Ethereum developers are refining a zero-knowledge protocol designed to bring stronger privacy guarantees to on-chain interactions, starting with a “Secret Santa”-style matching system that could evolve into a broader toolset for private coordination.
Solidity engineer Artem Chystiakov resumed the research on Monday in an Ethereum Community Forum post pointing to work he first published in January on arXiv.
The idea aims to recreate the anonymous gift exchange game on Ethereum, where participants are randomly matched without anyone learning who is sending to whom. However, doing so on a transparent blockchain requires solving several long-standing issues around randomness, privacy, and Sybil resistance.
Chystiakov said the core issues are straightforward: “Everything on Ethereum is visible to everyone,” blockchains don’t provide true randomness, and the system must prevent users from registering multiple times or awarding gifts to themselves.
The proposed protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify sender-receiver relationships without revealing identities, and a transaction relay to submit moves so that individual wallets cannot be linked to actions.
In the proof-of-concept, participants register their Ethereum addresses in a smart contract and commit to a unique digital signature that blocks duplicate entries. Each participant then sends a random number to a shared list through the relay.
Because the relay broadcasts the transactions, no one can see which address contributed which number. Recipients encrypt their delivery details using these shared numbers, ensuring that only their assigned counterparty can decrypt them.
One contestant then picks another’s random number and completes the match. At that point, the protocol only reveals the recipient’s identity to the person assigned as their “Santa”, keeping the rest of the network blind to the pairing.
The work joins a broader push to design privacy frameworks for Ethereum as cryptosystems increasingly intersect with regulated finance.
Zero-knowledge layers of this type can be adapted for anonymous voting, DAO governance, whistleblower channels where employees must prove membership without exposing themselves, and private airdrops or token distributions that avoid revealing who received what.
