Ethereum Foundation Funds Kohaku Wallet Development and Railgun Integration to Boost Privacy
Key Facts
The Ethereum Foundation continues to support the development of privacy tools for the network’s wallets through Kohaku, a project the official platform describes as a reference implementation of a privacy-preserving wallet and an open-source software package developers can adopt as a model. In its Q2 2026 ecosystem support allocations update, published on August 18, the foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program listed a grant to continue work on the Kohaku wallet interface and integrate the Railgun package. The grant description specifies work on restructuring the browser extension and integrating Railgun, with the aim of improving maintainability and modularity and enabling community contributions. The update also listed another grant to improve the privacy experience in the wallet interface on Sepolia and integrate Privacy Pools and Railgun. These steps indicate funding for the development of project components; the sources do not establish that existing wallets have adopted privacy by default or that a new feature is available to all users.
Kohaku’s approach is based on making tools available for developers to choose and integrate into their products, rather than announcing a uniform change to wallet settings. In an article published by ethereum.org on July 2, 2026, the platform framed wallet privacy as a product-design choice and urged developers to make the private path the default while leaving the choice to the user. The article says the Kohaku package brings together primitives including shielded balances, mixing tools and light clients, allowing a wallet to adopt them without rebuilding every protocol from scratch. This gives developers a common starting point for integrating privacy features, while the decision to offer them to users remains part of each wallet’s design. The Ethereum Foundation said in a protocol update published on August 29, 2025, that its team was developing Kohaku in collaboration with external teams, with the goal of creating a package of privacy and security primitives and an advanced wallet built on them.
In the first phase announced by the foundation, the project focused on a browser extension for advanced users, introducing functions for private transfers, addresses and balances. Kohaku’s roadmap says the reference extension is built as a fork of Ambire, and that wallet teams will choose for themselves which features to offer users. The roadmap lists among its target features the private sending and receiving of funds across multiple protocols, as well as private payment requests and a separate account for each decentralized application. These functions outline the planned scope of work and do not mean that all of them have been completed or launched for users. ethereum.org also listed the project among privacy applications and said its page was updated on October 22, 2026.
But the project remains under development, according to the warning published in its GitHub repository: "Some parts of this project are still a work in progress and are not ready for production use. The packages contain unaudited code." This notice means Kohaku should not be considered a completed product or safe for production use at this time. The repository includes an abstraction layer for connection providers that supports ethers, viem, Helios and Colibri, reflecting the project’s effort to accommodate multiple technical options. It also features a package for implementing a post-quantum ERC-4337 account. These components are part of the project architecture presented, while the repository’s warning about unaudited code remains in effect.