Building Zcash to Last a Hundred Years

Mark Henderson, Engineering Manager at Shielded Labs, shares what it looks like to build privacy infrastructure on a hundred-year time horizon. He also breaks down two of Shielded Labs' most significant technical bets: the Network Sustainability Mechanism, and Crosslink. Mark makes the case that financial privacy and surveillance-based business models are structurally incompatible—true privacy means building systems where the choice not to look is enforced by the protocol, rather than a company promise.

Key Takeaways:

How Zcash is planning for long-term sustainability beyond its fixed 21 million coin supply

What Crosslink could bring to Zcash by combining proof-of-work with a proof-of-stake finality mechanism

Why Zcash's renewed momentum reflects growing demand for privacy-focused technology

Why financial data is behavioral data, and how it can be used for profiling and influence

Why truly private systems need privacy built into the protocol rather than relying on companies to protect user data

Guest Bio: Mark Henderson is the Engineering Manager at Shielded Labs, where he obsesses over permanence. He works on the privacy infrastructure meant to keep Zcash secure for a zillion years: the Network Sustainability Mechanism, the dynamic fee market, and the Crosslink consensus upgrade. All are designed to protect invariants on the Zcash blockchain (such as the hard 21-million supply cap). Mark is also a polymath who runs a 4,000-piece art catalog powered by AI visual search, and he treats privacy, art, and AI as the same puzzle in different clothes.

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