BITCOIN COULD GET ZCASH-STYLE PRIVATE TRANSFERS WITHOUT A SOFT FORK
A new proposal called Shielded Bitcoin is aiming to bring private BTC transfers directly onto Bitcoin L1 — without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
Researchers from [[alloc] init] — Clara Shikhelman, Misha Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin — propose using encrypted notes, nullifiers and zero-knowledge proofs to hide key transaction details.
A shielded transfer would hide the amount, sender, receiver and position in the transfer graph, while still allowing the protocol’s validity to be independently verified.
The design also avoids a dedicated sidechain, coordinator or trusted operator. Bitcoin provides the underlying publication and ordering layer, while a Shielded Bitcoin indexer reconstructs the protocol state.
The next major piece is the peg-in/peg-out mechanism, which the researchers plan to build around PIPEs v2. That part is still being developed and is outside the current paper’s scope.
If this architecture works as proposed, Bitcoin could support Zcash-style privacy without modifying Bitcoin itself.
Would private BTC transfers change how you think about Bitcoin’s L1? 👀
#Bitcoin #Privacy $BTC $ZEC
A new proposal called Shielded Bitcoin is aiming to bring private BTC transfers directly onto Bitcoin L1 — without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
Researchers from [[alloc] init] — Clara Shikhelman, Misha Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin — propose using encrypted notes, nullifiers and zero-knowledge proofs to hide key transaction details.
A shielded transfer would hide the amount, sender, receiver and position in the transfer graph, while still allowing the protocol’s validity to be independently verified.
The design also avoids a dedicated sidechain, coordinator or trusted operator. Bitcoin provides the underlying publication and ordering layer, while a Shielded Bitcoin indexer reconstructs the protocol state.
The next major piece is the peg-in/peg-out mechanism, which the researchers plan to build around PIPEs v2. That part is still being developed and is outside the current paper’s scope.
If this architecture works as proposed, Bitcoin could support Zcash-style privacy without modifying Bitcoin itself.
Would private BTC transfers change how you think about Bitcoin’s L1? 👀
#Bitcoin #Privacy $BTC $ZEC
