Ethereum devs work on ‘Secret Santa’ protocol to power privacy

Ethereum researchers, including developer Artem Chystiakov, are developing the "Zero Knowledge Secret Santa (ZKSS)" protocol, first introduced in January, to enhance privacy on the blockchain. The protocol addresses three main challenges of running the anonymous gift exchange game on Ethereum: maintaining privacy when all transactions are public, ensuring true randomness, and preventing duplicate participation or self-gifting. ZKSS uses zero-knowledge proofs to establish sender-receiver relationships without revealing identities and employs a transaction relayer to hide sender information. The process involves participants registering addresses, committing to digital signatures to prevent cheating, secretly contributing random numbers to a shared list, and finally, using these numbers to reveal the assigned receiver whose delivery address is encrypted for their specific sender only. Potential applications for this privacy-enhancing technology extend beyond the game to areas like anonymous voting in DAOs, secure whistleblower systems, and private token airdrops.

(Source：Cointelegraph)