The ones pushing for PoS are the Zcashers. If you’ve been in Zcash you’d know that PoS has been one of the most requested dev target along with ZSA (to be deployed soon).
PoW is and will be a vulnerability to Zcash. No one likes to see a mining pool mining 60% of the blocks.
Yes. And you can wonder how much is POW sustainable in the long run. I have never seen such a disconnect between the price of BTC and the miner’s revenue following the latest halving. ETF’s and BTC becoming more and more custodial are also starving the L1 of fees. Will be interesting to follow.
I am happy to see growth in the project, evolution, little by little Zcash is growing and decentralizing, decoupling Zcash from the United States.
Considerations when designing a PoS protocol:
Check out the new Shielded Labs website.
A big thank you to @Shawn for implementing the design and getting the website up and running. Also, thanks to @gottabeJay for designing an earlier concept for the website, which helped shape the final design.
In the coming days, weeks, and months, we’ll be adding more team members, a fifth board member, and a roadmap for our projects. Stay tuned!
I’d like to highlight a couple of pages: (1) our Values page (pasted below), which represents our commitment to Zcash, ZEC holders, and the community, and (2) the NSM page, which provides all the background information you need to understand what the Network Sustainability Mechanism is and why it’s important.
I’m delighted to share that Robert (aka @spectre) is joining Shielded Labs part-time for the next three months, with the possibility of transitioning to a full-time role in March 2025. Robert first reached out to me last year after Shielded Labs was announced, offering to help in any way he could and noting that he is based in Germany. Since then, he has been a valuable resource, volunteering to research, translate, and complete our 2023 taxes—an effort that was particularly helpful given that Shielded Labs’ legal and tax documentation is entirely in German.
Over the next few months, Robert will focus on researching different cryptocurrency governance models and evaluating their advantages, limitations, and potential applicability to Zcash. He may also share summaries of his findings and perspectives in forum posts, contribute to community discussions, and gather feedback on governance topics.
While Shielded Labs does not intend to seek lockbox funding, our interest in these discussions is focused on ensuring that coinholders have a role in any future governance model and on improving and better defining the network upgrade process. To be clear, we are not advocating for pure coinholder governance, but are interested in exploring ways to formally integrate coinholders into the governance process. We are pleased to see that both proposals put forward so far include coinholders as stakeholders.
We’re excited to have Robert join Shielded Labs and contribute to this important initiative. Welcome to the team!
Thank you very much for the introduction and kind words, Jason!
I am excited about this opportunity to contribute to the Zcash ecosystem and hope to be a useful addition to the Shielded Labs team (for the next 3 months and possibly beyond).
Following up on Jason’s summary, I would also like to provide a brief introduction of myself. I am in my early 30s and have been working in the field of alternative investments since 2015. I gathered experience in setting up new investment funds with a focus on operations, investor communication and regulation.
My first time coming across Zcash was during the Bitcoin hype at the end of 2017 and I have been a ZEC investor ever since. I feel a strong alignment with the mission of Zcash - the goal of giving people access to global digital private money. Honoring the ZEC holders and giving them a voice in the future of Zcash governance are values that also reflect my personal stance. Hence, I am highly motivated to support Shielded Labs where I can.
I look forward to interesting discussions on this topic and hope for a productive exchange with Zcash community members!
Robert/spectre
I liked the site, the initiative. Zcash is increasingly decentralized. Nowadays I understand the importance of ending the development fund.
congrats @spectre
if there is something that i could help you with here in germany or any of the other german speaking countries - feel free to reach out, i am more than happy to help.
I am happy to announce that @samhsmith is joining Shielded Labs as a Core Engineer. Sam’s primary focus will be working with @zooko and @shielded-nate on developing the first implementation of Crosslink and transitioning Zcash to hybrid PoS. He will also attend the bi-weekly ZIP Sync Meetings with the goal of becoming a ZIP Editor.
Sam is based in Sweden and has a diverse technical background. His recent professional experience includes rewriting the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm for Hyperledger Iroha 2. He is also the developer of Serenum, an operating system built from scratch, and Brevis, the custom programming language designed specifically for Serenum. To improve performance, he rewrote the Brevis compiler using a sea of nodes architecture, similar to the one used in Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and Oracle’s HotSpot Java runtime. Sam also has a background in low-level game engine programming and Data-Oriented Design (DOD), with experience working on physics engines, rendering, and netcode.
Sam is excited to join Shielded Labs and contribute to Zcash’s development. In his words, "I am very excited to work on a cryptocurrency that actually matters. Private currency is the only form of money that is fungible, and therefore the only thing that can truly become digital cash.”
We are pleased to have Sam on board and look forward to his contributions to Crosslink and the future of Zcash. Please join me in welcoming him to Shielded Labs!
Welcome to the community @samhsmith !
welcome Sam! just watched one of your presentations. i liked out of the box thinking. good luck in Shielded Labs! 
We are pleased to welcome Mark Henderson (@aphelionz) to Shielded Labs as a Senior Engineer. For those unfamiliar with Mark, he previously worked for Equilibrium Labs where he actively contributed to Zcash. He was a ZCG grant recipient from 2021-2022, he led the early development of the Network Sustainability Mechanism, and he moderated the NU5 and Sandblasting Retrospective. Mark left Equilibrium Labs in 2023 for a non-crypto company and is now ready to return to crypto to focus on Zcash full time.
While at Equilibrium Labs, Mark worked on various development initiatives for organizations like Protocol Labs, the Algorand Foundation, and Zcash Community Grants. As a ZCG grant recipient, he received a series of grants for Ziggurat, a network-layer testing suite for zcashd and Zebra nodes. Ziggurat monitors the network to ensure nodes adhere to the protocol, conducting tests, performing network-wide analysis, and providing tools to visualize and improve the network’s performance and security. After Mark completed his work on Ziggurat, I reached out to see if he was interested in contributing to the Zcash Sustainability Fund for Shielded Labs. He helped scope out the project and write initial versions of the ZIPs, laying the groundwork for what we now call the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM).
Mark is a seasoned engineer with more than ten years of professional experience and a strong track record of delivering successful software projects. He is joining Shielded Labs because he’s eager to contribute to Zcash and support its ongoing development. According to Mark, “Zcash is my favorite cryptocurrency, both for its technology and its community. It’s the OG zero-knowledge protocol, and I believe it has vast potential for success.”
Welcome to Shielded Labs, Mark! We’re excited to have the opportunity to work with you again.
Awesome news! 
You are building an A-Team!
Congrats!
Long live Zcash! I believe we are witnessing the start of a major transformation. Everyone involved is highly skilled and experienced, ready to make Zcash a true leader.
We’re excited to welcome another talented engineer to the Shielded Labs team! Andrew Reece is joining as a Core Engineer, where he will focus on Crosslink and help transition Zcash to a hybrid proof-of-stake consensus protocol. Similar to Sam and Mark, he will attend the bi-weekly ZIP Sync Meetings with the goal of becoming a ZIP Editor and improving the current process.
Andrew is based in the United Kingdom and has extensive experience building and optimizing developer tools. He is the Founder and Lead Developer of WhiteBox, a debugger designed to give developers real-time insights into how their code behaves as they write it. WhiteBox features a timeline view of execution traces that visualizes call stacks and variable changes over time. In addition to running normal executables, it can execute source code that is JIT compiled in the background whenever updated, providing instant feedback within various editors. WhiteBox also provides multiple options for automating data inspection and visualization, allowing developers to recognize overarching patterns and resolve uncertainties in precise behavior. Andrew built WhiteBox from scratch, drawing inspiration from the work of Bret Victor and Casey Muratori.
Andrew is interested in crypto because he believes in the need for viable, decentralized private money and wants to use his engineering skills to help build systems that preserve financial privacy. He says, “Zcash has been at the forefront of innovation in private money, thanks to the work of highly talented members of its community. I’m very excited to work with the Shielded Labs team on implementing low-level mechanisms that will directly map to major improvements for users.”
We’re looking forward to kicking things off with Andrew in person, as his first day at Shielded Labs will coincide with our first team retreat in Colorado next week. For some of us, this will be our first time meeting in person, and we anticipate a productive week of collaboration, focused work, and meetings with local Zcashers.
Please join me in welcoming Andrew to Shielded Labs. We’re glad to have you on board!
Welcome Andrew! 
WhiteBox is cool! Welcome Andrew!!
Welcome Andrew!
