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At Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2 on November 16, 2025, Vitalik Buterin used his keynote “Kohaku: Wallet Privacy On Ethereum” to deliver a sharp verdict on the state of Ethereum privacy: the cryptography works, but the user experience is failing.
He began by reminding the audience that Ethereum has spent a decade investing in privacy and security infrastructure. He pointed to the elliptic-curve precompiles added in 2018—“EC-add, EC-mul, EC-pairing”—as the foundation for protocols such as Tornado Cash and Railgun, and cited the Privacy & Scaling Explorations team’s work on zkSNARK protocols, developer tooling and application-layer experiments.
On the security side, he called the 2016 DAO hack an event that “really catalyzed the
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