PANews reported on December 2nd, citing CoinDesk, that Ethereum developers are refining a zero-knowledge protocol designed to provide stronger privacy guarantees for on-chain interactions. The project starts with a matching system similar to a "secret Santa," which is expected to evolve into a wider suite of private collaboration tools. Solidity engineer Artem Chystiakov revisited this research in a post on the Ethereum community forum on Monday, mentioning his initial work published on arXiv in January.

The idea is to recreate an anonymous gift-swapping game on Ethereum, where participants are randomly paired and no one knows who is sending gifts to whom. However, achieving this on a transparent blockchain requires addressing several long-standing issues surrounding randomness, privacy, and resistance to Sybil attacks. Chystiakov states that the core problem is simple: "Everything on Ethereum is visible to everyone," the blockchain cannot provide true randomness, and the system must prevent users from registering multiple times or assigning gifts to themselves. The proposed protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify the relationship between sender and receiver without revealing identity information, and uses transaction relayers to submit operations, so that no single wallet can be linked to a specific action. This type of zero-knowledge layer can be applied to anonymous voting, DAO governance, whistleblowing channels, and private airdrops or token distributions that avoid revealing receiver information.