A Tattered Cloak of Invisibility
Kanan Huseynov, Ali Shahzaib, Istvan Andras Seres, and Janos Tapolcai submitted A Tattered Cloak of Invisibility: Measuring Anonymity Loss in Railgun on Ethereum as a preprint on 24 June 2026. The preserved PDF studies behavioural privacy leakage in Railgun, an Ethereum shielded-pool system.
The authors test timing, address reuse, prior transaction-graph proximity, distinctive amount patterns, and group-sum matching between deposits and withdrawals. Their five heuristics uniquely link 17.65% of studied withdrawal transactions to deposits; a separate knapsack-style analysis reports a median anonymity loss of 3.42 bits.
The result supports a narrow conclusion for Cryptocurrency design comparison: valid zero-knowledge proofs do not prevent users from leaking linkage through timing, amount choice, address history, or surrounding wallet behaviour. It is not a measurement of all Ethereum privacy systems, and heuristic links are estimates rather than independently verified ground truth.