The official account of the Ethereum Foundation has announced that at 2 PM UTC tomorrow, there will be a live stream titled "Ethereum Builders Live," featuring foundation members Jason Chaskin (@jchaskin22) and Kassandra (@kassandraETH) presenting the Kohaku CLI privacy tool, along with a live demonstration of anonymous transfers across protocols such as Railgun and Tornado Cash.

Kohaku is a privacy wallet reference implementation project led by the Ethereum Foundation, providing an SDK that allows developers to integrate privacy protocols directly into wallet interfaces without relying on centralized relays or RPC services. The first alpha version was released in May this year, achieving privacy transaction relays based on the ERC-4337 memory pool, with teams including Ambire, Railgun, Helios, and the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy and Scaling Research Group (PSE) participating in the collaboration.

Currently, privacy protocols integrated into the Kohaku toolbox include Railgun, and Tornado Cash and Privacy Pools are also on the integration list. Notably, Tornado Cash was previously sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), but was removed from the sanctions list after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2025 that OFAC lacked the authority to sanction immutable smart contract code. This ruling is the basis for the Ethereum Foundation's current ability to publicly integrate Tornado Cash into its official projects.

After the Ethereum Foundation announced the integration of the Railgun protocol into the Kohaku toolbox in May, the native token RAIL surged nearly 300%, marking the fastest increase since the token's issuance in 2021, with its market cap reaching approximately $300 million. According to DefiLlama data, the Railgun protocol's annual fee income exceeds $5 million.

In line with this privacy roadmap, the Ethereum Foundation has formed a privacy technology team of about 47 members. The Railgun community has also developed a zero-knowledge multi-signature wallet prototype at the request of Vitalik Buterin, with plans to demonstrate it at the Devconnect conference in Argentina next month. The Kohaku roadmap indicates that goals for 2026 and beyond include zero-knowledge account recovery, quantum-resistant signatures, and support for universal hardware wallets, with the long-term direction being to integrate privacy capabilities directly into Ethereum's account abstraction protocol.

The direct impact of this roadmap on the market is reflected in the logic of "official endorsement = protocol repricing": Railgun was previously a relatively niche privacy protocol, but once adopted by the Ethereum Foundation's official SDK as a default integration, it signals to the market that "this protocol will gain broader wallet distribution channels," leading to a rapid influx of funds into the RAIL token and driving a short-term price surge. Beneficiaries include Railgun and its token holders, while the attention on other protocols like Tornado Cash and Privacy Pools, which were also included in the integration list, has increased, whereas similar privacy protocols that have not been selected for integration by the foundation may be marginalized in this round of "official selection effect."

Source: Public Information