Shielded Grid

Manifesto ^ SHIELDED GRID 8,888 notes exist. No more will ever be issued. One name, one grid, forever. A name is not a picture. It has no color, no shape, no weight. Not until it's spent. Shielded Grid takes the thing every identity starts with, a name, and puts it through a one way door. SHA256 in, a commitment out: sixty four characters that came from your name and can never be turned back into it. That commitment becomes the seed for a drawing. The same name will always produce the same grid. No two different names produce the same grid. This is not a style choice. It is what a cryptographic hash function guarantees. Most notes, about 8,444, are Transparent. Nine by nine, one ink, a plain mark where the pattern calls for an accent. Four hundred are Sapling. Thirteen by thirteen, a second ink, a ringed sigil in place of the plain mark. Forty four are Ironwood. Seventeen by seventeen, a third ink, a mark none of the other tiers can draw. Named for the pool that replaced a vulnerable one this year, not the one that broke. Nobody chooses a tier. The same hash that draws your grid decides where it lands, in the same pass, before anyone, including us, could have influenced it. Minting is not open. Entry is earned by two public actions on one pinned post, and the list of who qualifies is committed to a Merkle root before any randomness exists to bias it. Selection, where demand exceeds supply, runs on a random seed nobody chose and everybody can check. No name is drawn twice. Once a commitment is spent, its nullifier is recorded and that name is retired from the set for good, the same mechanism that keeps a Zcash shielded transaction from being spent twice, doing the same job for names. Grids are reserved the moment a name is committed. They settle on chain as Zcash Shielded Assets once ZSA issuance activates on the Zcash network. Public asset, private holder, proof offered only when the holder chooses to offer it. Until then, a reserved note is held, not lost, not visible to anyone watching the chain. Every holder gets a viewing key: the ability to prove a grid is theirs to whoever they choose, without exposing everything else they hold to everyone who happens to be looking. Nine by nine, thirteen by thirteen, or seventeen by seventeen. Transparent, Sapling, or Ironwood. One name, one hash, one grid, forever. Your name was always going to become something. This is where it becomes a note.

A leaf proves nothing without a witness and a path to the root. The root is pinned above. Witness it. Propagate it. Only witnessed leaves are counted before the tree is sealed