---
title: "Two ways to shield Bitcoin · Bitsaga Insights"
description: "Two research papers describe private payments on Bitcoin. One puts the proof on the chain. The other keeps it off the chain. Watch the same payment travel through both."
url: "https://bitsaga.be/insights/two-ways-to-shield-bitcoin"
language: "en"
---

> Two research papers describe private payments on Bitcoin. One puts the proof on the chain. The other keeps it off the chain. Watch the same payment travel through both.
[Insights](https://bitsaga.be/insights) · Technical

# Two ways to shield Bitcoin

October 5, 2026

Two research papers describe private payments on Bitcoin. They solve the same problem in opposite ways. One puts the proof on the chain. The other keeps the proof off the chain.

Watch the same payment travel through both.

Shielded Bitcoin Shielded CSV

Pause

On a phone, flip between the two tabs. The clock keeps running, so you compare the same moment.

## What the on-chain choice costs

The Shielded Bitcoin paper estimates about 610 bytes on the chain for a payment with two inputs and two outputs. That includes a 192-byte proof. A plain Bitcoin payment is about 140 vB. Shielded CSV claims about 64 bytes of chain data per payment, roughly ten times less. The paper puts the result at about 100 payments per second.

The price of that saving moves to the users. A Shielded CSV wallet must keep its own data. If that data is lost, the paper says the account cannot be recovered. In the on-chain design the encrypted notes stay on the chain, so a wallet can scan for them again.

## What neither design solves

Neither paper gives a trustless way to move real bitcoin in and out. Shielded CSV names BitVM as a route. The Shielded Bitcoin paper points to PIPEs v2. Both routes are research today.

Papers: [Shielded Bitcoin](https://www.allocinit.xyz/uploads/shielded-bitcoin.pdf) (Shikhelman, Komarov, Moskvin, 2026) and [Shielded CSV](https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/068) (Nick, Eagen, Linus, 2024). Shielded CSV also has a small [reference code repository](https://github.com/ShieldedCSV/ShieldedCSV).