Solidarity economics are core to our values at Bread, and this includes the ability to freely participate without the fear of having your identity revealed. Debanking and exclusion from traditional finance is a very real threat to many who operate online, especially in leftist spaces.
We are incredibly proud with the work done to contribute to onchain privacy, and grateful to be trusted by the Ethereum Foundation in building such an important tenet for the network going forward.
If you're interested in working with us (@breadcoop), please reach out to contact@bread.coop
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The Problem: Every Move You Make Is Public
When you use a standard Ethereum wallet, everything you do is visible to anyone who looks. Every token you send, every payment you receive, every wallet balance. Transparency was necessary by design , and is central to how blockchains prove wallet balances. But it is also a serious problem for anyone who does not want their financial life on display.
Thanks to the way standard crypto wallets work, the privacy leaks go deeper than the ledger. Connecting and transacting exposes your IP address and network activity to centralised service providers sitting between you and the blockchain.
Previous attempts to fix this required users to jump through technical hoops just to achieve basic transaction privacy, and most people never bothered. The honest conclusion from years of trying is that privacy cannot be bolted onto a wallet as an afterthought. It requires a ground-up rebuild.
The Vision: Privacy That Just Works
Kohaku is the Ethereum Foundation's answer to this problem. Led by Vitalik Buterin and Foundation protocol coordinator Nicolas Consigny, it is an open-source SDK and reference wallet designed to make private-by-default transactions normal and accessible across the Ethereum ecosystem. You can check out the video below from November 2025 where Vitalik presented the idea.
The goal is that any wallet team can build on Kohaku's toolkit and ship privacy features without reinventing the wheel. Kohaku handles the hard parts: private sends and receives, per-app account isolation so one application cannot track your activity in another, P2P transaction broadcasting that bypasses centralized nodes, and network-level traffic masking to prevent IP leaks. It is designed to be integrated by all wallet players with minimal fuss.
The project sits inside a larger Ethereum Foundation initiative called the Privacy Cluster, a team of 47 engineers, researchers, and cryptographers dedicated to making privacy a built-in property of the network, not a feature you have to opt into.
Where Bread Comes In
The Kohaku team needed a React specialist. Someone who could get inside an unfamiliar codebase, understand what it was doing, and improve it without breaking what was already working. Our frontend developer has been doing exactly that.
In close to two months, here is what has been contributed:
A new dashboard UI. The old wallet showed you one account at a time. You had to switch between accounts to see what was happening across your wallet. We built a consolidated view that shows your total balance and all account activity at once, public and private accounts together, on a single screen.
Significant performance improvements. The privacy stack (the part of the wallet that shields transactions and manages the link between your public and private accounts) used to take around a minute to load. By splitting a large, tangled codebase into smaller, cleaner files and optimising how the code runs, we cut that to 20 to 30 seconds.
A better dApp connection flow. When you connect a wallet to an application, the old Kohaku forced you to use an existing account, which defeats the purpose of having privacy tools. We changed this so that connecting to a dApp prompts you to create a fresh account on the spot, fund it immediately, and go. A clean address with no history attached, every time.
The Kohaku team reviewed the work and responded well. The partnership is continuing, with a new dashboard design in progress and conversations about expanding our scope on the project.
How the Privacy Actually Works
When you open a Kohaku wallet, you get two accounts automatically. One public account, visible to anyone, which works like any standard Ethereum wallet. The other is a private account, shielded from public view, is where the privacy lives.
The flow works in 2 parts.
1 - You start by sending funds from your public account into your private account. That move is the last traceable step.
2 - an create a brand new public account with no transaction history attached to it. When you send funds from the private account to that new address, there is no link anyone can follow back to you. The chain is broken.
This is built on two established privacy protocols:
Railgun, which is already production-ready in the Kohaku toolkit
Privacy Pools, which adds a compliance-friendly layer letting users prove their funds are legitimate without revealing their identity.
Our developer Blessing put it plainly: "I've always preferred it when nobody can trace a particular wallet to me. If I send funds to my private account, there is no way anybody can link that to my original address. Then if I send from the private account to a new public account, I've already broken that link for anybody to trace me." That is the design goal, and it is becoming real.
Financial privacy is not a niche technical concern. Nobody should have to expose their financial life just to participate in a new financial system. Kohaku is trying to change that for Ethereum, and we are glad to be part of it.
This is exactly the sort of work that Bread Cooperative specialises in. If your organisation is looking to build specialised blockchain tooling, we are on call to help. Email us at contact@bread.coop with any requests.
You can watch the full presentation by Nicolas Consigny at ETHCC below. Vitalik also called in, sit back and enjoy.