Shield Rush has officially ended.
Over the past week, thousands of private transactions were completed on Starknet, with many users trying onchain privacy for the first time.
This was only Phase 1.
Phase 2 is coming in a few weeks, and will go one step further: private swaps powered by @avnu_fi and @EkuboProtocol.
Private @USDC features are now live on Starknet.
Users can shield or unshield USDC by @circle at any time, send it privately, and use it in DeFi without exposing balances, amounts, or counterparties on the public ledger.
Powered by STRK20 🧵
Spent the past 2 weeks building the best ve(3,3) implementation on EVM
It's an extremely gas efficient extension for @EkuboProtocol, feat. continuous emissions and distribution to in-range LPs and stakers
For new chains, our stack provides the best tools to monetize bar none
Starknet v0.14.3 is coming to production this month.
Testnet: Jun 9
Mainnet: Jun 22
What’s inside:
> Dynamic L2 gas base fee adjustments based on $STRK price
> Faster block production
> Lower target L2 gas per block, while max block size remains unchanged
> RPC 0.8 deprecated
This version introduces some breaking changes, so we strongly advise all builders to read the official pre-release notes.
https://t.co/Js7HeKhlgW
ZRO Updates
More ZRO has been bought back and locked up than sold into the market. Institutions and buybacks have taken 19.77% of supply in 18 months, while 63.8% of ZRO unlocked to investors still hasn't moved. $112.7M has gone into ZRO buybacks since September 2025, one of the largest programs in crypto.
ZRO is the only asset in the LayerZero ecosystem. All economic value from Zero, LayerZero, and Stargate flows back to it.
Every token expresses a view. ZRO's first was that there'd be many chains, no single winner, and value would accrue to whatever connected them. Now LayerZero has moved $267B across 165 chains.
The next view is bigger. Money and markets are the two largest waves finance will ever see, and both are already onchain. Zero was built for this moment. Coming this fall.
My turn to call out quantum FUD.
The new “we improved on Google’s Bitcoin-breaking quantum circuit” story is, in my view, a nothingburger.
Roughly: Google obscured details of a particular circuit. Researchers reverse-engineered it and found a more efficient way to describe/optimize that circuit.
Interesting? Sure.
Does it change the big picture for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or cryptographic signatures? No.
The question that matters is not “can we shave down circuit size again?” We’ve seen those estimates improve for years.
The question that matters is whether anyone can build a machine with 1,000+ reliable logical qubits and run it at scale.
This is not that news. Not today.
Revenue buybacks on Ethereum went live on Monday. >20k EKUBO has already been repurchased!
Our solution to revenue buybacks is fully automated and permissionless, and can be utilized by any DAO or token
Find information about the EKUBO buybacks here:
https://t.co/hGfxsFKjvu
i am a proponent of privacy very simply because its the counter intuitive thesis to tightening regulations.
$ZEC has led the privacy season but there are a lot more projects that are building in the privacy space.
S tier:
$ZEC - the bitcoin for privacy outperformed every asset
$NIL - humanity first blind computer
$NEAR - one of the strongest architectures for AI Agents right now, agentic payments, low fees, chain abstraction @Grayscale onboard
A tier:
$CC - institutional private chain, huge beneficiary of regulation
$AZTEC - leading privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum
$OCTRA - open-sourced the core HFHE implementation with public benchmarks
B tier:
$H - zk verification of proof of humanity
$STRK - zk execution Layer scaling Ethereum
$ROSE - makes any application private and verifiable, no matter where it runs
C tier:
$DUSK - privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructure for institutional-grade finance