Shielded Labs

Shielded Labs was founded by Jason McGee, established as a Swiss association in December 2022 and publicly announced on the Zcash Community Forum on January 30, 2023. McGee said that Zcash was then supported only by two US organizations, the Electric Coin Company (ECC) and the Zcash Foundation, which were also the sole recipients of the development fund, and that more independent organizations were needed to diffuse power; he also saw Zcash’s exposure to the US as a regulatory single point of failure, and therefore chose to domicile in crypto-friendly, privacy-minded Switzerland. At the start, the organization relied entirely on donations and said it would not apply for Zcash Community Grants funding.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

McGee explained that Shielded Labs is a nonprofit Swiss association whose funds may be used only to support the Zcash protocol, community and ecosystem, with a board elected by its members; he is a US citizen and serves as a board member, while the other board members would be non-US citizens. In 2023, the Winklevoss twins made their first donation to it, supporting the formation of a dedicated Crosslink team.⁠[1][1][1][2]

In March 2023, Shielded Labs began championing the Zcash Sustainability Fund (also called the Posterity Fund) proposal; in June it announced a partnership with Equilibrium Group to develop it, with Shielded Labs providing the funding.⁠[1][1][1][1]

The proposal evolved into the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), an upgrade to ZEC’s issuance mechanism that keeps the 21 million cap while allowing circulating ZEC to be burned and later reissued as block rewards, addressing concerns raised in the Bitcoin community that miner revenue may become insufficient as block subsidies decline. The NSM comprises three ZIPs: ZIP 233 establishes a voluntary burn mechanism, ZIP 234 smooths the issuance curve with an exponential decay of roughly a four-year half-life so burned coins are gradually reissued, and ZIP 235 proposes burning 60% of transaction fees (about 210 ZEC a year).⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

On February 25, 2025, Shielded Labs publicly sought a fifth board member, requiring candidates to be based outside the United States and to understand privacy-preserving technologies; the position is unpaid. On March 7, it published its Crosslink roadmap: Crosslink is a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus designed for Zcash, with a complete implementation targeted within about 12 months and roughly 9 more months for productionization. The prototype uses Malachite, a Rust library implementing Tendermint BFT, and the team consists of former ECC and Equilibrium members and young engineers, with most engineering resources devoted to the project.⁠[4][4][4][5][5][5][5][5][5]

On August 13, 2025, Executive Director Jason McGee wrote that the NU7 network upgrade had been repeatedly delayed by the slipping deprecation of zcashd and expanding scope; he proposed that Shielded Labs accelerate a smaller NU7 including the NSM, Explicit Fees and front-loaded transaction format changes for all candidate features, with Shielded Labs taking responsibility for implementation in zcashd and zebrad, testing, auditing and coordination. He said Shielded Labs had already built a zcashd implementation of the NSM in advance.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

On September 4, 2025, Zcash coinholders voted to approve the Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants Program proposed by McGee on behalf of Shielded Labs, in a record-participation vote with 1.49 million coins voting on the first question. Under the Community and Coinholder funding model in ZIP 1016, proposed by ECC’s Josh SwihartJosh SwihartJosh Swihart is a technology executive and the founder and CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL). He joined the Electric Coin Company (ECC), Zcash’s developer, in 2018, succeeded Zooko Wilcox as CEO in December 2023 and led the launch of the Zashi wallet; in January 2026 he and the entire ECC team left after a conflict with the board of its parent organization and formed ZODL, with Zashi renamed Zodl.Open the full entry, 12% of block rewards flow to the program from November 2025 until Zcash’s third halving in 2028; the funds are held in a multisig wallet controlled by three keyholder organizations — ECC, the Zcash Foundation and Shielded Labs — and pay only for completed work. Shielded Labs said it would not apply for grants from the program or any other Dev Fund source.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7]

On November 26 of that year, the first-round results were published: coinholders voted on nine proposals, and five were approved — FPF Administration, Bitcoin VN, Electric Coin Company, ZcashCommunity.com Hosting and Unstoppable Wallet.⁠[8]

On September 12, 2025, Shielded Labs published an initial design for Crosslink staking economics: a proof-of-stake network of finalizers runs alongside the existing proof-of-work network, with block rewards split 40/40 between miners and finalizers; to protect privacy, staking and unstaking occur in 10-day windows with rounded amounts, plus a 30-day unbonding period. On October 27, after community feedback that the original design hurt liquidity, it shortened the epoch to five days and the unbonding period to one epoch, with staking taking place only within the Orchard shielded pool.⁠[9][9][9][9][10][10][10]

In January 2026, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated $1.2 million to Shielded Labs to strengthen Zcash’s security, sustainability and scalability, their second donation to the organization. The money will support core initiatives including the NSM, Crosslink and Dynamic Fees.⁠[2][2][2]

On March 23, 2026, security researcher Alex “Scalar” Sol reported to Shielded Labs a vulnerability that caused zcashd to skip Sprout proof verification when processing new blocks. Shielded Labs and ZODL engineers validated the issue, Jack Grigg wrote the patch, and Shielded Labs led outreach to mining pools including ViaBTC, Luxor, F2Pool and AntPool, with all major pools upgrading within three days; the bug was not exploited and could have affected only the deprecated Sprout pool, which held about 25,000 ZEC.⁠[11][11][11][11][11][11][11]

On April 17, Shielded Labs published a security advisory noting that the same researcher had used AI to find several lower-severity vulnerabilities in zcashd and Zebra and anticipating more AI-assisted discoveries and even exploits; it recommended that exchanges, custodians and others place their zcashd nodes behind a Zebra node so that the memory-safe Rust implementation handles all peer-to-peer connections.⁠[12][12][12][12][12]

In April 2026, Shielded Labs announced that Crosslink was moving from prototype to productization and launched an incentivized feature net in which miners, stakers and finalizers could earn real ZEC, allocating 500 ZEC in total, with the first season beginning on April 15. The roadmap targets feature production readiness in the third quarter of 2026 and an upgrade candidate network in the first quarter of 2027; any mainnet activation still depends on rough consensus among Zcash’s community and coinholders.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13]

On May 27, Engineering Manager Mark Henderson proposed a dynamic fee scheme achievable that year without a network upgrade, including wallet priority delivery at four times the fee, a speed-up feature, an RPC endpoint suggesting fees from on-chain data and several parameter changes. On May 29, Shielded Labs published a review of the feature net’s first six weeks, acknowledging frequent crashes, syncing problems and stalled finality, and decided to stop restarting the network in seasons, instead iterating on the existing network and distributing rewards every six weeks.⁠[14][14][14][15][15][15]

In April 2026, Shielded Labs engaged security engineer Taylor Hornby for ongoing security research on the Zcash protocol. On May 29, Hornby used AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry’s newly released Opus 4.8 model to review the Orchard circuit, found a critical counterfeiting vulnerability and immediately disclosed it to ZODL engineers; the ZODL-led ecosystem-wide emergency upgrade completed the fix on June 2. Shielded Labs explained on June 4 that the vulnerability could have been used to undetectably create an unlimited amount of counterfeit ZEC within the Orchard pool and had existed from Orchard’s activation in May 2022 until the emergency fix was deployed on June 1, 2026; because of Orchard’s privacy properties, cryptography alone cannot prove whether it was exploited, but it considered prior exploitation unlikely.⁠[16][16][16][16][16][16][16]

After the disclosure, ZEC fell from the previous day’s high of $635 to $309, down about 37.8% on the day; former BitMEX CEO Arthur HayesArthur HayesArthur Hayes is a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and investor who co-founded the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX in 2014 and served as its longtime CEO; as of October 2026, he is Chief Investment Officer of Maelstrom, his family office. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to one count of violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act over BitMEX’s failure to establish an anti-money laundering program and was sentenced to probation; in March 2025, he was pardoned by U.S. President Donald Trump.Open the full entry said he had sold his entire ZEC position, while Grayscale Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm argued that exploitation before the patch was very unlikely. Shielded Labs then announced a project to formally verify the Orchard circuit and began recruiting a head of security and a cryptographer.⁠[17][17][17][17][16][16]

On June 6, 2026, Shielded Labs, together with the Zcash Foundation, Tachyon, Valar GroupValar GroupValar Group is a cryptography research and engineering team focused on developing the Zcash protocol, led by Osmosis co-founder Dev Ojha and staffed largely by engineers from Osmosis and Celestia; in 2026 it took part in the Ironwood network upgrade, released the full-node software Zakura with Project Tachyon, and built Zcash’s private coinholder voting chain.Open the full entry and ZODL, proposed Ironwood: a new shielded pool built on the corrected Orchard circuit, while barring the creation of new outputs in the old Orchard pool so that its funds could leave only through the turnstile, which rejects any withdrawal exceeding legitimate inflows — allowing users to verify, simply by running a node, that the circulating supply of ZEC has not been inflated. On June 15, Shielded Labs also addressed four questions, including whether the vulnerability was exploited and whether legitimate funds can be recovered.⁠[18][18][18][18][19]

Ironwood activated as NU6.3 on July 28, 2026, at block height 3,428,143. Shielded Labs said Ironwood was completed jointly by Project TachyonTachyon (Zcash)Tachyon (Project Tachyon) is a Zcash scaling upgrade proposal put forward in 2025 by Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe and developed by community members. It uses “oblivious synchronization” and proof-carrying data (PCD) to shrink shielded transactions and cap the state validators must keep, and removes on-chain secret distribution to achieve full post-quantum privacy; as of October 2026 it remained in development, and mainnet activation requires community approval. In 2026 its team also led the formal verification of the Ironwood upgrade.Open the full entry, Valar Group, ZODL, the Zcash Foundation and Shielded Labs, with Project Tachyon, Valar Group and ZODL handling the architecture, the new consensus rules and formal verification, and the Zcash Foundation implementing it in Zebra.⁠[20][20][21][21][21]

In September 2026, the Zcash community debated whether the Development Fund should continue. In a September 15 essay, McGee wrote that Shielded Labs was the only major Zcash organization never to have applied for or received Dev Fund money, yet it supported the Dev Fund, crediting it with building Sapling, Orchard, Halo 2 and Zebra; he argued for first discussing the goals and size of funding before choosing mechanisms. On September 18, he wrote about the evolution of Zcash governance, noting that the five organizations responsible for protocol development — Project Tachyon, Valar Group, ZODL, the Zcash Foundation and Shielded Labs — had adopted the most conservative reading of a poll and set February 2031 for the start of reissuing funds removed by the NSM.⁠[22][22][22][22][23]

On October 1, 2026, Shielded Labs announced Epoch, a project to develop production-ready, formally verified post-quantum cryptography against threats such as quantum computing, AI-assisted attacks and state-level adversaries. It is led by a three-person team: Ulrich Haböck, formerly a cryptographer at StarkWareStarkWareStarkWare is a blockchain technology company headquartered in Netanya, Israel, founded in 2018 by STARK proof co-inventor Eli Ben-Sasson and others. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to provide scaling, privacy and quantum-resistance solutions for Ethereum and other blockchains, has developed the StarkEx scaling engine, the Cairo programming language and the Stone and S-two provers, and leads development of the layer-2 network Starknet; its last funding round, in 2022, valued it at $8 billion.Open the full entry, as chief cryptographer, and Luke Edwards and Suyash Bagad as cryptography engineers; the first phase is coordinated with Project Tachyon and other teams, targeting a production-grade implementation by the end of 2027 that could underpin a future upgrade.⁠[24][24][24][24][24][24]

At Network State Conference 2026 in Singapore on October 9, 2026, the speaker list for the Zcash Zummit session listed Zooko Wilcox as representing Shielded Labs.⁠[25]

As of October 2026, Shielded Labs’ executive director is Jason McGee Stramaglia, with Zooko Wilcox as chief product officer and Nate Wilcox as chief technology officer; the team also includes Engineering Manager Mark Henderson and Chief Cryptographer Ulrich Haböck, among others. Its board comprises Jason McGee Stramaglia, Zooko Wilcox, Awa Sun Yin, Chris Berg and Frank Braun. The organization is funded mainly by donations from ZEC holders and supporters, and it provides Zero, an open-source Zcash infrastructure software suite, along with technical support for exchanges, mining pools and wallets.⁠[26][26][27][28][29]

Shielded Labs: Official website: https://shieldedlabs.net/ (opens in a new window).⁠[30]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ShieldedLabs (opens in a new window)⁠[30]