👀 Researchers Propose Zcash-Style Private Bitcoin Transfers 🔹 Researchers Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov, and Aleksei Moskvin presented a technical paper on "Shielded Bitcoin," describing a protocol for private Bitcoin transfers that operates without requiring consensus rule changes to the network. 🔹 The authors propose shielding transaction amounts, senders, and recipients using encrypted notes and zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs), while leveraging Bitcoin as the underlying base layer for data publication and ordering. 🔹 Under the proposed design, Bitcoin transactions remain public on-chain, but the private transfer details themselves are stored in encrypted form. The protocol utilizes an architecture of encrypted notes, public nullifiers, and ZK-proofs similar to the mechanisms used in Zcash.