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Railgun Price Jumps 50% on Ethereum Wallet Privacy Hype

Denis O.
22 May 2026 2 min read

RAIL price rallied after traders noticed Ethereum’s Kohaku repository listed Railgun as a privacy protocol library.

RAIL, the native token of Railgun, jumped more than 50% on Friday, May 22, after traders noticed that a public Railgun developer tool had appeared inside Kohaku, Ethereum‘s wallet-privacy project.

Chart showing RAIL price on the day. Source: CoinGecko
Chart showing RAIL price on the day. Source: CoinGecko

The rally started after traders found that Ethereum’s Kohaku project now includes a public Railgun tool that developers can use to add Railgun-style privacy features to wallets.

Launched in 2021, Railgun is a privacy protocol built on Ethereum. It uses zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method for proving activity without exposing wallet details, to let users make private transactions.

Read also: Mission: “Save Ethereum” — Here’s What a Former EF Researcher Proposes

Privacy Hype Comes to Ethereum

First shown publicly by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at Devcon in late 2025, Kohaku is an Ethereum Foundation-backed privacy project that wants to give developers ready-made privacy tools.

As the Ethereum Foundation wrote in a March post on X, Kohaku is the “most exciting upcoming privacy development in recent years,” adding that “any wallet can plug n’ play with Kohaku and supercharge their privacy features using Railgun and Privacy Pools implementations.”

But the package doesn’t amount to a broad rollout of private transfers across Ethereum wallets. For now, traders seem to be pricing in what Kohaku could become, not a finished privacy feature already available.

As of press time, neither the Ethereum Foundation nor Railgun has publicly commented on the move.

Read more: Zcash vs Bitcoin in 2026: Is Zcash a Better Privacy Coin Than Bitcoin for Investors?

Denis O.

Crypto news reporter at Bitcoin Foundation covering topics including crypto markets, DeFi exploits, and regulatory developments. He was previously a reporter at The Defiant, crypto.news, currency.com, iHodl, BeInCrypto, and other…