Ethereum developers are tweaking 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 toolkit for private coordination.
Solidity engineer Artem Chystiakov resurfaced in an Ethereum community forum post on Monday, highlighting 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 knowing who is sending to whom. Doing this on a transparent blockchain, however, requires resolving several long-standing issues regarding randomness, privacy, and Sybil resistance.
Chystiakov said the fundamental problems are simple: “Everything on Ethereum is visible to everyone,” blockchains don’t provide true randomness, and the system needs to prevent users from registering multiple times or awarding themselves gifts.
The proposed protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify sender-receiver relationships without revealing identity, and a transaction relay to submit movements so that individual wallets cannot be linked to stocks.
In the proof of concept, participants register their Ethereum addresses in a smart contract and commit to using a unique digital signature, which blocks duplicate entries. Each participant then submits a random number to a list shared via the relay.
Since the relay broadcasts transactions, no one can know which address provided which number. Recipients encrypt their delivery details using these shared numbers, ensuring that only their assigned peer can decrypt them.
A participant then selects someone else’s random number, thus completing the match. At this point, the protocol reveals the recipient’s identity only to the person designated as their “Santa”, keeping the rest of the network blind to the pairing.
The work is part of a broader effort to design privacy frameworks for Ethereum as crypto systems increasingly intersect with regulated finance.
Zero-knowledge layers like this can be adapted to anonymous voting, DAO governance, whistleblower channels where employees must prove their membership without exposing themselves, and private airdrops or token distributions that avoid revealing who received what.
