Why ZCash CRASHED Over 30% in 1 Day (Mert)
Mert argues Zcash’s developer-exodus narrative was false, amplified when “Grok summarize[d] it falsely.” The people actually shipping Zcash—including Josh, the engineers, and the Zashi team—remained in a renamed, startup-style structure: “Nobody quit. They just changed the structure of the team.” The price recovered, though not fully.
The restructuring moves Zcash’s main shipping team from nonprofit constraints toward a capital-raising technology company. Mert calls the change “anything from 10 to 11x” better because the team can hire, fund development, and judge itself against product and wallet usage instead of navigating a bureaucratic board.
Zcash development remains decentralized across several organizations rather than controlled by one canonical team. ECC does some core development and maintains the Zashi wallet; Shielded Labs conducts research; independent contributors remain active; and Sean Bowe’s Tachyon team is pursuing state-growth removal, scaling, and quantum-proof privacy. Mert’s blunt assessment is that the Zcash Foundation is “basically non-existent” operationally.
The new company can monetize products while still seeking tokenholder-approved development funding. Zashi users pay a small fee when swapping assets through NEAR Intents, while what critics call a “dev tax” is, according to Mert, an approximately 8%-12% share of mining rewards held in a lockbox and allocated to teams through tokenholder votes.
Mert rejects the idea that organizational drama damages Zcash’s monetary thesis because “nothing about the chain itself has changed.” Thread Guy frames the broader mission as “encrypting money at planetary scale” and putting “a Swiss vault in your pocket,” which requires “missionaries, not mercenaries” who have stayed through years of downturns and whose cryptography has worked at scale.
The conversation broadens into Mert’s claim that Opus 4.5 represents a step-function improvement in AI coding and could reshape venture formation over five years. Programming becomes instructing computers in English, but specificity still separates useful engineering from bad prompting. After building a prediction-market app in roughly one part-time week, he expects cheaper MVPs, more founders, faster traction, less need to sell the company, fiercer software competition, and more incentive to pursue genuinely ambitious projects.
1. The crash reflected a communication failure, not a developer exodus
Mert woke at 5 or 6 p.m. after going to bed at 8 a.m. from vibe-coding prediction markets, then saw missed calls across Telegram, Slack, and Signal. His diagnosis: a few slow-thread or content-creator types were compounded when “Grok summarize[d] it falsely,” producing the claim that Zcash’s developers had abandoned the project.
The operative fact, in his telling, is that “literally 100%” of the people actually shipping the former ECC operation—including Josh, the engineers, and the people maintaining Zashi—remained in a renamed corporate structure. “Nobody quit. They just changed the structure of the team.”
Thread Guy pressed on what actually triggered the rupture. Mert would not disclose everything, but said the team wanted to raise capital, hire, and ship faster while a nonprofit legal structure and board impeded those goals; he compared it to OpenAI employees rallying behind Sam Altman, except this team actually took out the CEO and started its own company.
2. Zcash is a network of teams, with ECC at its shipping center
Mert’s framing: decentralized protocols inevitably have messy contributor structures—Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana all contain teams that disagree—so Zcash never had one monolithic developer organization.
ECC is generally the most relevant group because it contributes to some core development and maintains Zashi, the wallet Mert says most people use. He credits the wallet’s creation largely, or “really entirely,” to Josh.
Elsewhere, Shielded Labs performs research with Zooko and others, while independent contributors remain active. Mert sharply described the Zcash Foundation as “largely irrelevant,” contrasting its limited role with the Solana and Ethereum foundations.
Mert calls Sean Bowe “the Anatoly of ZK.” He says Bowe’s Tachyon project aims to remove state growth, scale Zcash to thousands and hundreds of thousands of TPS, and make it quantum-proof so privacy will not be compromised when quantum computers arrive. When asked why Bowe works separately, Mert admitted, “I actually don’t know,” then guessed he preferred shipping as a lone wolf.
3. The corporate reset exchanges governance friction for market discipline
Mert sees the nonprofit structure as fundamentally mismatched with adoption at millions or billions of users: it restricted fundraising, hiring, and execution while empowering a process-heavy board. Under the new arrangement, he says the shipping CEO is solely in charge of the organization and can respond more directly to market usage.
Commercial revenue has already begun: when Zashi users swap assets through NEAR Intents, a small fee goes to the team. Future products, including bridges, could similarly make development more market-driven and paid for by users.
Mert also corrected the “dev tax” caricature. He believes roughly 8%-12% of mining rewards goes through a lockbox; teams then present work—such as a wallet that attracted users—and tokenholders vote on whether they deserve funding for that period.
He stressed that he is not part of any Zcash team. His role is informal: helping with hiring, connections, and storytelling because he believes the mission matters.
4. The monetary thesis did not change with the org chart
Thread Guy’s strongest pushback was whether visible team drama weakens Zcash against Bitcoin’s “immaculate conception.” Mert answered that Bitcoin also endured human conflict; much of it simply happened long enough ago that people forgot it. “Wherever there’s humans, there’s going to be drama.”
His bottom line: “No monetary properties have been changed—nothing.” The chain is intact; the engineers who already performed the work now face less political burden.
Thread Guy defines the mission as “encrypting money at planetary scale”—“a Swiss vault in your pocket.” Eight years of persistence and cryptography that has worked at scale persuaded him to support the existing contributors: the project needs aligned “missionaries, not mercenaries,” not one savior.
5. Opus 4.5 could turn startup formation into an abundance problem
Earlier coding agents struck Mert as useful until they hallucinated on harder work. Opus 4.5 changed his view: while his team was away, he found that it could make “entire apps with not much supervision,” which he considers a step-function improvement.
His key analogy is that programming has always meant giving computers precise instructions; historically the language was JavaScript or Rust, whereas AI makes that language English. Precision still matters: an engineering-grade prompt plus repeated self-verification can make the model iterate “like a little intern.”
Mert says he built a prediction-market app in about one week, not even full-time. He expects the implications to unfold over roughly five years, beginning now: founders can reach market faster, hire fewer people, and sell less, while prolific builders can work on several projects simultaneously.
Thread Guy questioned how an explosion of disposable apps could monetize. Mert resisted a universal answer—crypto volume businesses, subscriptions, and B2B SaaS differ—but argued founders can no longer justify raising $10 million or $100 million before shipping an MVP. This should make it harder to bullshit and easier to weed out VCs who do not know what they are doing.
Mert acknowledged significant negatives, including uncertainty for new software-engineering graduates. His long-term view is that more founders, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and multi-project founders should mean more progress and encourage more ambitious quests.
Full transcript
What’s up, man?
Muted.
Oh, sorry. I got you now. How are you, dude?
Muted.
Yo, yo, yo.
Good, man. How you doing?
I’m maybe a little bit better than you, but in a similar boat. [Laughter] Good to see you here, man. I appreciate you jumping on such late notice. You woke up to some shambles today, huh?
Yeah. Are we live?
Yeah. Yeah, we’re live. We’re live. We’re live.
Yeah, man. Look, I woke up at around 5 or 6 p.m. because I went to bed at 8 a.m. I was vibe-coding some prediction markets, and then I saw a bunch of missed calls on Telegram, Slack, Signal, and all this shit.
It seemed like everybody got faked out by a few slow-thread or content-creator types, and then just had Grok summarize it falsely. There was this news that the Zcash developers left. It felt like all that happened was the developers went from a foundation structure to a tech startup-lab structure, and then they changed their names, which was made clear. The price recovered and stuff—not fully, obviously—but it was just a whole lot of shenanigans.
Honestly, there’s a lot there. The Grok explanation is awesome and terrible for the world.
Can you break down the structure of Zcash? One narrative that gets thrown around a lot is “encrypted Bitcoin” or something like that, and I don’t think anyone understands the dev structure for Bitcoin and how that works. I also don’t think most people, at least casuals, understand how Zcash is structured and what that looks like.
Can you break that down at a high level—how the organization is structured?
Sure. The second you have a decentralized platform and different people working on it, it gets a little weird because there’s no single team. Even within Bitcoin, you’ll see Udi go back and forth with Nick Carter about certain dev teams, while they’re fine with other dev teams. It’s quite messy. Ethereum is a similar situation. Solana is a similar situation. Zcash is no different.
The current structure is that there’s ECC, the Electric Coin Company—
Which basically helps with some core development?
Not all of it, but some of it. It also maintains the Zashi wallet, which is the wallet that most people are using for Zcash. By the way, that wallet is actually quite new, and it’s largely, or really entirely, due to the work of Josh, the bald guy who’s the CEO.
So there’s that. There’s also the Zcash Foundation, which is largely irrelevant. They don’t actually do anything. Solana Foundation and Ethereum Foundation are quite relevant, but the Zcash Foundation is basically nonexistent. They’re not in control of it. What do they do? I know their names roughly, but they basically just don’t do anything. I think they might help organize a few events or something.
Do they make money? Do they get paid coming from Solana and Ethereum?
No, not that I’m aware of for the Zcash Foundation. I’ll talk about some dev-fund confusions that people make a lot.
There’s the Zcash Foundation, which is pretty irrelevant. There’s ECC, which is generally the most relevant. There’s now also a team called Tachyon, headed by Sean Bowe, who is basically the Anatoly of ZK. He’s the one who’s going to scale Zcash and make it quantum-proof in certain regards. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he has a team of probably three or four of the best engineers in privacy and cryptography that I know. Two of them recently joined.
Then there are independent contributors. There’s a thing called Shielded Labs, which does some research work. That one is actually by Zooko and a few folks there.
The majority of the work gets done by what was formerly ECC, the Electric Coin Company. They do some core development, but they also maintain the wallet.
What’s happened now is that ECC was a nonprofit structure in the corporate sense.
Okay.
When you’re a nonprofit, there’s a lot of bureaucracy, a bunch of Karens on the board, and you can’t raise money well. The employees basically said, “Look, for Zcash to work, it has to scale to millions or billions of people. We can’t raise capital or do anything as a nonprofit. So we’re going to change the structure of this company, rename it, and go full force in accelerating hiring and shipping new shit.”
Why was it a nonprofit to begin with? Did they not have this thesis from inception?
I think the landscape looked quite different. This was many years ago. There were fears around privacy and all this stuff, and I wasn’t around, so I don’t necessarily know why they did it that way.
The important news is that—you might have seen Bali’s tweet, and you might have seen Josh’s tweet—there’ll be more news, but the fundamental thing to understand is that they’re now unburdened by the incompetencies and inefficiencies that come with a foundation and a nonprofit. Now they’re a tech company.
Okay. So this is ECC? Or was that the nonprofit that migrated its structure?
Yeah. It was ECC, which is now—there are some weird names, like Bootstrap technically owns ECC and stuff—but the people who actually do the shipping, like Josh, who maintains the wallet, and all the engineers and everybody on that team, literally 100% of them, are still there.
Nobody quit. They just changed the structure of the team. So when people say, “All the Zcash devs left,” that is absolutely incorrect.
Got it. Okay, makes sense. What sparked this today? They basically announced this, and then there was a harshly worded thread that went viral, basically saying that the Zcash team cashed out. That led to this snowball effect. What happened for there to be all this controversy on Twitter?
I’m not sure how much I can really disclose, but there are a few threads on this by Josh, who I would say is the source of truth.
Fundamentally, as far as I understand, they wanted to raise money, start shipping more things, hire more people, scale the team, and all this stuff. That is quite hard to do in the legal structure of a nonprofit. The nonprofit generally has board members who aren’t necessarily aligned with shipping and progress.
A very similar scenario is, if you remember ChatGPT—
Okay.
I don’t know if you remember, but the board basically kicked out Sam Altman. All the employees were like, “Hold up, what the hell is this? We want Sam Altman back.” They basically came together to say, “Bring him back or we quit the company.”
This is basically the same thing, except they actually took out the CEO, and all the employees started their own company.
Got it. What do you think this changes for the development teams working on Zcash? Is anything put in a better position for the future because they can make money, hire people, and do all this stuff? Is it worse? Is it more confusing? What does this change?
I think it’s inherently way better—anything from 10 to 11x better, in my view.
Now they’ll have more capital. They won’t have political or bureaucratic processes slowing them down. They’ll be able to hire more people. They’ll be able to raise funds if they need to. They’ll rely less on dev funds and will be more market-driven, such that they can judge the outcome of their actions by whether people are using the product, whether people are using the wallet, and all this stuff.
The board is very important if you’re an operator. Now the board is solely the CEO of the company. The CEO—the person who’s doing the shipping—is in charge of the actual organization, as opposed to some mix of four or five people who are just there to add process.
How did ECC make money previously, and how does the new structure make money?
There are a few ways. One of the bad things about a nonprofit, of course, is that you generally require donations and other ways of making money that aren’t very capitalist-aligned, at least for most crypto bros.
Now, for example, when you use Zashi and use NEAR Intents to swap across assets and do all this stuff, that little fee you pay goes to them.
Okay.
Right. So they’re now making money. This is obviously a recent phenomenon.
Then there’s the thing called the dev tax. People misunderstand how this works. They think that every block, some money goes to the foundation. That’s actually not what happens.
What happens is that token holders receive some portion of the ZEC mining rewards. I think it’s around 8% to 12%.
It goes through this lockbox that's voted on by token holders, right? Certain teams apply and say, “Hey, we think we did a good job shipping this new wallet, which brought over all these new users to Zcash. We would like 5% of the rewards this period.” And the token holders, if they agree, will vote with their money and say, “Okay, yes.”
Since it's now more of a tech company, they will release new products like bridges and all this stuff, such that they actually get paid by the users and the market-driven mechanics of people using Zcash.
Okay, thank you for that. Are you on this team?
No, I'm not on this team. I'm my own team of—I don't know. I try to help with hiring, connections, and telling the story. I think the mission is important, but I'm not technically part of any team. I'm not even part of the Solana team, either, by the way. I try my best.
I know you have a lot of vested interest, with your capital, in the privacy thing winning, but more broadly, philosophically, you just want to see this win. You now find yourself in this spot where Zcash has drama, or is in shambles, or there's some back-and-forth, and it's like, “Mert, fix it. Mert, what the fuck?” Does any part of you want to work on your own privacy solution and feel like you've gotten yourself maybe a little bit too deep in Zcash, or is this where you want to be?
This is definitely where I want to be. It's a similar situation to Solana when Solana would go down and I would get blamed. I was like, “Okay, I did not write the code there.”
Fundamentally, the way I think about this is: what's the mission? For Solana, the mission is to enable trading internet capital markets at scale—a billion markets in your pocket. With Zcash, it's encrypting money at planetary scale—a Swiss vault in your pocket. That is very, very difficult for one person or one team to do, and so you need to work backwards from that mission and pick people who are extremely mission-aligned and high-integrity.
With Zcash, for example, I know that these people have been here for 8 years. They've been down through extreme downturns and drama and all this stuff, so I know they're actually there for the mission. I know that the cryptography they've shipped clearly works and has been proven at scale. All the right ingredients are there.
When you have a context or situation like that, it makes much more sense to just help them and do this as a group, because no one person can unite the entire thing by themselves. You need a group of aligned missionaries, not mercenaries. For Zcash, that is exactly the situation.
Sometimes it gets a bit annoying that I get blamed for everything, but look, you can't tell the story and be the most vocal one and then expect no cost to that.
Yeah, of course. Makes sense. Do you think this is bearish for the Zcash-as-money or store-of-value thesis, where a lot of people who have been deep in Bitcoin for a long time have never really had to experience any of this developer-team drama? You sort of get the immaculate conception with Satoshi. Does this change or alter the narrative of Zcash in comparison with Bitcoin?
I don't think so. Bitcoin certainly had its fair share of drama. The only thing is, it was a few years ago—or many years ago—and so people just don't remember.
They forget.
But it did happen. Even recently, Bitcoin has had drama around child porn, quantum computing, and all this stuff. Wherever there are humans, there's going to be drama, especially when there's money at stake.
With Zcash, it's no different. You can basically think of it like we just got it out of the way fast. People realized, “Wait a minute, this structure is not going to work. It's going to get too weird. How will this survive a regulatory crackdown?” So they just changed that right away.
Nothing about the chain itself has changed. No monetary properties have been changed—nothing. The only thing that's really happened is that the engineers who actually do the work now have less political burden in front of them to ship. Now they can actually just focus on the market and shipping.
Who is Sean Bowe? I just looked him up. We're mutuals, but I don't really know who that is.
Sean Bowe is—I call him the Toly of ZK, or privacy. He's one of the smartest people in all of crypto, probably in all of cryptography. He's helped move Zcash to a trustless ZK setup. He writes the core code, and now he has this project called Tachyon, which, on a technical note, will remove state growth from Zcash.
Okay.
On a practical note, it will scale Zcash to thousands of TPS, hundreds of thousands of TPS. It will also make it quantum-proof, meaning that when quantum computers arrive, your privacy will not be compromised in any way with his work.
You might have seen certain guys like Cygaar, for example, clowning Sean on Twitter. He just joined Sean's team as well. That team is stacked.
Why is he not part of the ECC?
That's actually a good question. Maybe he might have been, but I actually don't know. My guess would be that he probably saw the political stuff and thought, “I can just do much more work as a lone wolf, shipping stuff.”
That's what you want, right? That's how you get decentralization. You have team one, team two, team three, all shipping improvements. You have multiple client teams, in a sense.
Okay, makes sense. Well, dude, I do appreciate you coming here to combat the FUD around our bags. Before you leave, how real is this vibe-coding renaissance?
This is pretty crazy, in my view. I got access to Cursor and Claude and all these things basically within the first few days that they came out each time, and so I gave it a try. I made everybody at Helius use it and stuff, but I was like, “Okay, this is useful for certain shit, but once you get to a certain level, it just keeps hallucinating and it's annoying.”
Then I tried Opus 4.5, the latest model from Claude, because my team was on holiday and I needed to ship shit. I couldn't wait for these guys to come back. I started using it and I was like, “Holy shit, this thing can make entire apps with not much supervision.”
It's by far a step-function improvement in current AI coding models. The thing that people don't understand is—let me give you a little analogy. When people talk about programmers and developers in programming, what do they mean?
Programming is just telling a computer what to do in a language that it understands. To date, those languages have been programming languages. They've been JavaScript or Rust. Those languages are highly specific. You'll say something like, “Create a new variable called X and make sure that X is a number,” and then, “Multiply X by 2”—some technical sequence of recipes and steps.
The key word there is that it's specific. You tell it what to do in a very specific way. What AI does is change the language that the computer understands to English. You can now tell the computer what to do in English, but the specificity of what you tell it to do is now up to you as the vibe coder, in some sense.
If you give it a shit prompt and say, “Build me a billion-dollar app, make no mistakes,” maybe one in a million times it works. But if you're specific and give it engineering-level directives, then it can basically do it. You can tell it to verify itself, such that after it does it, it looks at what it did and confirms whether it did it right. If it didn't do it right, it'll just keep going. You can keep making it iterate like a little intern, in some sense.
The language framing is so good. I think that puts it away in a way most people will understand. How substantial do you think the societal impact of where this vibe-coding thing is going will be?
I wrote a few posts about this, but I think this is actually going to change venture capital and how startups work in a very big way. I think it'll probably take about 5 years, but I think this is the year that it will start.
The reason I know this is because I actually just did it. I'm not just making this up. I just shipped an entire prediction-markets app with about a week of coding—not even full-time—by myself. I didn't have to hire anybody or do anything, and I was able to ship this thing very quickly.
If I now play time backwards and I'm 4 years ago, when I started Helius, how I started Helius looks very different. Now I can go to market faster. I don't have to sell as much in my company.
I don't have to hire as many people. I can get more traction faster. Furthermore, for the Dorsey and Elon Musk types, they can actually just start working on multiple things at once, right?
What will happen is there'll be an abundance of these apps and companies, especially software-based ones, and the competition between them will really pick up. The only way to stand out will be if you're, again, a really good storyteller, if you can really execute, but then also if you're extremely ambitious.
If you're a VC now, you must imagine, "Okay, I have these 1,000 prediction-market apps. I'm one of them. Or I have this one guy trying to bring nuclear energy into America, or supersonic submarines, or some shit, right?" Now the incentive is for you to take on much more ambitious quests as a founder. The cost of actually bringing your idea to life, without needing the skill set to be a Rust engineer, is now much lower. The idea guys are no longer superficially barred from creating things in the world.
In a scenario where this is happening and access to software is super democratized, and there's an explosion of applications like what Frank built—these mini, couple-day, cancel-your-subscription-type apps that go really viral for a day or two, a couple days, a week maybe—is there a monetization model for this? Because I feel like subscription sucks. Is it going to be Pump.fun and crypto tokens?
For this, I would be careful about generalizing it too much, because within software there are many different fields. There's crypto software, volume-based software like Hyperliquid and Pump.fun, subscription software, B2B SaaS—there are all these different types of software. I don't think there's going to be any one-size-fits-all model.
What I will say is, in crypto, we've seen a lot of this where people will be like, "Hey, look, man, I have this great idea to build this app. Give me $10 million—or not even $10 million, like $100 million—to ship this chain or ship this protocol." Now you don't actually have an excuse not to ship it before you even ask for money, in some sense, right? You can easily ship an MVP. So it's going to be harder for you to bullshit, in my view.
On the other hand, it will be easier to weed out VCs who don't know what they're doing, because you can actually just vibe-code the app in some sense. I think there will be a lot of negatives, for sure. If I were a new software-engineering grad, I don't know how I would feel right now.
But I think the long-term societal impact of this—and, like Naval says—is that the number of founders, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and multiple-type founders in the world will increase. In a world where there are more entrepreneurs and founders, that's just a world with more progress. It's honestly sick.
I wanted to get a couple takes to fire it up. Tulo King is about to come on and give us some vibe-coding tutorials, so I wanted to get a couple takes. But, dude, I appreciate you coming on. Thank you for fighting some FUD. Thanks for giving us some optimism.
Is there any sign-off, Zcash-related take you want to conclude with? Anywhere you want to send people? Anything you recommend people read before you leave?
Yeah. Definitely go to Josh's post. Apology quote tweeted. I quote it, where he—I think it's called cashz.org—and it's a waitlist for a new product they're building. I would go sign up for that if you want access to some premium Zcash goods that'll be released soon.
Sick. The unofficial CEO of Zcash, man, you're the GOAT. I appreciate you coming on. Thanks for the time, always.