Shardus is building distributed ledger software to remedy the problems of traditional blockchains -- scalability, decentralization and efficiency. The technology being developed will use compute and state sharding to accommodate billions of daily active users, allowing for global-scale decentralized networks.
Bitcoin Confidential is a new coin focused on confidentiality/privacy that will be Proof of Stake, using Ring Confidential Signatures and based on the latest Bitcoin codebase for compatibility.