Ethereum's Privacy Proliferation

gm Bankless Nation,
Privacy is crypto's main unfinished business.

As such, in today’s essay David Hoffman highlights the Ethereum Foundation’s bold new Kohaku wallet effort, which has the potential to redefine what privacy looks like onchain.

After that primer, we’ve got our usual roundup of weekly links covering the latest developments from across Ethereum, plus a fresh Weekly Rollup episode to close things out.

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Ironically, the crypto industry has never valued privacy nearly as much as we should.

Maybe privacy is treated as a sacred concept, but to date, most users, builders, and investors have left it on the backburner.

Privacy is vitally important, though, and neglecting it so far has been a critical failure of the crypto industry. As part of its growing efforts to respond here, the Ethereum Foundation notably just introduced Kohaku, a new privacy wallet design.

Kohaku is a "reference wallet," forked from Ambire and built by the EF and other ecosystem teams, that has the potential to become a next-gen standard in Ethereum wallet circles.

The wallet isn't intended (initially) as a mass-market consumer app, but rather as an initial demonstration of how multiple privacy primitives can be woven together.

The big idea is that once we have a successful privacy wallet implementation with enough adoption by users and developers, we finally have a solid foot-in-the-door for the ecosystem to start elevating privacy solutions into more parts of the tech stack. 

All that said, some of the features that Kohaku wants to deliver include: 

• Private sending & receiving.
• IP address / RPC leakage protection.
• Separate accounts per-dapp / isolation.
• Social recovery via zero-knowledge primitives.

These features are what should be standard across all wallets — it's just that no one has put them all together yet. The EF is finally throwing up its hands and saying, “If no one else will do it, we will!” 

How much adoption is left on the table because of a privacy-less ecosystem? 

Degen gamblers and speculators are happy to trade privacy for wealth, but building a mature and consumer-ready ecosystem requires privacy as a first-class citizen in crypto's tech stack. 

The EF has identified a major market failure, and it's moving on it. Kohaku is one significant prong in this blitz. And getting things right here is critically important, not just for the industry but the future of humanity itself! 

Ultimately, the successful execution and adoption of Kohaku and its future spinoffs can bring immense tailwinds to the Ethereum ecosystem, as this will be an Ethereum Virtual Machine innovation first and foremost. 

Users want solutions like this, and institutions fundamentally need them. Most companies simply cannot do things onchain unless they have assurances that they can keep their business secrets private from their competitors. 

My grand takeaway is that Kohaku's arrival is very bullish, and bullish in multiple senses. I’m excited for a crypto future where privacy is built-in and streamlined by default and not an opt-in UX encumbrance.

It’s about time. 2025 is far too late in crypto's evolution for privacy to not be the standard option for those who choose to live a bankless life. 

Onwards! —David

📈 The Asset

• BitMine brought its holdings to 2.83M ETH
• Ethereum is the fastest growing stablecoin chain
• Robinhood EU launched tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs
• SharpLink’s staked treasury is generating ~$370k worth of ETH per day
• Treasury firms and ETFs now hold over 10% of ETH supply (12.48M ETH)

🏛️ The Protocol

• Nethermind rolled out Fusaka-ready configs for the Holesky, Hoodi, and Sepolia testnets
• Pooja Ranjan recapped ACDE #222 on Fusaka updates, successful BPO testnet fork, and scaling discussions
• Ready for Merge, a new podcast on Ethereum and Bitcoin protocol development, launched

📱 The Apps

• Coinbase enabled DEX trading for all U.S. app users except New York
• Flaunch unveiled Groups, which allow users or communities to connect and earn from networks of tokens
• Fluid announced The Fluid Reserve, which will kick off FLUID buybacks
• Maple expanded to Linea
• Rainbow rolled out perps trading via Hyperliquid

🐸 The Culture

• Base revealed its Onchain Summer Awards winners
• CurrencyCoin, one of the oldest tokens on Ethereum, launched a Uniswap pool through a new wrapper
• ethereum.org announced the results of its 2025 Ethereum Translatathon event
• Ethereum recapped top September launches and upgrades
• Linda Xie’s “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story” documentary streaming soon on Amazon Prime Video

🔏 The Privacy Stack

• The EF published a primer on its commitment to privacy
• Fileverse dDocs added anonymous access and private sharing via email, ENS, or 0x
• Privacy Pools now lets users generate accounts using their existing wallets
• Kohaku, an Ethereum full-stack privacy wallet, introduced its codebase
• Succinct introduced “Private Proving” for privacy-preserving ZK proof generation

💽 The Tech

• L2s set a new ATH of 1.4B transactions in Q3 2025
• Rhinestone introduced Warp, a new wallet abstraction service
• Sudeep Biswas published an Awesome ERC-8004 repo
• Uniswap Labs acquired Guidestar, a team focused on AMM designs research
• World Chain accounts for 27% of Ethereum blobs
• ZKSync introduced its Atlas upgrade, which is capable of powering more than 15k TPS on the L2

In this week’s Rollup, Ryan and David ask what’s really powering markets: a debasement bid or an AI bubble?

They also break down gold at $4k, BTC’s quiet ATH, and BNB’s surge to #3, plus ICE’s $2B Polymarket deal, ETH staking ETFs going live, and more.

Tune in to catch up on all the latest crypto intrigues! 👇

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