Menese Protocol is preparing to open a two-week trusted setup ceremony on September 1 for its Shielded Ledger Hivemind, a privacy-focused ledger designed to run entirely on the Internet Computer.
The project is built around a shielded token pool that aims to keep transaction amounts, balances and the link between sender and recipient out of the publicly readable ledger state. Its developers say the system uses Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs, with verification carried out inside an Internet Computer canister using Motoko. The project’s public repository and demo are available for inspection.
The upcoming ceremony is intended to address one of the main trust requirements of the system. Groth16 requires a trusted setup, during which participants contribute secret randomness to generate cryptographic parameters. The security model depends on that secret contribution being destroyed afterwards.
Menese says the ceremony will be open to contributors for two weeks. Participants will add their own secret randomness before destroying it, with the aim of ensuring that no single participant can retain enough information to compromise the resulting setup. The project’s documentation states that a real-value deployment will require a multi-party ceremony and a public transcript before the production keyset can be accepted.
That distinction is important because the current system is still a demonstration rather than a production financial service. Menese’s repository describes the demo token as having no value and says its current live setup is based on a single-party random setup. The project explicitly marks that keyset as ineligible for real-value use.
The underlying ledger is designed to move privacy protection beyond simply encrypting information stored on a public chain. According to the project, the ledger records cryptographic commitments and nullifiers rather than readable transaction amounts, balances or sender-recipient relationships. Proofs generated in the user’s browser are then checked by the canister.
The project has also focused on the privacy implications of reading transaction information. Its private information retrieval system is designed so a wallet can request information without revealing which record it is interested in. The developers say the ledger performs the same type of scan regardless of the requested record, while the client decrypts the result locally.
Another component deals with wallet recovery and synchronisation. The project’s read-path specification says a wallet without stored metadata still needs to scan the public detection stream to identify its own notes. To make that process practical, the system uses certified data structures and parallel client-side scanning. The developers report zero false negatives across their 100-million-record acceptance corpus, although some of the published benchmarks remain based on controlled or headless environments rather than physical consumer devices.
The choice of the Internet Computer introduces a technical constraint. Unlike networks with a native pairing precompile, the project says its Groth16 verifier has to run within the canister itself. The repository contains a Motoko implementation of the BLS12-381 cryptographic operations required for verification, alongside Rust-based circuits and independent testing tools.
Menese reports that a full Groth16 verification can run within a single Internet Computer message. Its published measurements put a pool transfer or withdrawal verification at about 12.57 billion instructions, or roughly 31.4 per cent of the stated 40-billion-instruction message ceiling. These figures are project measurements rather than independent benchmarks.
The repository also contains extensive testing infrastructure, including differential tests against arkworks and blst, circuit tests, fuzzing, model-checked simulations and a separate verification suite. The public GitHub repository currently shows 110 commits and was updated on August 22, 2026.
Menese is presenting the trusted setup as the point at which the project’s cryptographic machinery moves closer to being suitable for real-value applications. The company says the production keyset will remain blocked until a reviewed ceremony transcript is available, followed by further independent review of the circuit, verifier, ledger integration, browser randomness, upgrades and key rotation.
The project is also being open about what its current implementation does not establish. The repository says the demo remains valueless, uses a single-party keyset and contains administrative testing functionality that would have to be removed from a real-value deployment. Its public security page also currently shows no SECURITY.md policy or published security advisories.
For participants, the September 1 ceremony therefore represents less a launch of a finished financial product than an opportunity to contribute to one of the cryptographic foundations required for it. Menese says anyone can take part during the two-week window, with the resulting transcript intended to provide a publicly verifiable record of the contributions.
The broader question will be whether the system can maintain its privacy guarantees while meeting the performance, review and operational requirements expected of software handling real value. For now, the project remains a working public demonstration, with its developers positioning the ceremony as a necessary step before that boundary can be crossed.
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