Privacy Pools Go Live on Ethereum, With Vitalik Buterin As One of the First Users

Ethereum collective 0xbow.io announced today that its Privacy Pools mainnet has launched, offering a way to make private transactions without assisting the laundering of illicit funds.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, a co-author of the paper that proposed Privacy Pools, was one of the first users, depositing one ETH.

Privacy Pools create Association Sets that commingle users’ funds, enabling them to be withdrawn into a new wallet without being traceable. In this, it is similar to mixing services like Tornado Cash, which came under fire after being heavily used by North Korean hackers and other bad actors. Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) until a judge ruled that it did not qualify for sanctions.

Filtering Bad Actors

The Privacy Pools attempt to address regulatory concerns by having their smart contracts automatically scan deposits for connections to known hackers, scammers and other bad actors before allowing a deposit. However, they do not require the Know Your Customer (KYC) identification of users that most centralized exchanges must have.

The protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs to show that funds in the Association Sets did not come from specific groups without revealing the sources of those funds. Funds that do not pass screening are returned but cannot be withdrawn privately. This makes it a non-custodial system, 0xbow said.

If a deposit is later found to be connected to illicit actors, it will be removed from an Association Set without affecting other deposits.

“ETH users can now achieve on-chain privacy, while still dissociating from illicit funds,” 0xbow said in the mainnet launch announcement on X. “It is now up to all of us to Make Privacy Normal Again.”

Users can access multiple Privacy Pool accounts with a single seed phrase. Partial withdrawals are allowed, protecting privacy by preventing trackers from seeing, for example, 21 ETH go in and 21 ETH come out and coming to the obvious conclusion that the transactions may be related.

Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis’ 2025 Crypto Crime Report estimates that $51.3 billion in crypto was received by illicit addresses in 2024.