Your onchian txns are being watched by almost everyone. They're searchable on Etherscan, scrapable by Arkham, and the agents can sniff you out in a whim.
At this stage, privacy is the only invisibility cloak.
If the title caught your attention, there’s a decent chance that you are a whale.
By whale, we mean your ETH wallet is worth more than your house. The other part is that you are also aware that you are being watched by almost everyone.
Not “everyone” in the vague, tinfoil-hat sense, but everyone in the literal, searchable-on-etherscan, scraped-by-arkham, the agents-can-find-you-in-a-whim sense.
At this point, your 0x address might as well be a neon sign bolted to your forehead reading: “I HAVE MONEY. COME FIND ME.” (Don’t test the French or the hyper-rich AI agents creating IRL bounties).
If your kink is that you enjoy being watched, that’s cool. But for those who wish to go private, there’s so much to consider about how you get it done.
So much to consider because the crypto privacy conversation, especially regarding ETH, has been dominated by two main protocols, @TornadoCash and @RAILGUN_Project.
These tools aren’t bad. In fact, they work just fine. But the reality is that using them still feels like the sign we described a few paragraphs before.
For example, depositing into Tornado Cash is akin to disappearing into a crowd by walking in wearing a balaclava - nobody can see your face, but every camera in the building just flagged you.
Railgun, on the other hand, is more sophisticated. It uses zk-SNARKs, supports composable DeFi interactions within its shielded pool, and utilizes ‘Proof-of-Innocence.’
This is clearly a much better alternative and a massive improvement over Tornado’s blunt instrument approach.
However, your wallet interacts with Railgun’s smart contract, with that interaction being visible. This means you are shielded inside the pool, but the entrance and exit points are visible.
Both of these tools provide privacy (i.e., hiding the link), but neither provides complete invisibility (erasing the footprint). And for a whale looking to exit the surveillance grid entirely, the difference between those two things is everything.
In our opinion, what whales actually need is not a mixer. They need a one-way bridge to a parallel economy to completely extinguish any trail.
What is WORM? A one-way bridge
WORM (@EIP7503) is an ERC-20 token minted by the irreversible, private destruction of ETH. This means you do not transfer or deposit your ETH. Rather, you permanently and irrevocably destroy your ETH in a cryptographic black hole.
Once destroyed, you’ll receive a new token called WORM. WORM is a clean, scarce, mathematically sound asset with no history and zero link to the wallet that burned the ETH.
The key innovation here is what is framed as plausible deniability. When you send ETH to a burn address in the WORM protocol, the transaction looks like any other EOA-to-EOA transfer on Ethereum.
Unlike Railgun, there is no smart contract interaction; the transaction occurs directly on the Ethereum network, like any other regular transaction.
The goal here is to completely eliminate the trail in such a way that no one can prove you did anything at all.
To truly understand how this works, we need to break down the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-7503).
The WORM architecture (EIP-7503)
WORM is inspired by EIP-7503, a proposal for zero-knowledge Wormholes that introduces the concept of Private Proof-of-Burn (PPoB) to Ethereum.
Here’s how it works in 3 steps:
Step 1:
The user generates a burn key (a secret cryptographic key known only to the user) and derives a stealth burn address from it.
This burn address is mathematically proven to be unspendable: no private key exists that can sign transactions from it. The user can then send their ETH to this address.
To any outside observer, this looks like a plain EOA-to-EOA transfer. Maybe they sent money to a friend, or maybe they made a mistake. There’s no way to tell, because unspendable addresses are indistinguishable from regular ones on the Secp256k1 curve.
Step 2:
Offchain, users use their burn key to generate a zk-SNARK proof. This proof demonstrates that they burned a specific amount of ETH to an unspendable address, without revealing the address, the burn key, or their identity.
It also includes a nullifier, a hash derived from the burn key, that prevents you from claiming the same burn twice. The beauty is that the entire anonymity set consists of every Ethereum address that has ever received ETH but never sent a transaction. That’s millions of addresses.
What this means is that users are not hiding in a mixer pool of 1,000 participants but in the entire history of Ethereum.
Step 3:
Here, the user submits the proof to the WORM smart contract from a completely different Ethereum account. The contract verifies the zk-SNARK, checks that the nullifier hasn’t been used before, and mints the user’s tokens.
This process ensures that no one can determine who burned the ETH or which address it came from. The user can now hold a brand-new asset on a brand-new address with absolutely zero connection to their previous onchain identity.
Why it works
As we mentioned, WORM has no deposit contract that can be sanctioned or flagged. There is no “pool” of mixed funds. The burn happens through a plain Ethereum transfer to a standard-looking address.
It only requires the Ethereum protocol itself and a mathematical proof. The unspendable addresses are mathematically indistinguishable from regular addresses.
You cannot ban WORM burns without banning all ETH transfers, and good luck with that.
The WORM economy
WORM operates as a two-token economy, designed around scarcity, game theory, and what you might call “privacy-native value accrual.”
One of these tokens is BETH, a burn receipt. When you burn ETH and generate your zk proof, you don’t immediately get WORM. You first mint BETH (Burnt ETH), which is essentially a Proof-of-Burn receipt.
BETH is a transferable claim on future WORM minting. BETH is also tradeable. Users can sell their “right to mint” without ever minting WORM themselves.
This adds another layer of disconnect between the original burner and the eventual WORM holder.
If a user burns ETH and sells their BETH to someone else, the chain of custody is broken twice: once at the burn, and once at the sale.
The other token is the WORM token. WORM is designed to be a fundamentally scarce asset, as it is hard-capped at 21 million tokens.
Emissions start at 50 WORM per 10-minute epoch and follow an exponential decay schedule, halving every four years. If you’re having Bitcoin flashbacks right now, that’s by design.
BETH holders compete to redeem WORM in each epoch. If many people redeem in the same window, each person gets less WORM.
If fewer redeem, you get more. This creates a game-theoretic dynamic where timing and strategy matter. And because WORM is backed by permanently destroyed ETH, it carries a deflationary backstop that makes it, you could argue, harder money than ETH itself.
Every WORM in existence represents ETH permanently removed from the supply. WORM will only grow scarcer with time.
How to go private with WORM (step-by-step)
Here is a practical step-by-step process to go private as an ETH holder
Start by generating your ‘burn key.’
Using the WORM tooling, you generate a cryptographic burn key. From this key, you derive your stealth burn address. This is all done locally, offchain.
Execute the burn by sending your ETH to the derived burn address. On Etherscan, this looks like a bog-standard transfer.
Wait. Patience. Let the burn settle. Let time create distance between the transaction and your next move.
Generate the zk proof and mint.
Generate your zk-SNARK proof and submit it to the WORM contract.
Proceed to mint your BETH.
Then redeem BETH for WORM during an epoch.
At this juncture, you now hold WORM on an address with no history, no connection to your previous identity, and no trace back to the burned ETH.
You can hold it, trade it, use it across lending pools, or re-purchase ETH on your own terms.
The old wallet will appear to be someone who sent ETH to a dead address. Happens every day.
Closing thoughts
Obviously, this feels a tad experimental and isn’t as proven as the other tools.
However, one thing that feels warm about WORM is that it doesn’t solve privacy by hiding what you did. Rather, it approaches privacy by making it impossible to prove you did anything at all.
The burn transaction looks like any other transfer, with no one being able to prove a specific transaction was a WORM burn unless the user reveals it.
It also comes across as censorship-resistant, since you can’t ban a burn executed directly on the network without a smart contract.
And hey! For a while now, we’ve screamed for someone, anyone, with the basic decency to be honest about tokens being the product. WORM is that, or to put it mildly, something close to that.
The 21 million hard-cap design with halving emissions gives the token a scarcity model that’s frankly quite alluring in theory.
It’s also backed by permanently destroyed ETH, which gives it a deflationary floor that most tokens can only dream of. And the BETH intermediary layer adds optionality and an additional privacy break for those who want it.
The utility is also worthwhile, considering that for the whale reading this, who’s sitting on a public fortune in a world where surveillance is accelerating, regulations are tightening, and onchain privacy is being actively criminalized, WORM comes off as the exact kind of nuclear option that’s needed.
We believe that the window to exit the surveillance grid will certainly not stay open forever.
If you’re to learn anything from Europe, it should be that privacy is a war of asymmetry in such a way that the tools available today may not be available tomorrow. And if the Tornado Cash saga taught us anything, it’s that governments move fast when they decide privacy tools are a threat.
Quite obviously, we are optimistic about WORM in theory; it’s yet to be proven beyond testnet, so we strongly advise you to do your own research on this before engaging with the protocol.
✍️ @ollieblocmates
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