Hi, all questions are welcome, here are some from the Kusama Vision coordinator:

1) Who exactly is the team (devs) who will be benefiting from the proposal?
Kusama Shield has since day one had anonymous contributors but 2 developers had been mainly developing the protocol, Because contributors specifically have requested not to be mentioned by name, which anonymous collaboration is something we encourage and want to continue doing but 2 developers have been mainly developing most of the code so far. The “how to contribute to Kusama Shield” mentions this: https://kusamashield.codeberg.page/contribute.html

2) Audit, can you share a signed quote ot auditors engagement letter, some terms, repos and can you clarify if its an official zkSecurity audit or Dvid working independently?

Good Question, David will be treated as an independent subcontractor both to be able to provide an audit like this at this price point but also to have the ability for the auditor to work directly with the developers, unlike an average audit where the developers just hand over a specification of what repos and code bases they want audited and then send it away, we want to do more than an audit, take David expertise in the Zero Knowledge field and improve the development process forever by adopting the best practices, tools and Quality Assurance that comes out of the audit.
In practice:
David company will sign a NDA while doing the audit with proposing entity Rust Syndicate LLC, a republic of Georgia based software company. Making sure all bugs are not disclosed until they are documented, patched and fixed in production before the Audit report is published. This is pretty standard practice to provide a legal enforceable protection between auditor(asked a legal expert in Georgia who explains how NDA's are enforced by saying: "Most NDA's are considered a civil matter which is not enforced by prison but the case could be escalated to a criminal offense if it can be claimed that it violates commercial secrets act").

Here is some references to previous stuff David has done:
https://hackmd.io/@teddav/ByzhQ-zMee

Audit portfolio is including:

• Zcash Tachyon | https://seanbowe.com/blog/ragu-for-orchard-part1/
• Self | https://self.xyz/
• Aleo’s hyperlane bridge: https://github.com/hyperlane-xyz/hyperlane-aleo/
• Celestia Zoda: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/034
• Solana Confidential transfers: https://reports.zksecurity.xyz/reports/anza-solana-token2022/

Full list:
https://teddav.github.io/portfolio/

Scope:
The scope of the audit is covering the smart contracts and the Zero Knowledge implementation, David will come in and work his magic and produce the needed audit after this, all the findings will squashed out by the dev squad.

3) Why is audit done after launch and not before? What user funds are now exposed?

Previous proposal included an audit milestone which before the proposal was submitted the audit milestones was requested to be moved to an independent milestone, where an idea was laid out that another entity would pay for the audit, this ran out in the sand and because the usage is growing, the Kusama Shield project want to guarantee that there has been done a comprehensive audit and that's the reason for this proposal. In order to be able to test full compatibility with all types of Polkadot assets and special cases, we went live to see how the protocols behave in production. Also to be able to build and optimize the SDK’s for Kusama and polkadot, we have right now made lots of improvement in Transaction creation time(/optimizing for faster ZK tx generation). By not having a previous audit

4) What's the project's current usage? current tvl? number of users and txs?
We have soft commitments from projects, but since most larger project really insist on integrating with Audited projects.. Here is some user numbers:
Paseo: ~ 4-5000 shielded transactions
Polkadot: ~200 shielded tx on the latest pool(the v7 contracts) | ~500 swaps | offramps user we dont know
Kusama: not sure, will update once knowing

Also note we have done 7 iterations, that means 7 different smart contracts has been deployed etc. We do have a telegram app for shielded gifts ready to launch after the audit since user funds and security should be number one.

5) Can you link two previous audit reports, including findings?
Here is a summary of some of the stuff that has been previously found and patched:

High level zk circuit explanation:
V5/V6 (VULNERABLE):
Deposit: [nullifierHash] → public on-chain + stored in contract
Withdraw: [nullifierHash] → public in tx calldata
Linkability: MATCH! → Privacy broken

V7 (FIXED):
Deposit: [commitment only] → nullifierHash NEVER sent to chain
Withdraw: [nullifierHash] → only revealed at withdraw
Linkability: IMPOSSIBLE → Privacy preserved

We also have a list of minor bugs that was found by the following frameworks that scans every file changed:
https://github.com/ConsenSysDiligence/mythril
https://github.com/crytic/slither
https://trailofbits.com/tools/circomspect/

~flipchan

Aye:

1. reasonable audit cost,
2. the list of issues found in prior audits warrants another one, now that it's on mainnet and the project has had further optimizations applied
3. privacy on Kusama, 'nuff said