Ethereum Pivots To Privacy: Buterin Unleashes Kohaku At ECC2

At Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2 on November 16, 2025, Vitalik Buterin used his keynote “Kohaku: Wallet Privacy On Ethereum” to deliver a sharp verdict on the state of Ethereum privacy: the cryptography works, but the user experience is failing. He began by reminding the audience that Ethereum has spent a decade investing in privacy and security infrastructure. He pointed to the elliptic-curve precompiles added in 2018—“EC-add, EC-mul, EC-pairing”—as the foundation for protocols such as Tornado Cash and Railgun , and cited the Privacy & Scaling Explorations team’s work on zkSNARK protocols, developer tooling and application-layer experiments. On the security side, he called the 2016 DAO hack an event that “really catalyzed the ecosystem,” leading to stronger auditing, teams like SEAL, safer Solidity and Vyper, and multisig wallets that were “mostly a dream back in 2015” but are “very mainstream today.” Vitalik Pushes Ethereum Toward True Wallet Privacy Despite that progress,...

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