Ethereum developers are refining a zero-knowledge protocol designed to bring stronger privacy guarantees to on-chain interactions, starting with a “Secret Santa”-style matchmaking system that could evolve into a broader toolset for private coordination.
Solidity engineer Artem Chystiakov resurfaced the research Monday in a post on the Ethereum community forum, 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 paired without anyone knowing who is sending whom. However, doing that on a transparent blockchain requires solving several long-standing issues related to randomness, privacy, and Sybil resilience.
Chystiakov said the core problems are simple: “Everything on Ethereum is visible to everyone,” blockchains do not provide true randomness, and the system must prevent users from signing up multiple times or assigning gifts to themselves.
The proposed protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify sender-recipient relationships without revealing identities, and a transaction relay to send movements 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, which blocks duplicate entries. Each participant then sends a random number to a shared list through the repeater.
Because the relay transmits the transactions, no one can know which address contributed which number. Recipients encrypt their delivery details using these shared numbers, ensuring that only their assigned counterparty can decrypt them.
A participant then selects another person’s random number, completing the match. At that point, the protocol reveals the recipient’s identity only to the person assigned as their “Santa”, keeping the rest of the network blind to the match.
The work fits into a broader push to design privacy frameworks for Ethereum as crypto systems increasingly intersect with regulated finance.
Zero-knowledge layers of this type can be adapted to anonymous voting, DAO governance, whistleblowing channels where employees must prove their membership without exposing themselves, and private airdrops or token distributions that avoid revealing who received what.
