Researchers Publish 'Zcash-Style' Design for Private Bitcoin Transfers

In brief

• Researchers at [[alloc] init] have published a specification for Shielded Bitcoin, a protocol for private transfers on the Bitcoin base layer.
• The design borrows Zcash's encrypted notes and zero-knowledge proofs, and requires no changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules.
• Mechanisms for moving BTC into and out of the shielded system are not covered and are due in a separate paper.

Researchers at Bitcoin cryptography developer [[alloc] init] have published a design for "ZCash-style" private transfers that would hide the sender, recipient and amount of a payment while running on the existing Bitcoin network.

The 56-page paper, dated September 24, 2026, is written by Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin.

The team has "put a lot of work into thinking carefully about the security of Shielded Bitcoin and about what information the protocol reveals," Shikhelman tweeted. Komarov called it "ZCash-style privacy on the Bitcoin L1 via PIPEs v2."

Scott Odell, chief operating officer of [[alloc] init], tweeted that the firm had been "cooking on this for quite a while," and described it as a contribution to making Bitcoin "private, without changing Bitcoin."

Value in Shielded Bitcoin is held as encrypted "notes," and each transfer carries a zero-knowledge proof that the sender controls the notes being spent and that inputs and outputs balance. A public marker called a nullifier lets software reject double spends without revealing which note was used.