Ethereum developers advance the deployment of a ZK-based "Secret Santa" system

According to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers are refining a zero-knowledge protocol aimed at providing stronger privacy guarantees for on-chain interactions, starting with a matching system similar to "Secret Santa," which is expected to evolve into a broader set of private collaboration tools.

Solidity engineer Artem Chystiakov revisited this research in a post on the Ethereum community forum on Monday, mentioning his related work first published on arXiv in January this year. The concept aims to recreate an anonymous gift exchange game on Ethereum, where participants are randomly paired, and no one knows who is giving 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 stated that the core issue 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 the sender and receiver without disclosing identity information, and it also employs transaction relayers to submit operations, so that a single wallet cannot be linked to specific actions. This type of zero-knowledge layer can be applied to anonymous voting, DAO governance, reporting channels, and private airdrops or token distributions that avoid revealing recipient information.