The Ethereum ecosystem has demonstrated a growing need for privacy in recent years.

Various solutions, specifically zero-knowledge solutions, have emerged, each offering a different approach to maintaining transaction confidentiality without eliminating the transparency that is the hallmark of blockchain.

Amidst this dynamic, the name Nicolas Consigny has been increasingly discussed, especially since his contributions to the development of privacy tools like Railgun and Kohaku.

To find out who is behind this rising privacy research trend on Ethereum, let’s take a look at the full review below.

Who is Nicolas Consigny?

Nicolas Consigny is a French software developer who is now recognized as a key figure in privacy research on Ethereum.

At the Ethereum Foundation, he served as a Developer Coordinator before ultimately focusing on his role as a Privacy Researcher.

This position allowed him to be directly involved in the development and coordination of a team dedicated to on-chain privacy.

Before joining the Ethereum Foundation, Consigny was active as a core contributor and coordinator on Railgun DAO, a zk-SNARKs-based privacy protocol that allows transactions to be conducted without revealing identities or asset amounts.

This experience complements his technical background, which began early in his career at Ledger.

Early Career and Professional Experience

Before becoming known for his research on privacy tools on Ethereum, Nicolas Consigny had a wealth of experience that shaped his expertise. Here’s a look at his early career and professional experience.

 

Early Career and the World of Software Development

Nicolas Consigny’s career began in software development, an environment that formed the basis of his interest in digital security and risk-resilient system design.

His technical background quickly made him familiar with issues surrounding data confidentiality and users’ need for greater control over their identities and transactions.

It was from this early stage that Consigny’s attention became drawn to privacy challenges in the crypto world, a theme that would later become his primary focus.

 

Contributions to Ledger as Developer Relations Manager

Before delving deeper into the Ethereum ecosystem, Consigny worked at Ledger as Developer Relations Manager. This role exposed him directly to the developer ecosystem, the needs of advanced users, and the hardware security standards used by millions of crypto asset holders.

This experience broadened his technical understanding of practical cryptography and real-world threat models, while also giving him a more mature perspective on the importance of privacy as a foundation for the user experience.

 

Nicolas Consigny’s Role in Railgun DAO

At Railgun DAO, Nicolas Consigny serves as a core contributor, directly involved in the development of the zk-SNARK-based privacy protocol.

He helped develop the technical architecture that enables truly private transactions on Ethereum by hiding sender, recipient, and amount data without compromising network security.

In addition to technical contributions, he also coordinated development direction and communication across teams. This in-depth experience later laid a strong foundation for the privacy research he developed when he joined the Ethereum Foundation.

 

Joining the Ethereum Foundation

After being involved in various privacy projects, Consigny’s next step took him to the Ethereum Foundation. Here’s a brief overview of that important phase.

 

Duties and Responsibilities as a Developer Coordinator

Following his role on Railgun DAO, Consigny joined the Ethereum Foundation as a Developer Coordinator.

In this position, he manages the technical pipeline, connecting researchers and developers, and ensuring that research and implementation move in the same direction.

He also explained the direction of Ethereum development, from restaking to the “Endgame” vision, demonstrating his understanding of the ecosystem’s big picture.

 

Focus on Onchain Privacy and Zero Knowledge Infrastructure

In 2025, he joined the @EF_Privacy team and began fully focusing on zero knowledge research. In the Privacy Cluster, he addresses Ethereum’s core privacy needs, from private transactions to zk infrastructure and developer tooling.

This culminated in Project Kohaku, which he worked on with Vitalik Buterin, delivering an SDK, reference wallet, and onchain privacy standards that laid the foundation for Ethereum’s future privacy direction.

 

The Kohaku Project and Its Major Contributions

After solidifying his role on the Ethereum privacy team, Consigny’s biggest move came when he began leading an ambitious new initiative, the Kohaku Project. Here’s what you need to know about his contributions.

What Is Kohaku?

Kohaku is an on-chain privacy toolkit developed under the Ethereum Foundation, with Nicolas Consigny as its main driver alongside Vitalik Buterin.

The toolkit is designed as a framework that provides dApp developers with readily usable privacy features, from reference wallets and SDKs to new standards for more secure transactions.

Since its official announcement in October 2025, Kohaku has been positioned as the foundation for the Ethereum ecosystem, delivering practical privacy without sacrificing security or user experience.

Consigny’s Role as a Developer and Researcher

Within Kohaku, Consigny plays a central role as a technical architect and privacy researcher.

He designed the project’s core philosophy, “transactional minimalism,” which emphasizes that each party only knows the information strictly necessary for a transaction.

From roadmap development and system design to zk research that combines security and usability, Kohaku’s entire technical direction is heavily influenced by his leadership.

He also ensures that the experiences and learnings from Railgun DAO are technically integrated, including through his contributions to the Kohaku repository containing Railgun-based tests.

Kohaku’s Impact on the Ethereum Ecosystem

Kohaku’s presence paves the way for the development of privacy technology on Ethereum.

With a simple SDK, a comprehensive reference wallet, and privacy features such as private send/receive and zk-based social recovery, Kohaku provides developers with practical tools to add privacy to their applications.

This impact is not only on the security of user transactions but also on the growth of the dApp ecosystem that can leverage zero knowledge more simply.

With its public launch at Devcon 2025, Kohaku is projected to be a crucial foundation in Ethereum’s journey towards a private and secure global infrastructure.

Nicolas Consigny’s Views and Vision on Onchain Privacy

Nicolas Consigny views privacy as a key foundation for Ethereum’s future. In various public interviews, he consistently emphasized the importance of user protection.

For him, a network that aspires to become a global infrastructure must be able to maintain the security and confidentiality of its users’ activities.

He believes that privacy is a prerequisite for a system to remain secure, practical, and viable for millions of people without exposing all their activities to the public.

On the Big Talk podcast in 2024, he emphasized that Ethereum’s evolution cannot focus solely on scalability or transaction fees. In this regard, privacy stands alongside rollups, restaking, and Vitalik Buterin’s “The Endgame” vision.

An increasingly transparent world, he said, requires new boundaries that maintain transaction confidentiality without sacrificing security or interoperability.

Consigny’s entry into the Privacy Cluster further sharpened his perspective. He advocates the principle of “transactional minimalism,” which involves disclosing only the information that is absolutely necessary.

The goal is not to hide actions, but to provide a safe space for individuals and businesses to operate without undue risk.

Through Project Kohaku, his vision is concretely realized through a privacy toolkit, a reference wallet, and zero-knowledge integrations that make on-chain privacy more natural and easy to adopt.

For Consigny, mature privacy will open the door to new applications and business models, and create a Web3 ecosystem that is secure, user-friendly, and respects everyone’s full control over their data.

 

Konsigny’s Impact on the Ethereum Development Ecosystem

As his career at the Ethereum Foundation progressed, Consigny’s influence extended beyond privacy. He also had a tangible impact on how the Ethereum ecosystem was developed and coordinated, including the following:

Visible Technical Contributions

Nicolas Consigny’s technical contributions are evident through his activity on GitHub and his involvement in the Ethereum core repository.

He is active in ethereum/pm, the central hub for All Core Developers and Consensus Layer meetings, demonstrating his role in maintaining the protocol’s development rhythm.

He also maintains the EIPs and RIPs fork repositories, demonstrating his role in the Ethereum standardization process and the rollup ecosystem.

Furthermore, he has opened and reviewed pull requests, such as the addition of EIP-8052 to ethereum/forkcast and the update to ethereum/kohaku that included Railgun testing.

These activities demonstrate that he contributes not only conceptually but also directly to the protocol’s code and architecture.

Role in the Privacy Research Community

Consigny has become a prominent figure in the privacy research community. After joining @EF_Privacy and the Privacy Cluster, he has been active in public discussions, technical workshops, and collaborations across zero-knowledge teams.

He has been involved in discussions about transaction privacy, the principles of transactional minimalism, and the development of new standards through Project Kohaku, which has helped shape the direction of Ethereum privacy research.

Through interviews, podcasts, and technical forums, he consistently emphasizes that privacy is a core component of Ethereum as a global infrastructure.

This combination of open source contributions and research thinking makes Consigny increasingly influential in driving mature privacy within the Ethereum ecosystem.

 

Challenges and the Future of Privacy Research in Ethereum

Privacy research on Ethereum still faces significant challenges, from the scalability of computationally intensive zero-knowledge technology to the need for truly developer-friendly toolkits to ensure adoption doesn’t stop at the conceptual level.

Furthermore, privacy regulatory issues, from data compliance to concerns about misuse, also demand solutions that are secure, transparent, and adhere to decentralized principles.

Amidst this complexity, Consigny promotes an approach that maintains a balance between security and openness.

Through Project Kohaku and its involvement in the Privacy Cluster, it strives to provide a privacy infrastructure that is efficient, easy to integrate, and resilient to regulatory pressure.

Its long-term vision is to build an Ethereum ecosystem that fosters privacy without sacrificing transparency and innovation, essential foundations for on-chain privacy to function at a global scale.

Conclusion

So, that was an interesting discussion about Nicolas Consigny, the Ethereum developer pushing for onchain privacy, which you can read more about in the INDODAX Academy’s Crypto Academy. In conclusion, Consigny’s story demonstrates how diligent research can push new boundaries in Ethereum privacy.

His role is further strengthened by his contributions to technology that makes onchain transactions more secure and private.

The presence of Kohaku is a strategic step that marks a new direction for the future of onchain privacy, one that is more mature, more scalable, and increasingly relevant to the ever-growing ecosystem.

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FAQ

1.What are Nicolas Consigny’s main contributions to Ethereum?

Nicolas Consigny’s primary contributions are in the area of ??onchain privacy research and development.

As a Developer Coordinator and Privacy Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, he coordinates teams focused on zero-knowledge, transaction privacy, and infrastructure supporting privacy applications.

His role became even more prominent when he led the development of Kohaku, a privacy toolkit designed to make it easier and more secure for dApp developers to build privacy features.

2.What is Kohaku and how does it work?

Kohaku is a privacy toolkit introduced by the Ethereum Foundation to make it easier for developers to build privacy features into onchain applications.

Kohaku provides a zero-knowledge-based framework, libraries, and components that enable certain onchain transactions or activities to be performed with an additional layer of privacy.

Kohaku’s focus is not only on data hiding, but also on ensuring that these privacy features remain secure, scalable, and compatible with the current Ethereum architecture.

3.What is Nicolas Consigny’s relationship to Railgun DAO?

Before joining the Ethereum Foundation, Nicolas Consigny was a core contributor to Railgun DAO, a privacy protocol that uses zk-SNARKs to provide a layer of anonymity for transactions.

At Railgun, he was involved in technical aspects such as system design, feature refinement, and developer community coordination. This experience served as a crucial foundation that shaped his research focus on onchain privacy on Ethereum.

4.Is Kohaku available for developers yet?

Kohaku is currently in the early stages of development and has only been released as a toolkit with basic features.

However, its fundamental elements, such as the zero-knowledge library and application integration framework, are already available for developers to explore.

As the Ethereum Foundation announces updates, Kohaku will receive more features, documentation, and implementation references, enabling wider adoption across the Ethereum ecosystem.

5.Why is onchain privacy such a critical issue in Ethereum?

Onchain privacy is increasingly important because user activity on the blockchain is public and can be analyzed by anyone. Everything from transaction activity and wallet usage patterns to interactions with applications can be easily tracked.

On the other hand, many use cases, such as DeFi, digital identity, and sensitive payments, require a certain level of confidentiality.

This is why privacy research, such as that led by Nicolas Consigny, is a strategic step in maintaining the security, convenience, and freedom of Ethereum users without sacrificing decentralization.

 

 

 

Author:  Boy