# Kohaku Wallet on Ethereum by Nicolas Consigny || Ethereum Privacy Stack, Devconnect 2025

- Speakers: Nicolas Consigny
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2026-01-09
- Duration: 12:27
- Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, privacy stack, devconnect, 2025, eps25, pse, privacy stewards of ehtereum, ethereum foundation, ef, Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-FMjYFXctV4c
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMjYFXctV4c

## Description

Nicolas Consigny from Ethereum Foundation introduces Kohaku Wallet -  set of primitives that provide wallet with security and privacy running on Ethereum. 

Ethereum Privacy Stack is a global privacy summit during Devconnect 2025 bringing together Ethereum builders, protocol maintainers, and advocates. 
Featuring Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, Andy Guzman, Polymutex, Ameen Soleimani, and 30+ speakers on 2 stages, celebrating privacy acceleration.

Ethereum Privacy Stack: 
http://eps25.web3privacy.info

Organized by 
Web3Privacy Now & Privacy Stewards of Ethereum

Web3Privacy now collective: http://web3privacy.info
Privacy Stewards of Ethereum: https://pse.dev/

## Transcript

[applause] Thank you. Hello, I'm Nikico. I work at the Ethereum Foundation where I am a protocol team lead and Kohaku co-lead. And today I'm going to introduce you to Kohaku. Kohaku is a set of primitives that provide wallet with security and privacy. Kohaku core goals are an SDK that exposes strong privacy and security primitives, a reference implementation of a browser extension that ships on top of that SDK. The goal is to showcase the features that are available in the SDK, but it is also various collaborations with other wallets that are going to implement the SDK either in full or in parts. So you can see this SDK as a buffet for wallet and they can choose only the feature that they care about. So development of the wallet and the SDK will be mainet first and progressively adding supports for layer 2 that are privacy focused. So with Vitalik we presented the project on Sunday at the cipher punk congress here in Benosirus. We faced some AV difficulties that Twitter enjoyed. But in the end, we managed to play the video. People liked it, but I will not try my luck again today. So, I decided to decided to play it safe. Um, and we will not be playing a demo video. But don't you worry, we will be publishing the complete demo um in the next few days. So, actually, this is a li there is a video. It's not Kohaku, but it's a a cool guy. You have to decide as a as a engineering team or or as an innovator to say, you know what, I don't need to change the world overnight. I'm going to change the world over the next 50 years. I don't need to build the killer product overnight. I just need to build a winning product. And the goal of winning is so that you can play again. It's just like pinball. Okay? If you could just play well enough to get another game, you could be there for a long time. Most companies just need to realize that in fact this is a long road and that >> yes indeed it's a very long road. I used to be a top tier competitive g gamer so Jensen played a very important role in my life and yeah to me it's all about winning. I'm also a wallet guy and I've been looking at wallets for quite a while now and like many of you I feel that wallet are not innovating enough and not winning enough in this ecosystem. So this is why we decided to start Kohaku with a simple goal in mind improve security and privacy and to do to do it now using what's available on Ethereum and to start winning in a very simple way. So we have Kohaku a browser extension as a reference implementation. It's a fork of Empire, an existing wallet which has been a pioneer in the account abstraction space. And we went for a very simple flow, a regular send flow, but ours is slightly different. You can use it to go directly into a privacy protocol. So you simply click there and you get there. You get a toggle where you can choose the privacy protocol that you want to use. all in the same UX that you're used to. And you can sign a transaction business as usual. And voila, that's it. Very simple. The same as you're used to. We could have sent any ERC20 uh through rail gun, but I went for a screenshot of an e ether deposit into privacy pools. Why? Simply because ether is the superior asset. In this world, there is one and only native asset that powers the world computer. So, as I've seen a few scams going around in the last few day, I think it's important to mention that Kohaku will never have a token. And the ticker is east. It always has been. So, you can have a very simple product that brings a lot of value to users without going too crazy and trying to change the world overnight. So we also implemented a feature to connect to DAPs in a privacy preserving way nudging you to create a new account every time you use a different app. So many of you have experienced connecting to a DAP and misclicking and simply by a misclick you can actually reveal an account that you never wanted to connect. So we are trying to prevent that and all of this can be done enabling the Iliosite client within the browser which allows you to remove the trust that you place usually in RPCs. So in a regular wallet you send RPC request and this is uh you have to trust this data from a somewhat centralized server. What IOS does is that it syncs to a previous checkpoint. It verifies the checkpoints AC uh against various sources and then from there it syncs every block. So you don't have to worry about the data being fetched from a somewhat centralized server anymore. And voila, victory. In less than four months, we have a first massive win thanks to a collaboration between multiple teams. Wonderland who laid down the foundation to implement privacy protocols. Seal 911, shout out to Robert, who implement who did the oneap per account connection system, and Cass who has been doing a tremendous job adapting the rail gun SDK. Wh the slides are okay again technical issue. Our second win is integrating a job hardware signer on the previous screen that you've seen so that you're able to sign um rail gun transactions directly from your hardware. So this is a massive unlock and a massive feat realized by the Zenox and Rail gun team. A lot of advanced users want to be able to use privacy protocols directly from their hardware and so this is what we will enable with Kohaku. So this is yet another win. Please reach out to us if you are a privacy dev and you want to work on such hardware integration. So, all right. [snorts] So, we have our third win, which is OpenLV, a secure peer-to-peer JSON connectivity kit. Uh, it's a simple connection kit that is privacy first. Don't doesn't retain your data, doesn't know who you are, which user agent you use, and it simply works. It's still a work in progress, but you can check it today at openlv.sh and try to connect your account right now. It simply works. The documentation is available already to help you get started. So, if you're a wallet dev or a DAP, just check it out. And massive shout out to Luke from my team at Berm Foundation and his friends from Vitri Labs that have been working on this. Check their repo. They're doing amazing open source projects. Again, another victory in less than four months. Fourth big win is the universal hardware app giving us uh open signing. So this app runs on on a virtual machine that is portable across hardware. So basically what it what this means is that this application is able to run on different hardware. It can be a keystone as you see here. It can be a key card and in the future it could even be a small little Firefly a do-it-yourself hardware that is worth less than $5. So this is a massive win for the hardware wallets uh ecosystem in Ethereum because this allows us uh to collaborate together on a new application instead of having teams that are isolated and that develop an application by themselves without having Ethereum research uh priorities as their main priority. So massive shout out to um BTJ Chip from ZKOX who has been uh working on this. If this model is to succeed, this will revolutionize uh the way we create hardware application not only in Ethereum but also across every chain. So this would be yet another um coronation of glory as they say here in Argentina. As a French person, it hurts me to put this slide, but I had to I had to adapt to the locals. So, what's next? Obviously, we will try to keep winning and to do so, we will start with even more collaborations. So, if you're a wallet, please reach out. Our doors are open to you and we will be working with various actors um such as this guy who's working on a very cool tour library. Uh this library allows you to directly send your wallet traffic through to um it is very very usable. It works today. A lot of wallets implemented it. I think Hinkle wallet already has it working. Um, any wallet could be using it today and just enabling a tour feature within the wallet. Then we will implement a post a postquantum kill switch feature. So a few days ago you may have seen Vitalic went viral when saying that postquantum computers could be ready by 2028. Well, we actually have an ongoing PR from the AA team to have a 4337 compliant postquantum account. So actually if we work hard uh we might be postquantum ready on the execution layer even before 2026 and then we have the privacy road map to execute. So it's a somewhat simple road map that we will be following. To help improve privacy on it, we will be focusing on high ROI for the ecosystem. We will be publishing descriptions of the challenges uh that we face so that you can take them and they're open to the public. And last but not least, we are going to be grinding to prepare a public activation on testn net at ECC in can. And this this time can be in April. So it's coming soon. Be ready for it. And thanks for your attention. See you all in CAN. [applause]