Would be interesting to hear what the team/community thinks about it.

makes perfect sense for using Bridgeless to "external" chains; but ZEL is Zano's own sidechain – so the question remains, "is ZEL itself privacy-preserving or just standard (public) EVM?"

if it's the latter, fUSD in an AMM pool there would have visible amounts and balances – and perhaps be considered too big a (privacy) shift from the L1

not sure what the plan is, but here are 2 possibilities:
(1) Aztec is doing zk-powered private smart contracts with their Noir language — probably the closest thing to real private EVM execution – and definitely the one I'd favor

(2) while Railgun takes a different approach – utilizing shielded pools on top of existing EVM chains rather than privacy at the execution layer

imo, both are pretty interesting – but also feel very different in terms of what they'd mean for (and how they'd integrate into) ZEL

any sense of which direction the team is leaning?
or perhaps it's still early

Great questions shomari.

i've been looking for some time now, but hadn't seen ZEL mentioned before, glad to hear it's on the roadmap

any details on the tech stack?

but what i'm really curious about – how does privacy work across the two layers?

if the EVM sidechain handles contracts and the L1 handles privacy, is there a bridge mechanism that keeps amounts/addresses hidden when assets move between them?

It's an EVM sidechain that brings smart contracts to the ecosystem while Zano L1 remains the privacy chain.