- Buenos Aires aims to become an on-chain city, integrating blockchain for public transparency and growth.
- Vitalik Buterin unveiled Kohaku, a new privacy toolset using zk-SNARKs for regulatory compliance.
The Head of Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Jorge Macri, attended Devconnect on Tuesday, an event organized by the Ethereum Foundation taking place this week in the Argentine capital. During his speech, Macri confirmed his administration’s decision to continue supporting the sustained development of the cryptocurrency sector. The official shared the stage with Russian-Canadian computer developer Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
Macri stated that Buenos Aires is one of the safest cities in the region and a top choice for digital nomads and students.
“And now we are moving towards an on-chain city, where technology is at the service of transparency and growth,” he declared.
Jorge Macri’s speech cited concrete adoption figures within Argentina. He noted that the country has more than 10 million cryptocurrency users, a base that represents nearly a quarter of all transaction volume in Latin America.
“A great many of them already transact in crypto in the city and even pay their taxes or for a coffee with cryptocurrencies,” he commented.
This reality, he explained, prompted an institutional response.
“From the Government, we understood that we could not watch this process from the sidelines.“
The result of that decision was the creation of a working group that included the Ethereum Foundation, the NGO Bitcoin Argentina, major local wallets and exchanges, and global players like Binance and Bitso.
This collaborative effort gave rise to BA Crypto, a municipal program that promotes the sector’s development and includes the enablement of tax payments, such as the ABL property tax and business licenses, through these digital assets.
Hosting Devconnect in Buenos Aires, an event that registered 16,000 tickets sold and gathered over 8,000 programmers and specialists from 130 countries, aligns with the BA Crypto program’s strategic vision to position the City as a regional financial technology hub.
Technical Advances for Regulated Privacy on Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin introduced Kohaku, a new open-source toolset designed to enhance data protection on the Ethereum network. The proposal aims to incorporate mechanisms that allow for compliance with regulations without users having to completely sacrifice anonymity.
Kohaku is conceived as a modular architecture that makes it easier for developers to build wallets with integrated privacy. Its roadmap includes future extensions, such as the implementation of mixnets to obfuscate network layer traffic and browsers using zero-knowledge proofs.
Mixnets are networks that mix and reorder transactions, making it virtually impossible to trace a message back to its origin. Buterin acknowledged that Ethereum still lacks the desired level of privacy and that closing this gap requires a coordinated effort.
Documentation in the GitHub repository confirms the project is under development and includes components like Railgun and Privacy Pools. These tools are based on a privacy pool protocol that allows users to shield and unshield their ERC-20 tokens.
Regulatory compliance would be achieved through a mechanism called “innocence proofs,” which uses an advanced cryptographic technique known as zk-SNARKs. This technology enables a user to demonstrate the legitimacy of their funds or a transaction without revealing sensitive data or the complete transaction history.