Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, recently launched the Kohaku privacy and compliance solution, which is quite interesting.The key is that it is different from previous solutions such as Tornado and Railgun. It uses zk and elliptic curve cryptography generation technology:
To put it simply, in the past, Ethereum transfer Alice initiated an on-chain transfer to Bob’s public address, and everyone saw that Bob received the money.Now Bob will generate a “one-time temporary address” to collect the money. Bob can legally use the money, but no one can know that the money belongs to Bob..
Previous privacy solutions, such as Tornado, Railgun, Aztec, etc., use currency mixing or ZK solutions. All money is routed to a black box. Due to the large transaction capacity of the box, no one can see the real transfer path of the money when it comes out.
Privacy Solutions from KohakuIt is to ask Bob to generate a Stealth Meta-Address master key, and then a one-time payment address (based on elliptic curve cryptographic pairing technology) will be temporarily and randomly generated when receiving payment. Everyone can see that this temporary address has received money, but the address will become invalid when used up. Bob, who really owns the master key, can control the money and claim it at some point in the future.
A little abstract technical understanding: There will be a master stealth key pair (public key + private key) resident in Bob’s wallet. When Alice transfers money to Bob, Alice/Bob’s wallet will generate a one-time temporary private key, and use Bob’s public key and this temporary private key to perform an elliptic curve algorithm to calculate a shared secret, and then use this to derive a new and completely random one-time address.Alice sends money to this address. No one on the chain can tell that it is related to Bob, but Bob can control the money with a simple calculation using his master private key.
above.
It seems that only elliptic curve cryptography technology is needed and has nothing to do with ZK.But if you use Kohaku technology to transfer money to an institution with compliance requirements, you may be required to attach a ZK certificate to prove the source and true identity of the money, but at the same time you do not want to expose your privacy.ZK lightweight verification comes in handy.
Therefore, the combination of elliptic curve cryptography technology + ZK technology has upgraded the anonymity solution into a compliant privacy protection solution.Just think about the past, the reason why the coin mixing pool solution was blocked was because the absolute “anonymity” solution gave opportunities for money laundering and other crimes. The technology combination solution of privacy address + ZK is the optimal solution to cater to the regulatory trend.
Believe in some ETHing!






