On September 25, Unchained reported that Misha Komarov, founder of the [alloc] init team, stated that they are developing 'shielded Bitcoin'—a privacy fund pool that mimics Zcash and operates on the existing Bitcoin network without the need for a soft fork or company operation. The solution, named Bitcoin PIPEs, utilizes witness encryption to lock a Bitcoin key, which can only be unlocked upon proving compliance with the rules. The team plans to release the second version of their research in February 2026. Komarov mentioned that each shielded transaction is approximately 700 vbytes (compared to about 100-200 vbytes for regular transactions), with fees around four times higher than conventional transactions, which he described as 'not catastrophic'; the more it is used, the stronger the privacy. He acknowledged that witness encryption is still in the experimental stage, and while the related cryptographic files have been compressed from about 300 TB last year to around 8 TB, they remain quite large. The team plans to reuse audit tools and conduct repeated audits. No launch date has been provided, and users are encouraged to participate in the protocol design discussions early.