# Private Proof of Burn by Shahriar (WORM) || Ethereum Privacy Stack, Devconnect 2025

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2026-02-09
- Duration: 08:46
- 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
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-WyXIB76WJ1I
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyXIB76WJ1I

## Description

...

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

So hello everyone. I'm Shahar. I'm a co-founder of Z zerosavvi. It's a researcher nonprofit research organization in UK and also uh I'm a research associate in Alen Institute. I'm super excited to talk about this uh private proof of burn and like how using that you don't have to you know scream that you are going private on chain um it's a backbone of uh many new interesting protocols privacy protocols and yeah let's head to the problem so the idea is that uh you know privacy probably will never be as equal as invisibility we want to make it you know as close invisibility as possible and no matter like what type of privacy protocol that you are using at some point you need to interact some you know on chain in a different way than just a normal transaction either you have to interact with a contract or you know there are some proofs involved anyway you will trigger some sort of signal that might leak some information about you and this can be very serious when for example you're a big firm you want to go into the big auctions or you know you're a big company, you want to handle your you know salaries of your employees privately. These things can be serious and can be captured by your business enemies or anything. So it's important like like how can we make it as invisible as possible just to look like a normal transaction. Um okay so the proof of burn it's actually very old concept. It it existed from the early years in Bitcoin and there were even very interesting blockchains built on it like yeah they it was involved in the like consensus of the blockchain and everything but it was uh like academically formalized in back in 2020. Uh definitely check that paper if you're a cryptographer and yeah that has very interesting properties proven about this. Uh but things got very interesting u especially after like August 2023 when some people proposed EIP753 and introduced the concept of zero knowledge wormholes and we will see like what is it about u so okay the burning what we know what we are very familiar with is that you know you just send your assets into address 0000 why we all know that this is an burning mechanism is that of course we are aware that it is super hard to find the secret key that can withdraw from this address. Everybody knows that and I'm not going into the detail like why it's secure but but but yeah it is like this and but uh you know it is proven that it's not only about like having an obvious address. You can use any sort of secure commitment like we call like think about it as a just random secure random function that it's just other than the standard address derivation method in Ethereum. So this way if you send the transfer to that type of address you and you will know that it's impossible to withdraw from this address. Uh and this can be done in any ways like you can say that for example yeah I'm Shahar my vote is for example two and then you hash this string and this is of course will result in an address that you can burn into you know that your funds are gone and like okay why would you do that and this is where this EIP comes and this is the very interesting part is that you can prove that you have burnt this token and then you will keep this address private So this way this is the whole concept of private proof of burn and very simplified version of it like this is not perfectly secure but like this is just simplified version of it just saying that um you prove that oh you know I know a burn address that falls into this type of category of the address and this address has positive balance in the latest uh state root of the blockchain. So basically this is the whole concept of this how this CK works. Uh and the very good thing about this type of proof is that it is uh very composable friendly like in terms of the cryptography it is uh it is not proven in UC if you are into these things I'm I'm really interested in to prove this in UC. So contact me if you are into those things but you can combine this proof with interesting other proofs like proof of innocence. So you can prove that oh my funds are not part of a bad acting or I'm not a hacker and then you can burn your vote. Uh and then you can participate for example in a voting or you can participate in a privacy pool that it's authentic. It is like there's no way that other bad actors could satisfy those kind of constraints. And even if you want to show that you can actually show that oh my transactions are not burned transactions or you can actually reveal it securely only to one person that how you have burned it. U so if you revisit the problem is that with this kind of technique uh you don't need to interact directly with a contract or a pro a privacy protocol. you can burn your address, you know, your assets. And this is just a normal looking transfer with the to just a normal looking address. There's no everything looks random. And then uh the very good thing about this kind of protocol is your anonymity set. This is like the biggest anonymity set that you can achieve at at the moment. And this is like everyone every address on chain that hasn't have any outgoing transaction will be part of your anonymity set. This is a very big anonymous set and this is the cool thing about this. So there are some uh current active research going on in this uh using this kind of protocol and uh of course the very first one the obvious one is the EIP itself. So the EIP was like saying that okay you know you you burn your ETH you prove it and then maybe you get something back. So for example if it was integrated for example to Ethereum itself you could be able to remint Ethereum again. So EIP proposed something like this. This is a very interesting uh protocol itself and the followup of that EIP is the guys behind that actually worked on uh do building B warm and the idea is that you do the same thing like you burn your ETH you prove it and then you get some token called burnt ETH and then with this they built a you know a a very decentralized tokconomics around it that you participate in a mining pool with your burnt Ethereum and then yeah it's a very active u project now it's going on I'm not going into the details of the tokconomics behind it but it's live on sepoleia it's not on mainet yet uh and yeah it got a lot of attention from the community it they have burnt more than like uh 200,000 Ethereums in sepoleio now it's it's an interesting uh concept of tokconomics and yeah definitely go check their GitHub and recently like this is the the best implementation possible for proof of burn proof of private proof of burn and it's been recently audited by the elect. So this is a very s like promising implementation. Yeah, a lot of people have been contributing to this repository. Uh and as I said like you can see the burn addresses as type of commitments on chain. So it doesn't have to be always about the like privacy coin. Uh it can be anything. You can commit to votes. You can commit to your bids on auction. And this is uh another thing that uh we've been working on and you can check the paper. It's formally proven to be secure. So yeah, this is some another project that is going on and thank you. Privacy is normal and hopefully soon it will be warm too. Thank you.