Vitalik Buterin All-Out Supports Zcash with Big Steps in the Privacy Realm

Jakarta, Pintu News – Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has donated to Shielded Labs to support the development of Crosslink, a proposed consensus enhancement for Zcash .

This move demonstrates Buterin’s growing commitment to privacy-preserving infrastructure, while also reflecting the growing interest in strengthening finality and transaction settlement guarantees on proof-of-work-based blockchains.

Vitalik Doubles Down on Commitment to Privacy Infrastructure

Shielded Labs is developing Crosslink, a parallel finality layer designed to run on top of Zcash’s existing proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

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Simply put, Crosslink adds a second confirmation system that locks in transactions faster and with more certainty. This reduces the risk of chain reorg, rollback, and double-spend attacks.

As a result, crypto exchanges can shorten confirmation times, cross-chain bridges get stronger security guarantees, and developers find it easier to build applications on top of Zcash.

What is Shielded Labs Working on for Zcash?

Shielded Labs is a research and engineering group focused on Zcash and works on improving the core protocol, not on developing applications or tooling.

Its primary mission is to improve the long-term security, usability, and cryptographic guarantees of Zcash-especially regarding shielded transactions and privacy-first design.

Buterin’s support comes amid a shift in his public advocacy stance that increasingly emphasizes privacy and system resilience over growth or ease of use.

In recent months, he has repeatedly asserted that blockchain should be optimized for worst-case scenarios, not just for the best user experience. That includes resisting censorship, minimizing trust assumptions, and protecting users even in hostile conditions. In that framework, privacy is not an add-on feature. Privacy is core infrastructure.

The Push Toward Privacy Is Now More Crucial than Ever

Buterin has warned that financial transparency without strong cryptographic privacy protections will create long-term risks, including surveillance, coercion, and systemic fragility.

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He has been increasingly vocal in praising systems that embed privacy directly at the protocol level, rather than making it an optional feature at the top layer. Zcash’s shielded transactions model is very much in line with that philosophy.

By backing Shielded Labs, Buterin is essentially lending his support to privacy-preserving designs while strengthening transaction settlement guarantees-two areas that he believes are still lacking attention and investment in the crypto industry today.

Signals for a Broader Crypto Ecosystem

This donation also comes at a time when Ethereum itself is reviewing some parts of its scaling and security roadmap.

While Buterin often criticizes superficial innovations and “copy-paste” infrastructure in other projects, his support for Zcash highlights the kind of progress he considers truly meaningful: protocol-level improvements that enhance user safety, finality, and protection.

In this context, the move isn’t about Ethereum versus Zcash-it’s about what kind of blockchain architecture Buterin thinks will be viable in the long run.

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Reference:

• BeInCrypto. Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Goes All-In on Zcash With New Privacy Bet. Accessed on February 9, 2026