TL;DR:
- Buterin endorsed Kohaku Wallet’s per-dapp address feature, calling global unique addresses a “norm that needs to be broken.”
- Kohaku has already integrated Railgun and Privacy Pools, and its alpha.21 version enabled ERC-4337 relaying for private transactions on Ethereum.
- Kohaku’s improvements, EIP-8250, and account abstraction are scheduled for the Hegotá hard fork, expected in the second half of 2026.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly endorsed a feature developed by Kohaku Wallet that automatically assigns a unique blockchain address for each decentralized application a user interacts with. Buterin described per-dapp address isolation as “a really important starting point” for building meaningful onchain privacy. Credit for the development was attributed to contributors kassandraETH and ncsgy.
The problem this feature addresses is structural: most Ethereum users operate from a single persistent address, which allows any external observer to track the complete history of tokens, protocols used, and transactions made simply by querying public chain data.
.@kassandraETH @ncsgy and others have been working hard for nearly a year on Kohaku.
Kohaku's goal is to make two twin properties:
* Security (and trustlessness)
* Privacy (read and write)a reality on the access layer.
Security and privacy on Ethereum must be normal. https://t.co/qiegdhjLiM
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 26, 2026
Each time a user connects to a new application, the wallet generates a fresh address, which breaks the onchain link between their activity on a decentralized exchange, a lending protocol, or any other dapp. This makes it significantly harder for data aggregators or surveillance infrastructure to build a complete financial profile of the user.
Kohaku Wallet
Kohaku is an open-source initiative backed by the Ethereum Foundation that aims to give wallet developers modular tools to implement protected transaction pools and private query infrastructure within existing wallets, without requiring users to navigate between separate privacy protocols. The initiative has already integrated tools such as Railgun and Privacy Pools, abstracting their technical complexity so that everyday users can execute protected transactions from their usual wallets.
The most recent technical milestone was the release of kohaku-eth/railgun v0.0.1-alpha.21, which enabled relaying via ERC-4337 for private Railgun transactions. ERC-4337 is Ethereum’s account abstraction standard, and routing protected transactions through its mempool reduces reliance on protocol-specific infrastructure, which has historically acted as a bottleneck for large-scale privacy adoption.
Buterin and Ethereum Charted a Roadmap Toward Privacy
This feature is part of a privacy roadmap that Buterin outlined in 2026, composed of three initiatives: account abstraction combined with FOCIL, Keyed Nonces via EIP-8250, and Kohaku. Most of these improvements are scheduled for the Hegotá hard fork, expected in the second half of 2026. “We have accelerated enough narratives. Let’s accelerate the cypherpunk privacy reality,” Buterin wrote this week.
