Hey, welcome to the Zcash community. Glad to have you here. A lot of work ahead.
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We wish you great success working with the Shielded Labs team.
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Welcome @philliptrudeau !
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Awesome, welcome Phillip!
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Welcome @philliptrudeau
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A post was merged into an existing topic: ZSAs in NU7, H2 2025 Extension
Shielded Labs is happy to announce that we have received a generous donation of 3,221 ZEC (approximately $1.2 million) from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. This contribution will directly support Shielded Labs’ core initiatives, including the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), Crosslink, and Dynamic Fees, which focus on strengthening the long-term security, sustainability, and scalability of the Zcash network.
Tyler and Cameron are long-time, deeply committed supporters of Zcash and its mission to build unstoppable private money. Through Gemini, they have consistently demonstrated leadership in supporting Zcash directly. Gemini was the first major exchange to support shielded Zcash withdrawals, which now includes support for Orchard, Zcash’s most advanced privacy protocol. More recently, they reinforced their commitment to Zcash with the launch of the Cypherpunk DAT, reflecting their continued belief in cypherpunk values and self-sovereign private money.
In Tyler’s words, “A healthy Zcash ecosystem depends on multiple independent organizations contributing at the protocol level. Shielded Labs plays an important role in that effort, and we’re glad to support their work.”
Cameron echoed that view, saying, “We’ve supported Zcash for many years because we believe strong privacy is an essential property of sound money. Shielded Labs is doing important work at the protocol level, and we’re happy to support their efforts.”
Shielded Labs is a Swiss-based Zcash support organization funded by donations from Zcash holders and supporters. We operate independently of the Dev Fund and block rewards, with donations supporting long-term protocol development. This donation is Tyler and Cameron’s second contribution to Shielded Labs. Their first donation, made in 2023, supported the formation of a dedicated team focused on Crosslink.
We are grateful for this strong vote of confidence in Shielded Labs and in the broader Zcash ecosystem. Their contribution meaningfully accelerates our ability to execute on critical protocol-level work and to collaborate openly with other contributors to advance Zcash’s mission. We sincerely appreciate Tyler and Cameron’s continued support of Zcash and its ongoing development.
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Shielded Labs is excited to announce that Vitalik Buterin has made a donation to support the continued development of Crosslink, a security-focused upgrade to Zcash’s consensus architecture. The contribution will be used to advance Crosslink from its current prototype stage toward a persistent, incentivized testnet and eventual production readiness.
Crosslink strengthens Zcash’s existing Proof-of-Work consensus by adding a parallel finality layer that protects against chain reorganizations and rollback attacks. All block production and economic activity continue to occur on the PoW chain, while the finality gadget anchors blocks and provides stronger settlement guarantees. By ensuring that confirmed transactions cannot be reversed, Crosslink reduces double-spend risk and increases confidence in transaction settlement. Stronger finality allows for shorter confirmation requirements for exchanges, improves reliability for cross-chain integrations, and provides the consistency required by applications that depend on predictable settlement. These improvements make Zcash easier to integrate into the broader crypto ecosystem while maintaining its existing security properties.
Vitalik’s donation will be used to support the productization of the existing Crosslink prototype, including the launch of a persistent, incentivized testnet where participants can earn ZEC, as well as the transition into a productionization phase. This phase will focus on design specifications, security analysis, audits, coordination with wallets and infrastructure providers, and proactive engagement with the Zcash community. As with all major protocol changes, progress toward mainnet activation will depend on technical readiness, security review, and broad community support.
Commenting on the donation, Vitalik said, “Zcash is one of the most honorable crypto projects with a steadfast focus on privacy. Shielded Labs’ Crosslink work will allow Zcash to be more secure and on a lower security budget, supporting its long-term sustainability.”
Shielded Labs is a Swiss-based Zcash support organization building unstoppable private money. We focus on protocol development projects that strengthen the long-term security and sustainability of the Zcash network. Shielded Labs is funded by donations from Zcash holders and supporters and operates independently of the Dev Fund and block rewards. This donation marks Vitalik’s second contribution to Shielded Labs; his first, made in 2023, supported the formation of a dedicated team focused on Crosslink.
Shielded Labs would like to thank Vitalik for his continued support of Zcash. He has been a long-time supporter of the project and has contributed to discussions around protocol design and security over many years. We appreciate his continued engagement with the Zcash ecosystem and his willingness to help advance work that makes Zcash stronger and more resilient.
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Shielded Labs is pleased to welcome Giovanni Carlino as an engineer. Giovanni is based in Italy and will be working on our core projects while also supporting our Partner Services initiative.
Giovanni has a strong interest in systems engineering and security. He previously worked on Icarus, an advanced C/C++ IDE built in C99 using the Win32 API. Building a full development environment gave him a deep appreciation for software quality and performance, an approach he will bring to his work on Zcash.
He is particularly excited to join Shielded Labs because of its focus on building strong, privacy-preserving infrastructure. Giovanni says, “For me, Zcash is the leader in financial privacy, and joining this team is an opportunity to ensure that the underlying infrastructure is as robust and efficient as the cryptography it supports. I’m looking forward to helping Shielded Labs push the boundaries of what decentralized money can do.”
Giovanni’s addition strengthens our ability to execute on protocol development and ecosystem support. This brings the team to 11 members, including 9 full-time contributors and 2 part-time contributors who support operations and security. We’re excited to have him on board and look forward to his contributions.
Welcome to Shielded Labs, Giovanni!
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Welcome to the fold Giovanni 
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Ciao Giovanni, benvenuto! 
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Nice.
A couple of things I’m curious about:
How do you see coordination working long-term between multiple independent orgs contributing to consensus-critical code? Especially if Shielded Labs is maintaining its own fork initially, what prevents fragmentation or conflicting upgrade paths?
On the protocol side, what criteria would you use to decide what gets prioritised independently vs what should still align tightly with ECC/Foundation roadmaps?
Also, on the adoption side, there’s a mix of narratives (privacy, human rights, payments, DeFi). Do you see Shielded Labs converging on a primary identity for Zcash or intentionally keeping it multi-narrative?
Overall, the decentralisation goal makes sense. The interesting part will be how coordination scales without reintroducing central points of control.
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What prevents fragmentation is that Zcash already has a defined process for evaluating and building support around changes before they move forward. The ZIP process and consensus gathering through community panels and coinholder polling create clear and transparent ways to obtain feedback and gauge support for protocol upgrades. Disagreements will happen, but they’re channeled into discussion and iteration rather than competing upgrade paths, as we’ve seen with the recent discussions around NU7.
The reality of a permissionless protocol is that no group can force users to adopt a feature they don’t want or prevent them from adopting one they do, and good-faith disagreement is part of the process and often leads to better outcomes. Forks are always a possibility, and that is by design, but the processes we have in place help reduce unnecessary conflict by creating structured ways to discuss proposals, test support, and iterate before activation. Ultimately, protocol governance comes from the software that miners, node operators, exchanges, and users choose to run. No process or sentiment poll can force the network to adopt changes its participants do not accept.
Shielded Labs prioritizes protocol work that advances the long-term sustainability, security, and scalability of the Zcash network. That focus drives our core initiatives: the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), Crosslink, and Dynamic Fees. Together, these are designed to reinforce each other and improve the security budget, strengthen settlement guarantees, and make Zcash more unstoppable.
We collaborate closely with ZODL, the Zcash Foundation, and other contributors, but our priorities are ultimately driven by what we believe best strengthens the network over the long term.
Shielded Labs views Zcash as unstoppable private money.
I don’t think Zcash should force everything into one narrow narrative. Multiple narratives are fine, but they should be anchored in a single coherent identity: unstoppable private money. Privacy, human rights, payments, savings, DeFi, institutional use cases, etc. can all be valid, but they should connect back to that identity.
Unstoppable private money is the core principle. It’s money that is private by default, censorship resistant, and reliably protects ownership so you can hold and transact without needing permission or trusting any intermediary.
Privacy, payments, human rights, DeFi, etc. aren’t separate narratives. They’re different ways people experience that core principle.
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