Ethereum developers are advancing the deployment of the ZK-based "Secret Santa" system.

According to Mars Finance, as reported by CoinDesk, Ethereum developers are refining a zero-knowledge protocol aimed at providing stronger privacy protections for on-chain interactions, starting with a matching system similar to a “Secret Santa” that is expected to evolve into a broader set of private collaboration tools. Solidity engineer Artem Chystiakov mentioned this research again in a post on the Ethereum community forum on Monday, referring to his related work first published on arXiv in January this year. The idea aims to recreate an anonymous gift exchange game on Ethereum, where participants are paired randomly, and no one knows who is giving gifts to whom. However, achieving this on a transparent blockchain requires solving several long-standing issues surrounding randomness, privacy, and resistance to Sybil attacks. Chystiakov stated that the core problem is simple: “Everything on Ethereum is visible to everyone,” the blockchain cannot 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 the relationship between the sender and the receiver without disclosing identity information, and it also employs transaction relays to submit operations, so that a single wallet cannot be linked to specific actions. This type of zero-knowledge layer could be applied to anonymous voting, DAO governance, reporting channels, and private airdrops or token distributions that avoid disclosing recipient information.