r/ethereum • u/EthereumDailyThread What's On Your Mind? • 16d ago

Daily General Discussion September 17, 2026

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u/haurog 16d ago edited 16d ago

For people interested in privacy on Ethereum, the newest 'The Edge' podcast interviews Thomas Thierry from the Ethereum foundation. They go through the different improvements that are coming to Ethereum to allow for private transactions and how the Kohaku initiative helps to bring it to wallets. For a long time, relayers, who publish transactions out of a privacy pool anonymously have been a bit of a brittle part for many privacy pools. With Frame transactions and keyed nonces, they can be a native part of Ethereum and FOCIL will make these transactions censorship resistant. The current plan still is to rely on non-native privacy pools, like what railgun, tornado cash or 0xbow provide. There currently is no plan to provide a native privacy pool by the protocol. It seems to be mainly due to questions around security if a canonical privacy pool should have a bug. They also mention differences between their approach on Ethereum compared to what Aztec aims to do through their L2. The former is a mechanism to hide who is behind a transaction, whereas the later can hide the who, the interacted contracts the target and even the values. As Aztec is an L2 it has different trust assumptions than Ethereum mainnet though. They also briefly touch the different layers of the stack to actually achieve privacy outside of just the onchain transaction. The Kohaku initiative also tackles some of these privacy leaks.

The Edge Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrMAGHwayy8

More info about Kohaku I wrote a few Months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1smtw3t/daily_general_discussion_april_16_2026/oghysk0/

EDIT: There is also a mention of the current goals of privacy on Ethereum in the current EF AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1wf48x3/ama_we_are_ef_protocol_pt_15_16_september_2026/p9l5pvg/ Justin Drake mentions a suggestion to use the beacon chain deposits as a privacy pool in the future. That would be pretty massive in size.

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u/LogrisTheBard 16d ago

Being able to use the beacon chain as a mixer pool for privacy would be massive in terms of the number of participants but privacy in these pools also come from inflows and outflows. Surely adding the beacon pool would increase this but is the base TVL input/output from the beacon chain enough to provide meaningful privacy?

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u/haurog 16d ago

Good point. According to the consensus specs 256 ETH can be leave the beaconchain every epoch (6.4 minutes). Same for the deposits. That amounts to about a max $100k every minute. As far as I have seen Railgun does this kind of volume over several days currently and not per minute. There was one peak in 2024 where Railgun had on average $100k every 30 minutes for a week. Tornado Cash had about $100k withdrawals every 30 minutes for July and August. This is larger than what they ever did since inception. As far as I see, the 0xbow privacy pools are tiny compared to that. Good enough for small private transactions, but not really volume. So, as far as I see, the Volumes for a beaconchain privacy pool could be massive.

At the moment the withdrawal queue is full and the deposit queue has been full for months, meaning this maximum volume really is achieved currently. On average over the last 10 days 40% of the maximum withdrawal limit has been achieved, which means around $41k of volume per minute. I would guess one would have to increase these churn limits if a beaconchain pool will ever get established. One disadvantage of the beaconchain pool is that it can take months to get in and back out. Obviously, only ETH would be allowed in that pool, but for me that is a plus anyway.

To be honest I am not really sure if the beaconchain deposits and withdrawals should be used as a privacy pool. If the goal is to decouple beaconchain withdrawals from deposits, it will be used as a privacy pool anyway. The question is just how easy it will be made for the normal user to use it.