to the same person on-chain. Per-app accounts work on a similar principle: activity in one dapp is separated from activity in another, making it harder to assemble a complete profile of a user.
The SDK also supports integrations with established privacy tools, including Railgun, Privacy Pools, and Tornado Cash. These integrations are designed to enable shielded balances and keep user activity unlinkable.
Beyond transactions, Kohaku includes light clients and private state reads, aiming to protect users not only when they send money but also when they check balances or query the chain. The EF also says Kohaku is structured to be post-quantum secure.
Not all components are finished. Some parts of the SDK, including those tied to shielded balances and automatic stealth addresses, are still under development.
The CROPS framework and Devcon
The EF frames this work through the acronym CROPS: 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 used 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, offering stronger assurances than ordinary testing—particularly important for software that guards 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, providing 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, and proposes protocol-level changes such as EIP-8141 Frame Transactions, planned for the Hegotá upgrade.
The inclusion of Tornado Cash among supported integrations is worth watching. 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.
