Ethereum has long harbored a paradox that sits at the core of its identity: a network built on transparency that increasingly leaves its users exposed. While the blockchain has become home to sophisticated zero-knowledge cryptography, robust auditing standards, and billions in secured value, the average user in 2025 still faces a clumsy, fragmented experience when seeking basic financial privacy. Transactions remain traceable. Balances are public. Metadata leaks through centralized infrastructure. The research exists - but the usability does not.
That gap is precisely what Kohaku aims to close. Unveiled by Vitalik Buterin at Devcon in Buenos Aires in November 2025, Kohaku represents Ethereum's most ambitious attempt to transform years of privacy research into practical, everyday tools. It is not a new mixer, not a new layer-2 network, and not another theoretical protocol. It is a wallet-level framework - an SDK, a reference implementation, and a set of design patterns - that integrates existing privacy infrastructure into a coherent, user-facing experience.
Privacy has returned to the agenda because the stakes have risen. Tokenized real-world assets now flow through public ledgers. Institutional capital has arrived, demanding discretion. Regulatory scrutiny has intensified following high-profile sanctions on mixers. And perhaps most urgently, onchain identities have merged with offchain lives in ways that create real physical and financial danger. In this environment, Ethereum's traditional transparency has become a vulnerability.
This article provides a comprehensive examination of Kohaku: what it is, how it works, why it matters, and how it fits into the broader privacy, security, and regulatory landscape shaping Ethereum's future.
The Road to 2025: How Ethereum Arrived at This Privacy Moment
Understanding Kohaku requires understanding the decades of infrastructure that made it possible - and the persistent failures that made it necessary.
Ethereum's security culture traces back to a formative trauma: the 2016 DAO hack, which saw approximately $60 million in ETH drained through a reentrancy vulnerability. That incident catalyzed a transformation across the ecosystem. Auditing became standard practice. Multisignature wallets evolved from theoretical concepts into mainstream tools. Security-focused teams like SEAL emerged. Solidity and Vyper matured with stronger safeguards. By 2025, multisig wallets have become the default for serious capital, and the ecosystem considers itself significantly hardened at the layer-1 level.
Privacy infrastructure developed along a parallel track. The 2018 Byzantium upgrade introduced elliptic-curve precompiles - EC-add, EC-mul, EC-pairing - that unlocked practical implementation of zero-knowledge SNARKs on Ethereum. These precompiles formed the foundation for every privacy protocol that followed, including Tornado Cash and Railgun.
Tornado Cash emerged as the most prominent early privacy tool, enabling users to break transaction links through a mixer model. At its peak, the protocol processed billions in deposits. But its success also attracted regulatory attention. In August 2022, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Tornado Cash, citing its alleged use in laundering over $7 billion in cryptocurrency, including funds stolen by North Korea's Lazarus Group. The designation froze associated wallet addresses and effectively criminalized interaction with the protocol for U.S. persons.
The sanctions created significant legal uncertainty across the ecosystem. GitHub suspended developer accounts. Circle froze USDC on associated addresses. The message was clear: privacy tools would face aggressive regulatory scrutiny regardless of their legitimate use cases.
In November 2024, a federal appeals court in the Fifth Circuit reversed the sanctions, ruling that OFAC had exceeded its statutory authority by sanctioning immutable smart contracts that no one controls or owns. By March 2025, OFAC officially lifted the sanctions against Tornado Cash. But the experience left lasting scars on developer confidence and illustrated the precarious position of privacy protocols that operate without compliance considerations.
Meanwhile, the data on security threats continued to worsen. Crypto hacking incidents in the first half of 2025 surpassed all of 2024, with approximately $2.47 billion stolen through 334 attacks. Wallet compromises proved particularly devastating, accounting for $1.7 billion in losses across just 34 incidents. Address poisoning attacks targeted 17 million victims on BNB Chain and Ethereum between 2022 and 2024, resulting in $83.8 million in losses. Phishing schemes using wallet drainers extracted approximately $500 million in 2024 alone.
These statistics underscore a fundamental reality: public blockchain transparency has become weaponized. Attackers use onchain analytics to identify valuable targets. They study transaction patterns to time phishing campaigns. They create poisoned addresses that match the first and last characters of legitimate recipient addresses, tricking users into copying malicious addresses from their transaction history.
Beyond financial attacks, the exposure of onchain identities has created physical dangers. According to security researcher Jameson Lopp, 2025 has already seen 32 reported physical attacks against crypto holders - "wrench attacks" - putting the year on track to surpass 2021's record. These incidents include kidnappings, mutilations, and ransom demands. The transparent nature of blockchain balances allows attackers to identify high-value targets with precision.
Against this backdrop, privacy transitioned from a philosophical preference to a practical necessity. But despite the sophisticated cryptography available, everyday users faced persistent usability challenges. Using privacy protocols required separate seed phrases. Multisig support did not exist in shielded pools. Public transaction broadcasters frequently failed. The experience remained fragmented, technical, and frustrating.
In April 2025, Buterin published "Why I Support Privacy," a comprehensive essay arguing that privacy is essential for freedom, order, and progress. He framed privacy as protection against both centralized surveillance and decentralized social pressure, noting that even legitimate public figures face harassment and judgment based on their financial activities. The essay also addressed the rise of artificial intelligence, warning that AI significantly amplifies the ability to collect and analyze personal data. Buterin argued that zero-knowledge proofs and other cryptographic tools now make it possible to design systems that are "privacy first" without sacrificing security or accountability.
The essay laid philosophical groundwork for what would follow: a concerted push to embed privacy into the practical layer of Ethereum's user experience.
What Is Kohaku?
Kohaku is best understood as Ethereum's new privacy-and-security toolkit for wallets. Developed by the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy Cluster - a 47-member team of researchers, engineers, and cryptographers coordinated by Blockscout founder Igor Barinov - Kohaku provides developers with an open-source framework for building secure, privacy-preserving wallets without relying on centralized third parties.
The project consists of several components. At its foundation is a modular software development kit (SDK) that offers reusable building blocks for private sending and receiving, safer key management and recovery, and risk-based transaction controls. Rather than requiring developers to construct an entire privacy stack from scratch, the SDK provides standardized patterns they can implement selectively or comprehensively.
Alongside the SDK, Kohaku includes a reference wallet implementation: a browser extension built as a fork of the Ambire wallet, designed initially for advanced users who want more control and privacy. This reference implementation demonstrates how the various privacy primitives work together in practice, serving as both a functional tool and a template for other wallet teams.
Crucially, Kohaku does not introduce a new mixer or a standalone blockchain. Instead, it plugs into existing Ethereum privacy infrastructure. The GitHub repository includes software packages for protocols like Railgun and Privacy Pools, enabling users to shield funds using battle-tested systems while benefiting from improved wallet-level integration.
For users, Kohaku's first version supports several key features. Private and public transaction modes coexist within a single wallet, allowing users to choose their desired level of visibility for each interaction. The framework supports separate accounts per decentralized application, reducing the ability to link activity across different services. Peer-to-peer broadcasting bypasses centralized RPC servers that can log transaction metadata. Tools to hide IP addresses and other network-level identifiers are integrated into the design.
The project also incorporates new recovery mechanisms that do not rely solely on seed phrases. Using zero-knowledge tools like ZK-Email and Anon Aadhaar, users can prove their identity to recovery systems without revealing personal information, enabling social recovery that preserves privacy.
Kohaku emerges from the Ethereum Foundation's broader Privacy Cluster initiative, which works across five key areas: private reads and writes for payments and interactions without surveillance, private proving for portable verification, private identities through selective disclosure, privacy experience improvements for everyday users, and institutional adoption through a dedicated task force. The cluster builds on over 50 open-source projects developed by the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team since 2018, including primitives like Semaphore for anonymous signaling, MACI for private voting, and zkEmail.
Deep Architecture Breakdown: How Kohaku Works
Understanding Kohaku's significance requires examining its technical architecture. The framework addresses privacy at multiple layers - key management, transaction shielding, and network-level metadata - while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum's existing infrastructure.
Multi-Key Wallet Architecture
Traditional cryptocurrency wallets rely on a single private key derived from a seed phrase. This creates a binary security model: either you have full control, or you have none. Kohaku introduces a more granular approach through multi-key architecture with defined roles and permissions.
Under this model, wallets can assign different keys to different functions. A viewing key might allow monitoring balances without spending authority. A spending key might require additional authentication for transactions exceeding certain thresholds. High-value transfers can trigger extra confirmations or multi-factor verification, implementing the kind of risk-based access controls that Buterin has advocated.
This architecture also enables new recovery patterns. Rather than relying exclusively on seed phrases - which remain the dominant single point of failure in crypto security - Kohaku's framework supports recovery through zero-knowledge proofs of identity. A user might recover access by proving they control a specific email address or government identity document, without revealing the document itself. The cryptographic proof demonstrates legitimacy without exposing personal information to the recovery system.
Opt-In Shielding and Private Transactions
Kohaku does not force all transactions into obscurity. Instead, it lets wallets offer public and private modes side by side. When users choose privacy, the wallet routes transactions through protocols like Railgun or Privacy Pools, generating fresh, unlinkable addresses for receiving funds and minimizing the onchain footprint.
Railgun uses zk-SNARKs to shield transaction details - token types, amounts, and parties involved - while allowing interactions with existing DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave. Users "shield" tokens by depositing them into Railgun's smart contracts, conduct private operations, and can later "unshield" to public addresses when needed. The protocol has been deployed across Ethereum, Polygon, BSC, and Arbitrum.
Privacy Pools, developed by 0xbow, add a compliance dimension through "association lists." These lists enable users to generate zero-knowledge proofs demonstrating that their funds do not originate from sanctioned or illicit sources - a "proof of innocence." The approach attempts to separate legitimate privacy-seeking users from bad actors, allowing wallets to block clearly illicit flows without stripping privacy from everyone else.
This selective visibility represents a pragmatic middle ground between maximal privacy and full transparency. It acknowledges the reality that some degree of compliance integration may be necessary for mainstream adoption while preserving privacy as the default for legitimate users.
Network-Level Privacy
Transaction privacy extends beyond what appears on the blockchain. When users broadcast transactions, check balances, or interact with decentralized applications, they typically route through Remote Procedure Call servers that can log IP addresses, view queries, and correlate activity. This metadata leakage undermines transaction privacy even when the onchain footprint is minimized.
Kohaku's roadmap addresses network-level privacy through several mechanisms. Integration with mixnets allows transactions to be relayed through multiple nodes, obscuring the originating IP address. Plans for zero-knowledge-powered RPC or browser integrations would allow users to read blockchain data without revealing their queries to service providers. The reference wallet integrates the Helios light client, which validates blockchain data locally without trusting centralized RPC providers - eliminating a key privacy leak in current infrastructure.
These measures reflect an understanding that privacy requires defense in depth. Shielding transaction amounts means little if an observer can correlate query patterns to user identities.
L2-Agnostic Design
Ethereum's roadmap increasingly emphasizes a rollup-centric future, where layer-2 networks handle most transaction execution while layer-1 provides security and data availability. In this environment, privacy must work consistently across multiple chains - otherwise, users face fragmented experiences depending on which rollup hosts their assets.
Kohaku's design is L2-agnostic, providing patterns and code that rollups and applications can all rely on. Instead of every network inventing its own stealth address system or recovery flow, Kohaku offers a shared baseline. This matters for both user experience and privacy guarantees, since larger privacy sets across more networks provide stronger anonymity.
Why Kohaku Matters in 2025
Kohaku's significance extends beyond its technical features. The framework represents an attempt to close the persistent gap between Ethereum's theoretical privacy capabilities and its practical user experience.
For years, research teams shipped faster proofs, more efficient cryptographic primitives, and safer contract patterns. But Buterin's complaints at Devcon were mundane: extra seed phrases, no multisig support in private pools, unreliable broadcasters, five clicks to do a private send, public balances that make users targets. These usability failures have pushed people back to centralized exchanges because they are simpler - a perverse outcome for a decentralized ecosystem.
By focusing on wallets, Kohaku targets the layer closest to users. It provides L2 networks and DApps something they have been missing: a shared, privacy-aware baseline. Rather than treating privacy as an advanced feature for power users, Kohaku makes it accessible as a default option that works within familiar interfaces.
The security implications are substantial. Wallet poisoning, phishing, and metadata tracking all exploit the transparency that Ethereum provides. When users can shield balances, generate fresh receiving addresses, and obscure their network activity, attack surface diminishes significantly. Self-custody becomes more competitive with centralized exchanges that offer privacy through internal ledgers rather than onchain transparency.
Institutional adoption presents another consideration. Traditional finance operates with significant privacy expectations - banks do not publish customer balances, and trading desks guard their positions jealously. As tokenized assets and institutional capital flow onto Ethereum, the absence of privacy creates barriers. The Ethereum Foundation has launched an Institutional Privacy Task Force to explore how privacy-preserving technologies can coexist with compliance requirements, aiming to publish guidelines that map privacy tools to frameworks used by businesses and auditors.
Regulatory and Ecosystem Implications
Kohaku arrives amid ongoing tensions between privacy advocates and regulatory authorities. The framework explicitly navigates this terrain by incorporating "responsible privacy" features alongside its core privacy-preserving capabilities.
Association lists exemplify this approach. By allowing users to prove their funds do not originate from sanctioned sources, Privacy Pools create a mechanism for compliance-friendly privacy. Users can interact with services that require such assurances without revealing their entire transaction history. The approach acknowledges that some visibility may be appropriate for certain contexts while maintaining default privacy elsewhere.
This pragmatism generates controversy within the community. Critics argue that any selective visibility normalizes financial surveillance and creates pressure to prove innocence - inverting the presumption that should protect legitimate users. They note that "unlawful sources" can be defined by governments with varying commitments to human rights, potentially weaponizing compliance mechanisms against dissidents or marginalized populations.
Defenders counter that practical privacy tools require navigating existing regulatory realities. They point to the Tornado Cash sanctions as evidence that maximalist approaches invite aggressive enforcement, whereas tools with compliance integration may achieve broader adoption and therefore deliver more meaningful privacy at scale.
The MiCA regulation in the European Union, fully applicable since December 2024, adds complexity. MiCA requires crypto-asset service providers to implement the Travel Rule, exchanging sender and recipient information with every transfer. National authorities across EU member states now enforce compliance requirements that could conflict with privacy-preserving tools.
Yet MiCA also creates incentives for innovation. Clear regulatory frameworks provide certainty that encourages institutional participation, and the ability to demonstrate compliance through cryptographic proofs rather than full disclosure could prove valuable to entities navigating these requirements. Kohaku's design allows selective disclosure - proving what is necessary without revealing what is not.
FATF guidance and potential U.S. legislative action present additional considerations. The regulatory landscape remains unsettled, and tools like Kohaku must maintain flexibility to adapt as requirements evolve.
Trade-Offs, Limitations, and Risks
Kohaku is not a complete solution, and its architecture introduces trade-offs that deserve careful consideration.
A wallet that juggles multiple keys, recovery paths, privacy toggles, different broadcasting options, and plug-in modules presents a larger attack surface than a simple seed-phrase-and-send setup. Each component introduces potential vulnerabilities. Misconfigurations or insecure add-ons could compromise privacy or security. The complexity demands serious audits and clear rules around upgrades and defaults.
User experience presents another challenge. Clarity between private and public flows is essential - users must understand when their actions are shielded and when they are not. Confusion could lead to inadvertent exposure, undermining the privacy guarantees users expect. The framework can suggest good patterns, but it cannot force wallet teams to ship clear interfaces.
Developer responsibility becomes significant under this model. Kohaku provides building blocks, but implementation quality varies. A poorly implemented wallet could misconfigure privacy protocols, leak metadata, or fail to properly manage key hierarchies. The ecosystem will need standards, audits, and best practices to ensure that Kohaku-based wallets actually deliver their promised protections.
Performance and cost considerations also apply. Zero-knowledge proofs, while dramatically more efficient than earlier generations, still impose computational and gas costs. Privacy features may increase transaction expenses, creating trade-offs that users must navigate based on their needs and resources.
Finally, regulatory pressure represents an ongoing risk. Even with compliance-friendly features, privacy tools may face future restrictions as governments develop more sophisticated approaches to blockchain oversight. Tools designed for current regulatory frameworks may require modification as those frameworks evolve.
How Kohaku Fits Into Ethereum's Roadmap
Kohaku aligns with several major themes in Ethereum's evolution, positioning privacy as a natural extension of the network's development rather than a niche add-on.
Account abstraction through ERC-4337 transforms wallets from simple key-holding mechanisms into programmable smart accounts. Deployed on Ethereum mainnet in March 2023, ERC-4337 enables features like custom signature schemes, gasless transactions through paymasters, and sophisticated recovery mechanisms without requiring consensus-layer changes. Kohaku's multi-key architecture and ZK-based recovery patterns build on these capabilities, leveraging smart account flexibility to implement privacy features that traditional externally owned accounts cannot support.
Stealth addresses, standardized through ERC-5564, provide another building block. These addresses allow senders to generate fresh, unlinkable receiving addresses for recipients, breaking the connection between public identity and incoming funds. Kohaku incorporates stealth address support as part of its receiving privacy features.
Decentralized identity represents a growing focus for Ethereum, with applications requiring verification of attributes - age, nationality, accreditation - without full disclosure. Zero-knowledge proofs enable selective disclosure, proving specific claims while maintaining overall privacy. Kohaku's framework supports these patterns through its private identity tooling.
The broader ZK-EVM progress also supports Kohaku's goals. As zero-knowledge technology becomes more efficient and accessible, the costs and complexity of privacy features decrease. Developments in zkSNARK circuits, developer tooling, and proof generation performance all contribute to making privacy practical at scale.
Buterin has described this trajectory as moving toward "privacy by default" - a state where private interactions become the norm rather than the exception. Kohaku represents a significant step on that path, translating protocol-level capabilities into user-facing tools.
Case Studies and Examples
Understanding Kohaku's practical impact requires examining concrete scenarios where its features address real user needs.
Consider a user wanting to send a private transfer. Under current infrastructure, they would need to download a separate privacy wallet, generate a new seed phrase, fund that wallet through a potentially traceable transfer, navigate the privacy protocol's interface, and hope public broadcasters function correctly. Buterin described this experience at Devcon: "It takes like five clicks to do a private send and withdraw. Last week, I had to fight against public broadcasters. It took about ten tries until eventually I figured out that it works after you turn on a VPN."
With Kohaku, the same user would toggle privacy mode within their existing wallet, select the recipient, and send. The wallet handles Railgun integration, stealth address generation, and peer-to-peer broadcasting automatically. The complexity shifts from user-facing to infrastructure-level.
Wallet implementations could leverage Kohaku's risk-tiered permissions for institutional use cases. A treasury management application might require single-signature approval for transactions under $10,000, dual-signature for amounts between $10,000 and $100,000, and three-of-five multisig with time delays for larger transfers. The framework's multi-key architecture supports these patterns natively rather than requiring custom development.
DApps themselves might leverage Kohaku patterns for privacy-respecting user interactions. A lending protocol could verify collateralization ratios using zero-knowledge proofs without exposing actual collateral values to other users. A decentralized exchange could match orders without revealing trading strategies to front-runners. A payroll system could distribute salaries to stealth addresses without publishing employee compensation publicly.
Metadata leaks that Kohaku aims to fix include IP address exposure through centralized RPC providers, query pattern analysis that correlates viewing activity with wallet ownership, and transaction timing that enables network-level surveillance. By integrating light clients, mixnets, and peer-to-peer broadcasting, the framework addresses these vectors systematically rather than leaving them to user workarounds like VPNs.
L2 adoption could follow a standardization pattern similar to token standards. Just as ERC-20 created a common interface for fungible tokens that all applications could support, Kohaku's patterns could create common privacy interfaces that work consistently across Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and other rollups. Users moving assets between networks would maintain privacy guarantees rather than losing them at each bridge.
Comparison With Other Privacy Efforts
Kohaku operates in an ecosystem with multiple privacy approaches, each addressing different aspects of the challenge.
Railgun focuses on shielded DeFi interactions. Users can swap, lend, and provide liquidity through privacy-preserving smart contracts while maintaining full custody of their assets. Railgun's integration into Kohaku allows its capabilities to reach users through a standardized wallet interface. RAIL token holders govern the protocol, and the system generates significant fee revenue.
Tornado Cash, despite its regulatory history, remains a functional mixer available on Ethereum. It provides transaction privacy by pooling deposits and breaking links between sources and destinations. However, it lacks the compliance features that protocols like Privacy Pools provide, and its regulatory experience may limit mainstream adoption.
Aztec Network takes a different approach entirely, building a privacy-first layer-2 network that enables private smart contract execution. Rather than adding privacy to existing Ethereum infrastructure, Aztec creates a separate environment where privacy is the default. The network launched its Ignition Chain on Ethereum mainnet in November 2025, positioning itself as the first fully decentralized L2 with programmable privacy. Aztec uses its Noir programming language to abstract cryptographic complexity, allowing developers to build applications that mix public and private elements.
Privacy coins like Monero and Zcash provide native privacy at the base layer of their respective networks. Monero defaults to private transactions through ring signatures and stealth addresses, while Zcash offers optional shielded transactions using zk-SNARKs. However, these networks operate separately from Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem, limiting their utility for users who want privacy within Ethereum's application layer.
Polygon Miden represents another approach: a STARK-based ZK-rollup that provides client-side proving for privacy and scalability. Unlike systems that prove on sequencer infrastructure, Miden enables users to generate proofs on their own devices, enhancing privacy by ensuring transaction details never leave user control. The project emphasizes programmable privacy through its own virtual machine architecture.
Noir, developed by Aztec, deserves mention as the programming language underlying much of the new privacy infrastructure. Noir abstracts zero-knowledge circuit complexity, allowing developers to write private application logic without deep cryptographic expertise. As Noir tooling matures, the barrier to building privacy-preserving applications decreases, enabling a broader ecosystem of privacy-respecting DApps.
Kohaku's distinctive contribution is wallet-level integration and UX standardization. While protocols like Railgun provide the underlying privacy technology, Kohaku provides the interface patterns that make them accessible. It does not compete with these tools - it incorporates them into a coherent user experience that other wallets can adopt. This positioning makes Kohaku complementary to the broader privacy ecosystem rather than an alternative to it.
Future Outlook: 2025-2027
Several developments will shape Kohaku's trajectory over the coming years.
Wallet adoption represents the most immediate question. Major wallet providers like MetaMask and Rainbow will decide whether to integrate Kohaku patterns - or develop competing approaches. Given the framework's origin within the Ethereum Foundation ecosystem and its endorsement by Buterin, integration seems likely, but implementation timelines and feature completeness will vary.
L2 standardization could amplify Kohaku's impact. If major rollups adopt consistent wallet privacy standards based on Kohaku's patterns, users would benefit from privacy that works similarly regardless of which network hosts their assets. This consistency would strengthen privacy guarantees by enlarging privacy sets across the ecosystem.
Regulatory developments will test Kohaku's compliance features. Enforcement actions, legislative changes, and international coordination through bodies like FATF will establish how privacy tools must operate to remain viable. Kohaku's selective disclosure and association list capabilities may prove valuable - or may face requirements for modification.
Private RPC infrastructure is expected to mature. Projects working on zero-knowledge proofs for data queries and mixnet integration for transaction broadcasting should deliver production-ready solutions that complement Kohaku's wallet-level features. These developments would close remaining metadata leaks in current infrastructure.
The intersection of privacy with real-world assets and institutional adoption will prove significant. As tokenized securities, real estate, and other traditional assets migrate onchain, privacy requirements from traditional finance will apply. Kohaku's institutional task force outputs and compliance tooling will be evaluated against these practical needs.
Final thoughts
Kohaku represents Ethereum's most realistic attempt at mainstream private user experience. It arrives at a moment when the network's transparent infrastructure has become not just philosophically uncomfortable but practically dangerous - enabling financial surveillance, physical attacks, and sophisticated fraud. It arrives after years of research that produced powerful cryptographic tools but left them stranded outside the reach of ordinary users.
The framework sits at the intersection of privacy, security, regulation, and wallet design. It does not solve every challenge or satisfy every constituency. Privacy maximalists will criticize its compliance features. Regulators may demand more visibility than it provides. Developers will implement it with varying quality. Users will navigate new complexity alongside new capabilities.
But Kohaku does something that previous privacy efforts have not: it provides a realistic path for privacy to become normal on Ethereum. Not experimental. Not niche. Not reserved for technical experts. Normal. A feature in the wallet you already use.
Because Kohaku originates from the core Ethereum ecosystem rather than a single startup, it has a realistic chance of becoming the reference model that other wallets match or surpass. Its patterns may become expectations. Its features may become defaults.
Buterin closed his Devcon presentation with characteristic directness: "We're in this very last mile stage. It's exactly at that last mile stage where we need to put a lot of really concerted effort into doing better."
Kohaku is that effort. Its success or failure will significantly shape whether Ethereum's privacy decade translates into private Ethereum - or whether the paradox persists.