AmericanFortress Paper: ZKPs for Proving Crypto Wallet Ownership
AmericanFortress researchers propose a novel method to prove crypto wallet ownership across multiple addresses while keeping the seed, private keys, and other addresses private.
September 24, 2026 - 7:28 pm
Credit: Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash
The team at privacy infrastructure developer AmericanFortress has authored a new paper titled “Provenance Proofs: Linkable, Post-Quantum ZK Derivation Relations for Blockchain DeFi, Wallet and Identity Systems”.
In it, they introduce a way for wallets to prove ownership of multiple addresses or credentials without revealing the wallet seed, private keys, derivation paths, or other sensitive information. This allows for selective disclosure of wallet ownership.
A New Use Case for ZKPs
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are a powerful technology that enables one party to prove the truth of a statement without revealing the statement itself. Invented in the mid-80s, ZKPs continue to evolve with new use cases emerging, particularly within web3. The AmericanFortress paper adds another application: privacy-preserving proof of wallet ownership.
Solving a Cryptographic Challenge
The paper addresses a challenge related to hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, which are commonly used in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. HD wallets generate multiple addresses and keys from a single secret. Users typically store this secret as a 12- or 24-word mnemonic phrase.
The problem is how to prove ownership of an HD wallet without revealing sensitive information about other connected addresses. While ZKPoSP already provides a solution for proving the origin of a public key, the new paper goes further by proving that multiple public keys share the same hidden origin (i.e., they originated from the same HD wallet).
Shared Origin Provenance
The proposed system allows users to configure varying degrees of linkability between wallets:
- Only when necessary: Proving ownership while keeping other addresses unlinkable.
- Future linkability: Keeping addresses currently unlinkable but enabling linkability later.
- Permanent recognizability: Making the relationship between wallets permanently identifiable.
This approach offers more control to users over how much information they share, providing a more flexible and secure way to prove wallet ownership.