Vitalik Buterin Moves $113K Through Privacy Pools, Putting Real Capital Behind Compliant Ethereum Privacy!

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin transferred 50.25 ETH — roughly $113,000 — through Privacy Pools, the compliance-aware privacy protocol he co-authored in a 2023 research paper. The move came weeks after 0xbow.io launched the protocol on Ethereum mainnet on March 31, 2025, and it shifts Privacy Pools from a research proposal to a live, publicly endorsed tool in a single transaction.

The protocol's architecture is what separates it from Tornado Cash. Privacy Pools uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users prove their withdrawal belongs to a curated, AML-filtered association set — without revealing which specific deposit was theirs. Fund cleanliness is demonstrated without surrendering identity. Tornado Cash offered no such selectivity, mixing every deposit indiscriminately and giving regulators no mechanism to distinguish honest users from sanctioned wallets. OFAC acted accordingly in…