- Railgun has hosted some $4 billion in private transactions since its launch.
- It has recently been integrated into a new Ethereum developer toolkit.
Railgun has processed a record $1.6 billion in shielded transactions this year as enthusiasm for privacy enhancing protocols surges.
It brings the protocol’s total volume to $4 billion since its launch in 2021.
The new record underscores the surge in demand for confidentiality as Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems move to embed privacy into core infrastructure.
“Privacy is in every financial system except for DeFi,” Railgun contributor Bill Liang told DL News.
“Even something as simple as transferring value between accounts on a public ledger forces you to reveal your hand when you may not be ready to do so,” Liang said.
Launched in 2021, Railgun obfuscates users’ crypto transactions.
Unlike standard Ethereum transactions, which are broadcast publicly, Railgun’s shielded transactions keep information such as senders, recipients, and amounts transferred private.
The milestone caps off what has been one of Railgun’s best months yet.
Its governance token, RAIL, soared almost 300% on October 9 and 10 after the Ethereum Foundation unveiled Kohaku, a new developer toolkit that directly integrates Railgun into Ethereum’s reference wallet framework.
Privacy makes a comeback
The milestone comes as the Ethereum Foundation rolls out its new privacy initiative.
The foundation’s 47-member “Privacy Cluster” team consists of engineers, cryptographers, and researchers working to make private transactions a standard feature across the network.
“Privacy is the freedom to choose what you share, when you share it, and who you share it with,” the foundation said.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly endorsed privacy tech like Railgun and other similar efforts, arguing that privacy should be a default option for blockchain users.
Last month, he urged developers to add multi-signature privacy wallets, a security feature long used by institutions but absent from privacy protocols.
Railgun’s contributors responded by unveiling a working prototype for such a wallet, which hides which users control it while using the same zero-knowledge technology underpinning its shielded transactions.
The team plans to demo the tool at Devconnect Argentina next month.
“Ethereum’s commitment to privacy will accelerate its momentum in becoming the new economic layer for the internet,” Jan Philipp Fritsche, managing director of crypto auditing firm Oak Security, told DL News.
Lance Datskoluo and Tim Craig both report for DL News. Got a tip? Email lance@dlnews.com and tim@dlnews.com.