Nightfall - The Open Source Privacy Solution for Ethereum
Duration: 00:19:37
Speaker: Duncan Westland, Chaitanya Konda, Michael Connor, Paul Brody
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
We believe that public blockchain is the future of business to business transactions. However, two issues - privacy and scalability - will need to be solved if this vision is to be fully realised. This talk will explain the motivations behind the open-source nightfall code and how it is intended to tackle the first of these issues. We cover the operation of the protocol, the method by which it provides complete privacy, and how developers can use it to build their own applications by making use of its smart contract infrastructure and the ZoKrates framework. We will also present our modelling of transaction costs, which shows that nightfall can already provide a cost-competitive alternative to private blockchains for many situations and how that will be true for a growing number of use cases in the near future.
