ERC-8086: Privacy Token

Thanks for the thoughtful questions — they touch exactly the design boundary we’ve been very deliberate about with ERC-8086.

Our intent with ERC-8086 is to define a minimal, native privacy primitive at the token level, rather than standardizing a full privacy protocol or prescribing a concrete ZK system. This is very much a “minimal interface, maximal freedom” design.

Circuits & verifiers

The absence of circuits and generated verifier contracts in the reference repo is intentional.

ERC-8086 is not meant to canonize a specific circuit family. Doing so would effectively turn the ERC into a full product specification, which would dramatically raise the implementation bar and exclude many existing or future designs. Instead, the ERC defines what a token must expose, not how privacy is achieved internally.

Projects are free to:

  • generate verifiers off-repo,
  • use different proving systems,
  • upgrade circuits over time,
    as long as they conform to the interface.

This also means that systems like Railgun could adopt ERC-8086 naturally, without refactoring their circuit architecture.

the circuits used in our reference implementation are planned to be open-sourced in the near future.
They are intended as a reference and starting point, not a mandatory target: anyone will be free to reuse them directly or adapt them to build their own ERC-8086–compatible implementations.

Recipient keys & wallet interoperability

look this ERC-8091: Privacy Address Format