The Zcash Comeback: Why Insiders Say ZEC’s Price Run Isn’t a Fluke — And Just The Beginning
- Zcash’s comeback rests on a wallet people can finally use and connections to the wider crypto market. Zaki traces the first turnaround to summer–September 2025, when usable software and NEAR Intents made years of cryptographic work tangible; October’s price action followed. He identifies crypto Twitter and Bitcoiners as the clearest buyer constituencies, citing Bitcoin-heavy NEAR Intents flows, while stressing that Naval supported the project from its earliest days.
- The privacy thesis centers on holding indistinguishable money inside a shielded pool. Zaki’s strongest framing is “money at rest”: transactions can leak information, while coins left inside the pool reveal much less. Sudo favors the pool-wide anonymity set and the flexibility of transparent and shielded ZEC, but supports competing privacy approaches; wallet-level Tor addresses a separate layer of network exposure.
- The Orchard vulnerability was an existential inflation risk, and its resolution became a test of the ecosystem’s competence. Zaki says Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 helped uncover a four-year-old flaw permitting forged proofs and money creation. Ironwood combined formal verification with a new pool and migration: over 4 million ZEC moved, roughly 400,000 remained in Orchard, and Zaki says there is “no longer a credible story that the vulnerability was exploited.”
- Ironwood’s quantum safeguard is a path for dormant holders to recover funds after a future upgrade. Zcash is not fully quantum-safe today; extra wallet information is intended to let users migrate after the existing proof system is disabled, without meeting an advance deadline. Sudo calls full post-quantum security a “ridiculous amount of work,” and Zaki says it is unlikely to be a one-time transition.
- Mining economics and public equities give investors additional exposure to the revival. At the host’s roughly $1,300 ZEC reference price, Zaki estimates a Z15 Pro’s repayment period at “under ninety days,” with mining supply lagging the price increase. Cypherpunk, ticker CYPH, and Fortitude are pursuing that opportunity; higher prices and a growing Bitcoin constituency also make a proof-of-stake switch unlikely in his view.
- The next strategic choice is how much scarce security expertise goes toward payments scale versus shielded DeFi. Tachyon targets “Solana TPS,” while shielded assets already exist on testnet but face mainnet resistance; Zaki expects future shielded-protocol additions to require formal verification. Current block space is not saturated, and the direction remains contested—his “This is like Bitcoin 2016” analogy describes an ecosystem he considers early in its development.
1. Usability turns a struggling project into a credible comeback
- Zaki describes Zcash as “almost dead” for most of his board tenure: supporting it was a matter of mission rather than a convincing path forward. Sudo recalls joining ECC’s board in late 2023 and agreeing this was the “last shot”—“do or die.” Treasury constraints meant considering team cuts and financial trades to survive; renewed interest brings new talent and supports experimentation.
- The practical turning point came in summer–September 2025. A usable wallet—Zashi—working cryptography and NEAR Intents finally let someone say, “Install this app. I’ll send you a ZEC.” Insiders might have experienced incremental improvement; newcomers felt the magic of their first Bitcoin transfer. Zaki frames October’s rally as the reward for that work.
- Zaki also argues that Bitcoin’s issuance schedule makes the first two halvings “incredibly punishing” for price because so much supply reaches the market early. Projects that survive can eventually benefit. His comparison is to Bitcoin’s difficult 2009–2016 period, adding a supply-side explanation to the software improvements rather than attributing the rally solely to attention.
- Naval’s public enthusiasm was newly visible to the hosts, but Zaki says his support dated to day zero: probably the second investment commitment and the first money wired to ECC. For current buyers, Zaki points to crypto Twitter and Bitcoiners, with Bitcoin-heavy NEAR Intents flows as the observable evidence. He distinguishes that observation from whatever explanatory story people construct around it.
2. The privacy case starts with money at rest
- Zaki describes successive shielded pools—Sprout, Sapling, Orchard and now Ironwood—as places where coins cannot be distinguished from one another. His central distinction is holding money privately: public-chain balances carry address histories, while shielded holdings lose that visible linkage. “Money at rest” is his strongest privacy case; payments and interactions introduce opportunities to leak information.
- Sudo favors privacy based on the entire shielded pool, contrasting millions of transactions with approaches he describes as groups of fewer than 10. He also values having transparent and shielded ZEC available. But his broader position is pluralist: different transactions require different guarantees and trade-offs, so choosing one system should not mean forcing every transaction through the same privacy funnel.
- Chain privacy and network privacy are separate. Mobile wallets use indexing infrastructure, whose operators might otherwise associate requests with a phone’s IP address; Zodl’s Tor option helps obscure that connection, especially around transparent activity and pool entry or exit. Sudo links this capability to an earlier community grant for Arti, a Rust implementation of Tor. Zaki calls network privacy unfinished work.
3. New rails make ZEC accessible across crypto and banks
- A host’s acquisition question exposes the boundary: shielding ZEC does not erase everything disclosed while buying it. Zaki recalls access once depending heavily on Coinbase, Binance and Gemini. Today, users can buy bridged ZEC through Solana DEXs and use NEAR.com to move it onto native Zcash, substantially widening the routes into the asset.
- NEAR Intents also lets wallet users exchange ZEC for native Bitcoin, ETH and assets elsewhere. NEAR’s Confidential Intents offers a more private route through NEAR.com; Zaki thinks it will reach Zodl in the future. He additionally cites Hyperliquid purchases with a bridge back to Zcash and newly added THORChain support, emphasizing that several routes already carry substantial daily volume.
- For smaller purchases, Zaki highlights Peer.xyz: a peer-to-peer path from an ordinary bank or Venmo account into Zcash, using zero-knowledge proofs between the endpoints. His scale qualification matters: this is not how someone executes a multimillion-dollar purchase. Buying approximately $100 of ZEC with “really, really good privacy” is the concrete use case he gives.
4. An inflation bug exposes the cost of hidden balances
- Shielded Labs funded security researcher Taylor Hornby, ECC’s launch-era security lead, to perform AI-assisted audits. Zaki says Hornby reran standard queries as new models appeared, and Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 found the critical vulnerability upon its May release. Zaki places this discovery within a broader period of unusually frequent, multibillion-dollar vulnerabilities across crypto since December 2025.
- A “soundness” vulnerability sounds technical but carries the worst consequence: “You can forge a proof, and therefore you can create money from nothing.” The Orchard flaw had existed for four years. The concern was not an observed counterfeit balance; it was that someone might already have created enormous quantities of ZEC and gradually withdrawn them without detection.
- Zcash’s “turnstile,” introduced after an earlier inflation vulnerability associated with the original ceremony, counts coins entering and leaving each pool. Withdrawals cannot exceed cumulative deposits. But when legitimate users are net shielding, those inflows can leave room for an attacker to withdraw counterfeit coins without immediately breaching the limit. Patching the code therefore did not settle the historical supply question.
- The flaw was patched quietly before Zooko publicly explained its severity. Zaki estimates the absolute price trough at roughly a 60% decline lasting only minutes, settling into approximately a 25% drawdown; Sudo remembers the crisis around June. For Sudo, investors then had to assess whether serious teams could coordinate under pressure rather than merely benefit from a fashionable privacy narrative.
5. Ironwood turns the rescue into a test of supply integrity
- The response combined formal verification of the Orchard circuit with a new, cryptographically almost identical pool, Ironwood. Zaki says verification had previously been beyond the ecosystem’s financial means: “The same AI that had found the vulnerability gives us the ability to do this formal verification.” The plan was to freeze Orchard and get holders to migrate.
- Tachyon and Valor Group spearheaded the emergency development, drawing on contributors with experience across Zcash, Cosmos, Celestia and Penumbra. Zaki describes an approximately 30-day build and a roughly five-week emergency period, with Ironwood launching in July. Sudo says people effectively went without sleep for three weeks: teams that might have disagreed instead “swam in one direction.”
- Asked when the community can rule out money hiding in Orchard, Zaki cites over 4 million migrated ZEC and roughly 400,000 remaining—about 2% against approximately 17 million outstanding. His reasoning: either the flaw was not exploited, or legitimate holders would complain that withdrawals failed during migration. He says there is “no longer a credible story that the vulnerability was exploited.” Public observers can see pool totals and transaction counts, alongside transparent-wallet activity.
6. Quantum readiness starts with keeping dormant coins recoverable
- Zaki admits changing his mind: he did not consider quantum computing an immediate problem until December 2024, after which his assessment became, “This is an acute problem.” Other Zcash cryptographers had worried much earlier. A cryptographically capable quantum computer would make the current proof systems unsound, allowing the same kind of infinite-money creation, so those systems would have to be disabled.
- Ironwood adds wallet-level information intended to support migration after that shutdown, avoiding another compulsory migration window. Zaki’s example is deliberately vivid: a “ninja assassin tranq darts you,” you spend ten years in a coma, and awaken after Zcash has changed protocols. Unlocking the wallet should still let you recover your coins through the subsequent migration system.
- The host presses the distinction: Zcash is not fully quantum-safe today. Sudo says achieving that involves a “ridiculous amount of work” and unresolved choices; the practical accomplishment is making a future transition faster and easier. Zaki adds that post-quantum security is unlikely to be a one-time event. Sudo says holders could forget about Zcash and return in 30 years to find their ZEC accessible.
7. Mining and public equities reopen Zcash’s link to finance
- Sudo maps the core organizations: Zodl, previously ECC; the Zcash Foundation, which develops the Zebra full node and runs Zcon; Zcash Community Grants, with its grant treasury; and Shielded Labs, where Zooko works. Zodl makes the wallet and also works on protocol. Tachyon and Valor Group focus on scaling and jointly develop the alternative full node Zakura.
- Beyond that core sit longstanding international community groups, Vysor from the former Keplr team, Cake Wallet and Foundry Mining and its pool. Sudo emphasizes that local groups sustained Zcash through its weaker years and extend its reach beyond a Western-centered ecosystem. The renewed activity includes several independent wallet efforts rather than dependence on a single application.
- Zaki describes two former forms of isolation: separation from DeFi, addressed by cross-chain rails, and separation from conventional finance. Longstanding supporters including the Winklevoss twins and Barry Silbert at DCG helped bridge the latter. Cypherpunk, ticker CYPH, emerged through a reverse merger but, Zaki says, has less leverage built in than a typical DAT.
- Cypherpunk and listed miner Fortitude are pursuing mining profitability after ZEC’s price rose while mining supply remained small. Asked about economics at approximately $1,300 per ZEC, Zaki believes a Z15 Pro’s repayment time is “under ninety days.” He also says Cypherpunk wants to develop consumer products, making its ambitions broader than simply holding a treasury.
8. Coinholders express preferences while engineers implement consensus
- Zaki says proof of stake was considered when Zcash was a sub-$1bn proof-of-work chain facing listing and market-structure problems. Coinbase required either 200-something or 144 confirmations in his uncertain recollection, creating price distortions against Binance. “Number Go Up has largely fixed this problem” in the medium term; incoming Bitcoiners are also less receptive to proof of stake. He considers a switch unlikely soon.
- Since 2024, coinholder polls have run through a custom Cosmos chain, with participation available through wallets including Zashi and Vysor. These are “just preferences,” covering funding and protocol changes, without automatically upgrading the chain. ZCAP community polling, forum debate and the ZIP process contribute additional signals; node developers ultimately implement the agreed changes. Sudo characterizes decisions as predominantly engineering-driven.
- For November 5, shorter block times come with adjusted per-block issuance to preserve the supply and halving schedule; Sprout is also being sunset, a controversial change engineers strongly favored. Sudo dates retroactive funding to around 2024, replacing fixed allocations to ECC, the Foundation and ZCG. Sudo says most funding in the latest round went to new organizations—“a massive win.”
9. Argos and Relay fix neglected infrastructure
- Sudo calls their organization’s mandate fixing “potholes”: problems affecting everyone that few teams stop to address. Zaki traces one to ECC’s delayed wallet development, partly driven by regulatory concerns and hopes that community developers would provide it. “Ultimately, all of that was a mistake.” Between 2016 and 2023, even technical experts could acquire self-custodied ZEC that later proved difficult to access.
- Argos handles legacy wallet recovery and has rescued over $30 million in ZEC, according to Zaki. It began with one person asking for help and expanded across old wallet formats, with hands-on support for unusual cases. The November 5 Sprout shutdown makes recovery urgent for early holders who may have forgotten funds or cannot open their original wallets.
- Relay adapts Matt Corallo’s Bitcoin relay work to Zcash, aiming to make mining fairer by improving orphan rates among pools. Zaki says participating pools are starting to see lower rates. The network also supplies unusually detailed data, including per-pool orphan rates and probabilities of next-block transaction inclusion, which he expects to matter more as Zcash pursues higher throughput and lower latency.
10. Scaling competes with programmable money for scarce expertise
- The hosts want to do more with shielded ZEC, including DeFi. Zaki says the technical barrier to programmability has weakened; the constraint is now choosing where finite expertise, attention and security resources go. Tachyon’s shorthand is “Solana TPS,” with “Stripe-like transaction volume” as the ambition. He explicitly acknowledges that current block space is not saturated and demand does not yet require that capacity.
- Zcash Shielded Assets, or ZSAs, would provide ERC-20-like assets inside a shielded pool. They exist on testnet but face resistance to mainnet deployment; shielded DeFi primitives have also been proposed. After Ironwood, Zaki does not expect additions to the shielded protocol without formal verification. AI reduces its cost, but the supply of people qualified to perform it remains limited.
- One pressure point is an unnamed Zcash-affiliated NFT project that raised $20 million selling an NFT. “As far as we can tell,” Zaki says, its NFTs live on a single server; its supporters want ZSAs. Others advocate putting Zcash DeFi elsewhere, especially given existing activity on Solana, Hyperliquid and NEAR. Zaki expresses no strong preference on how that dispute should resolve.
- A host accepts specialization in money despite wanting native DeFi. Zaki places Zcash in “the middle thing” between Bitcoin’s ossification, which he calls a liability in the AI-plus-quantum era, and experimental chains; Bitcoin and Solana maximalists dispute that role. Sudo invites holders into the forums to shape the choice. Zaki’s closing frame is, “This is like Bitcoin 2016.”
Full transcript
The story is not the story of the price run-up. The story is all of this stuff, and the story is ongoing. There are plenty of ways of building and being involved, and plenty of opportunity here. We did the year of Zcash, and Zcash is over now. This is like Bitcoin in 2016. I think that’s where we’re at.
Welcome to The Edge Podcast. I’m DeFi Dad here with Nomadic. Today’s show features Zaki Manian, head of engineering, and Sudo, project lead at Zodl. Zaki and Sudo, thank you for joining us. How are you doing?
Hi.
Great. Hi.
Before we went live, we were riffing on this podcast. It was one of my first podcasts, honestly. It was a Radiolab podcast called “The Ceremony,” and this was my first touchpoint with Zcash. If anybody hasn’t listened to it, it’s probably one of the best crypto podcasts ever made.
The quick TL;DR is that it was documenting the origin story of how Zcash started, with a reporter who watched the whole thing. I remember listening to it at the time and thinking, “Man, the level of security they’re going through is ridiculous. Why are they destroying the laptops and all this stuff?” I was new to crypto and didn’t understand all the nuances.
I feel like I lost touch with Zcash until October 2025. One of my tech friends messaged me and said, “Yo, Naval is talking about Zcash. Should I buy it?” I was like, “What? Is he? Oh, wow.” It was under $100, and that kind of blew my mind. I thought, “What’s going on here? What have I been missing?” I missed this entire run-up, and we wanted to get you guys on the podcast to fill us in: What the hell have I been so blind to?
Why did the price run up so much? How does Zcash privacy work? How does it fit into the world of Bitcoin, Monero, and other privacy solutions? There’s a ton of ecosystem activity I wasn’t even aware of: the Zcash ecosystem, Zodl, the Zcash Foundation, and this new sort of DAT mining company called Cypherpunk. We want to connect all these pieces and give DeFi Dad and me a better primer on what’s happening with Zcash today. But before we dive into all that, I’d love to learn more about you both, Sudo and Zaki. Who are you? What have you worked on before this, and how did you end up building together on Zodl?
My involvement with Zcash started around 2020. I was on the first-ever Zcash Community Grants Committee, together with people like Chris Burniske, Jameson Hudson, and Holmes Wilson. In 2023, I joined the board of ECC, the Electric Coin Company, and I’ve been there since.
My background is broad. I’ve worked at a number of early-stage startups, including Anchorage in 2018. At that early stage, I did a broad range of product, business development, and general operations. Two lifetimes ago, I worked in private equity, investing in financial institutions.
My first encounter with Zcash was in 2014. One of the people who became a co-founder of Zcash gave a talk at my Bitcoin meetup in Mountain View, California, about Zerocash. I heard about SNARKs, zero-knowledge proofs, and all of these things. Aaron gave this talk the day before he was going to present Zerocash at a big academic internet security conference. Aaron was a professor at MIT and Technion, and is one of the co-inventors of SNARKs, Zerocash, and Zcash.
It was the first thing ever on my YouTube channel. I sat there and recorded it on a little camera, then posted it in 10-minute segments on YouTube. The whole time, I was thinking, “I have no idea what this man is talking about, but this is wizardry. How is this possible? How can you take all of these computations and compress them down into this small form?” I felt very motivated to understand how this magic was possible. At the time, you couldn’t go to OpenAI or ChatGPT and say, “Explain SNARKs to me.” You had to trudge your way through all of these things.
I started hanging out in the IRC chat for Zcash and getting to know the people involved. I went to the launch party. I started a CPU miner before I left, and came back having mined a little bit of Zcash. I was going to the launch party, and at some point, probably in 2018, Zooko asked me and Vitalik to be on the Electric Coin Company scientific advisory board.
In 2020, ECC turned into a nonprofit. Then, in 2021, because of a bunch of board turnover, he asked me to join the board. I’ve been involved at that level all these years. I’ve had this view of cryptocurrency that, when I started, we had Bitcoin, and Bitcoin was neither private nor scalable. Scaling and privacy were the 2 jobs; the job isn’t done until we’ve done both. It’s been a wild journey through all these different projects I’ve been involved in, but it’s pretty interesting that we’re right on the threshold of essentially doing Satoshi’s vision: private internet, peer-to-peer electronic cash at scale.
This is both why I was skeptical about this new energy in Zcash a year ago and why I was excited. I have a similar origin story to what Nomadic mentioned: you learn about Zcash from that early Radiolab-related podcast, “The Ceremony.” It’s an OG project, one that I think represents the best of the cypherpunk vision that drew all of us into the space. You learn about Bitcoin, you learn about Ethereum, and then you start to learn about a few other very unique projects, and one of them was always Zcash.
Zaki, I always knew you from the incredible work you did in the Cosmos ecosystem. Until sometime in the last few months, I didn’t realize you were working full-time on Zcash. For both of you, what changed that suddenly made you think to recommit full-time to Zcash? What drew you in for this second round of new energy coming into the space?
1. The Zcash Comeback
Zcash was almost dead for the majority of my time on the board and in the community. It was always something I put time and energy into out of principle, mission, and alignment. I always wanted it to succeed, but the path didn’t seem to be there.
A lot of new energy started to come into the Zcash space in late 2024. A lot of people from other communities started showing interest, and I thought, “Okay, this is interesting.” Then a variety of things started to come together. The wallet finally became usable. NEAR Intents connected Zcash to the rest of the cryptocurrency world.
One thing you kind of forget with Bitcoin is that the price action was also punishing from 2009 to 2016. It was absolute. One of the arguments, I think, is that the Bitcoin supply schedule is incredibly punishing because there’s so much emission in the first 2 halvings. It’s really hard for it to have any sort of price action—number go up. Then it rewards the projects that manage to survive this incredibly punishing price action.
All of these things conspired together for Zcash to go up, and we can get into that again. But now the reality is that there are so many things to do in the ecosystem, now that all this energy has come up.
There was this massive organizational restructuring that Sudo and I were involved in, which moved Zodl into its own company out of the nonprofit. Somebody has to take care of the nonprofit. I have for the last 5 years. It’s been my responsibility for a long time.
There are a ton of things to do in Zcash. The things we work on and have done so far would have had no point in 2024. But now somebody’s got to do them.
Sudo, anything to add about what made you recommit?
Sure. I joined the board at the end of 2023, so it’s almost 3 years now. At the time, I think I joined and then we all agreed at the board level that this was the last shot. It was do or die. Our treasury is comfortable now, but for most of the 2 years after that, depending on the coin price, we’d have to resize the team and really think about what our future looked like. It was difficult many times, and we had to figure out how to structure different financial trades so we could stay alive. I’d say it’s been a long struggle to survive.
But suddenly, now you have new talent, a greater ability to fund different explorations, and a lot of interest from the market. Like Zaki said, doing this before the interest came back would be pointless. The new products we’re trying now would be pointless because there was no interest. There’s another point here, which Zaki also covered: this is our responsibility. When the team left, we were basically left with a shell of an organization. We saw it as our responsibility to properly steward the organization and point it toward its next phase.
2. What Drove The Rally
I’m sure you both are feeling really good about all you’ve done now. I’m sure you did before, too, but it’s nice to see that validation in the price, right? I want to ask about the price because it’s been on an absolute tear. There’s this meme in the crypto space: “Oh, the tech is rapidly improving,” as a joke when the price is going up. But it sounds like the tech did rapidly improve. What made people grab onto it with such force?
There’s this whole narrative and movement behind privacy, which I’m surprised to see materialize. You’ve got KOLs caring about privacy. It’s been impossible to get people to care about decentralization, yet privacy is now front and center for people who I honestly wouldn’t have thought would care about it. From your seats at the board level, working behind the scenes, who’s been the buyer of this? What’s the archetype of the person who’s really bought into the Zcash mission? I brought up Naval earlier, but what kind of people are getting excited about it?
Naval’s name has come up, and I want to be clear: Naval has been a supporter of Zcash effectively from day 0. I think he was the first person to wire the money for ECC, and probably the second person to say yes to investing in ECC. He has been a steadfast supporter of the project, maybe not publicly, depending on what he chooses to support publicly. But he’s been a steadfast supporter of the project from the bottom to the heights we’re at now, and through every crisis. There have been so many crises.
The clearest signal of who is buying Zcash right now has 2 components: crypto Twitter and Bitcoiners. The NEAR Intents flows are very much from the Bitcoin end. We can make up a story about why that is, and maybe that story can be based on action. That is at least an observable phenomenon.
From my perspective, there was definitely an initial pump. Suddenly, a lot of very famous people were interested in it and tweeting about it. But with any other fad, you’re a DeFi Dad, right? You’re familiar with the pumps and the subsequent dumps. If a project doesn’t have something real to fall back on, the price generally comes back down.
I think what we saw was a lot of interest and hype. Then people started looking at the project and realizing, “Oh, they’ve unlocked the one thing that made it really hard to use in the last few years, and that’s a wallet with really good UX.” I think it fell back on that. After that initial period, which was late last year, throughout the rest of this year, investors, whether retail or institutional, looked at the project and asked, “Who’s working on it? How serious are they? What are their track records? Are they going to make it through together?”
It’s verifiable that you have very good-quality, serious people working on the project full-time now. A proof point was that Ironwood-related bug around June this year. That was a do-or-die moment for the project. At the end of the day, we coordinated really well. I think the price only dumped about 25% before basically coming right back up because people saw that—in a lot of privacy and security communities, people can’t agree on anything. There was always the risk that we’d never agree on how to fix it and everything would be a mess. But instead, people saw that we banded together and really swam in one direction. I think people didn’t sleep for 3 weeks straight just to fix it, and that gave it a lot of tailwind.
I would just say yes to what Sudo said, and add that there were 2 phases of Zcash’s redemption. The first phase was the summer and September of 2025. That was the first time we could go to someone and say, “Install this app. I’ll send you a ZEC,” and people would be like, “Oh, I can actually see this.” For people who hadn’t been using Zcash for 10 years, it gave them that same magical feeling as the first time somebody sent them Bitcoin. You’re like, “Wait, how? What? How did it happen? Does that make any sense?”
If you’ve been in the weeds of this for all these years, it was like, “Oh, this is 10% better.” I don’t think that was how most people experienced it. They were like, “Holy shit. What is this?” That was the first redemption of Zcash. Zashi, the wallet working, the cryptography all working, NEAR Intents coming in—that sequence happened over a period of time, and then October was the price-action reward for all of that work, and for years of work that went on before it to make all of that possible.
Then there was the bug found by an Anthropic model in May. There was the launch of the new pool in July. That 5-week period between them was when, I think, you got to see a completely different project from anything that had existed before. And we pulled off something that had never been done before in cryptocurrency.
I didn’t realize the wallet had been such a challenge before Zodl. It’s funny: Nomadic and I just downloaded Zodl, and we shielded some ZEC so easily. And to your point—
Yeah.
—the NEAR Intents are really cool. I had no idea. I’m clicking around and thinking, “Oh, wait, so I can send ZEC to native Bitcoin on Bitcoin, or ETH on Ethereum, or all the different tokens that exist on Ethereum, Solana, and other chains.” It’s cool. It’s something that wouldn’t have been possible five years ago with a wallet like this, because NEAR has come so far as well.
We’ve really been taking in the advances in mobile wallets, despite the existential threat we’re being told about—that AI could break all the cryptography or math we rely on. But that’s a whole other conversation. I did want to give you some space to talk about the Ironwood bug. I feel like you covered quite a bit, but maybe you can dumb it down for folks in case they didn’t understand the crash in the spring.
3. How Zcash Privacy Works
Before we do, I haven’t really given you the space to talk about Zcash at the most basic level. Taking a step back, why is Zcash so important to both of you? What can it offer that Bitcoin, another privacy-type chain like Monero, or stablecoins with privacy features can’t? We just did a podcast on Railgun. What’s different about what Zcash offers, or the way it goes about offering us that privacy?
Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. I think there are basically 2 things you should take away from Zcash. First, we’ve had a succession of shielded pools. The first one, Sprout, launched when Zcash first launched. Then there was an upgrade called Sapling, another called Orchard, and then Ironwood, the current best-of-breed pool.
Sprout is shutting down on November 5. If anyone here thinks they used Zcash a long time ago, I’m going to shill: install Argos. We’re trying desperately to get people to rescue their coins as these pools start shutting down. We built an app for it called Argos, at argos.zodl.com.
We have these OG shielded pools, and the coins in them can’t be distinguished from each other. With Bitcoin, you see a coin attached to an address, and you can see all the addresses that have ever touched it. With ETH on Ethereum, you can see all the different addresses connected to all the ETH. You can move in and out of exchanges, but ordinarily, when you hold the coins, it’s all there for everybody to see.
Everything in these shielded pools is indistinguishable. That’s the key thing, and it’s not a property that things like Monero have. They use various ways of encrypting transfers, but holding your money in an encrypted pool isn’t something anyone else has been able to pull off. That was always the goal.
The best privacy is money at rest. If you’re trying to do something with it—make a payment or use a DeFi protocol—the transfers are always going to leak information. But if you move your money into a shielded pool just to hold it there for months, days, or years, there’s no information to leak. That’s the most wonderful thing. So Zcash is basically Bitcoin, but no one can tell the difference between the coins in the shielded pool. That’s what it is.
Can I ask a quick follow-up? I downloaded my Zodl wallet before this podcast. I wanted to go through the process before we talked, and I shielded some ZEC. But right when I downloaded the wallet, there was an option to shield my IP as well, this Tor-level thing. Can you explain to me, as a layperson, what that is and how it fits into the whole security aspect?
Okay, let’s talk about that a little. People who’ve been around cryptocurrency way too long may remember this thing called a full node. This was a big part of the Bitcoin ideology back in the day: you run a full node, and you get the best use of Bitcoin because you verify the whole chain.
Like many cryptocurrencies, Zcash has full nodes, and it also has what we call light clients. There’s chain privacy, and then there’s network privacy. One of the things we’re all still working on—the unfinished business of Zcash—is network privacy. We’ve had chain privacy since the beginning.
When you use a mobile wallet, you can’t run a full node on your phone, so we have these indexer nodes running. The network privacy option built into Zodl that uses Tor helps ensure that the network nodes can’t tell what IP address or phone a given request is coming from. Especially when you’re moving in and out of the shielded pool or moving transparent ZEC, that’s information we’d prefer to obfuscate further. There’s ongoing work to make that better.
The fact that they can incorporate this Tor implementation into the wallet is related to when I was on the grant committee so many years ago. We gave a pretty large grant to the Tor Project to make something called Arti, a Rust implementation of Tor. At the time, we had no idea this was going to happen, but it’s nice to have it come full circle. It speaks to the fact that although the community grants are Zcash-focused, people in the Zcash community just want to make privacy possible for everybody.
I also wanted to talk about why I like Zcash compared with some of the other alternatives out there. More broadly, I like them all. I think they’re all important. It’s impractical to say I’ll make one selection and then all my transactions have to go through that funnel. For different transactions, I want different guarantees. I have different trade-offs I want to make, so I believe all the privacy solutions being explored in crypto privacy projects—and privacy projects in general—are important. I want to make sure they’re all supported culturally, too.
A few things I particularly like about Zcash: my privacy is based on the entire anonymity set in the shielded pool. My privacy is one of millions of transactions inside the pool, versus some projects where it’s limited to whoever is transacting with you in a group at a time. That can be fewer than 10 versus millions, and I really like that. I also like having both transparent and shielded ZEC. It gives me more flexibility.
I also personally know that the team is extremely paranoid. At the protocol level, they’re thinking about all these things I’m probably incapable of thinking about. I have other things to do in my life, and they take care of these things. One early indication of that is how early we’ve been thinking about the post-quantum risk. Those are some of my favorite reasons for preferring Zcash.
When I downloaded the Zodl wallet, I started thinking through this: if I wanted to buy ZEC and wanted real privacy, I know that once I have shielded ZEC, I have that privacy. The issue, of course, is what leads up to that. ZEC is a very popular token, and it trades on a lot of exchanges. I’m thinking through what the most private end-to-end way is for me to buy ZEC so I can get it into shielded form without exposing myself, maybe to—
—an exchange, and then having to transfer it to the Zodl wallet and shield it from there. So, yeah, can you talk me through your advice there? What applications should we look to? Should people be buying ZEC on-chain? At some point in the future, would you be able to buy with a private swap using a DEX in one of these privacy-type pools?
Yeah. Let me break down the choices. Right now, you can buy ZEC in a lot of places. One of the collective goals of the Zcash community has been to make it easier to buy ZEC. For a long time, the answer was basically Coinbase and very little else. For a long time, it was Coinbase and Binance.
Gemini was also long associated with the protocol and was another place to buy it. Those were the places.
Some real breakthroughs have been that you can buy ZEC on Solana, just like on any Solana DEX. There’s a lot of liquidity, and it’s NEAR-bridged. You can use NEAR.com to move that ZEC back to Zcash. You can also use NEAR Intents from the Web3 Auto Wallet. NEAR has a product called Confidential Intents, which is a more private version of it. I think it’s coming to Zodl at some point in the future, and it’s also available through NEAR.com.
There’s another really cool thing called Peer.xyz, where you can go from an ordinary bank, like a Venmo account, directly to Zcash on a peer-to-peer basis, with a whole bunch of zero-knowledge proofs in between. You’re not going to do a multimillion-dollar transaction that way, but if you want to buy $100 of ZEC with really, really good privacy, that’s another way that works. You can buy Zcash on Hyperliquid and bridge it back to the Zcash chain with UNet. There are just so many different ways of buying ZEC right now, and I think it’s been a huge success. THORChain just added Zcash support as well for people who want to use it.
The Solana-bridged ZEC, Hyperliquid-bridged ZEC, and NEAR Intents ZEC are all high-volume every day.
Can we go back to the Orchard bug that was patched, which I think is now referred to as Ironwood? Can you dumb that down for us? What happened? What was patched? What was the critical bug? From the outside, it seemed really serious, and it seems like the Zcash community is much stronger after the fact.
4. The Ironwood Crisis
It was an existential crisis. Let’s talk through it. Taylor Hornby, a security researcher who was the head of security at Electric Coin Co. when Zcash launched, has long been in the Zcash community. He was contributing to Zcash before launch. Taylor was being paid by an entity in the Zcash ecosystem called Shielded Labs to do AI-assisted auditing of Zcash.
I call the period that started in December 2025, and that we’re still living in, the cybersecurity apocalypse. I think other people on Twitter call it the same thing. It has been a very difficult time. I’ve seen so many multibillion-dollar vulnerabilities, most of them patched without being exploited. I’ve never seen so many multibillion-dollar vulnerabilities in a six-month period in my life, and I’ve been doing this a very long time. It used to be that maybe I’d see one multibillion-dollar vulnerability come my way in a quarter. These last six months have been crazy in terms of billions of dollars of exploitable funds.
People had been doing AI-driven audits of different parts of the Zcash code. I did a bunch of them, and Taylor had been running one. Basically, every time a new model came out, he would run a standard set of queries across the Zcash codebase. The day Opus 4.8 came out in May—I forget what day—it found what’s called, in the parlance of Zcash or zero-knowledge proofs, a soundness vulnerability. That’s a very benign-sounding term for basically the worst possible vulnerability you could have in a zero-knowledge proof protocol: you can forge a proof and therefore create money from nothing. It’s the worst possible thing that can happen.
It got patched fairly quietly. After it was patched, Zooko wrote a blog post—or a Twitter/X article—that was basically, “This is what this vulnerability meant, and how bad it could have been.” At that point, the price had a decline. The absolute bottom was actually more like a 60% price decline, but that only lasted for a few minutes. Then it ended up being a 25% decline, and it sparked all of these debates.
The core question was whether there could be trillions of ZEC, an infinite amount of ZEC, sitting in the Orchard pool. That bug had been there for four years. Somebody could have found it four years ago, produced millions of ZEC, and slowly taken money out of the shielded pool undetected.
We have this thing in each of the pools in Zcash. We started out talking about the ceremony, the Radiolab ceremony, and all the security measures that were taken. In spite of all that, there was a flaw in the security of the ceremony. That was our first infinite-mint vulnerability in Zcash. After that was discovered, the idea of a turnstile came in: every full node would count every coin that goes into the shielded pool and every coin that comes out, and make sure that at no point do more coins come out than went in.
But if people are net shielding coins, then, with an exploit, you could be slowly taking coins. That’s the concern. How do we reassure everyone that this isn’t happening, that it didn’t happen? A very ambitious plan came together quickly. One part was formal verification of the Orchard circuit, which we had never been able to do for any of the Zcash circuits before because it would have cost more than ECC or anyone in the ecosystem had at the time. AI has radically changed the cost economics of doing formal verification. Vitalik is tweeting about it all the time now, and lots of people are talking about it. The same AI that found the vulnerability gives us the ability to do this formal verification.
The second thing was to make a new pool that was cryptographically almost identical to Orchard, after this formal verification. We were going to freeze Orchard and basically force everyone to move their money, with the hope that most of it would move and the market could be reassured. The signal we’d be giving the community was that if most of the money moved out of Orchard and into Ironwood, one of two things was happening: either the bug hadn’t been exploited, or, if somebody had exploited it, you’d hear people screaming on Twitter, saying, “I tried to move my money out of Orchard to Ironwood, and it failed.” Either way, we’d know where we stood. The goal was to draw a line in the sand.
This kicked off an unprecedented period of development, spearheaded by 2 new teams. One was Tachyon, led by Sean Bowe, with otherwise new people. The other was Valar Group, headed by Dev Ojha from Osmosis and the broader Cosmos ecosystem. Dev also has a long history in Bitcoin, Zcash, and zero knowledge. Before he worked on Cosmos, Cosmos had given a grant to one of the Zcash founders, a professor at Berkeley, and Dev had been working in his lab on SNARKs. He had tons of knowledge and experience.
Evan from Celestia, Dev, Tal, who used to be at Penumbra, Sean, and Daira, who’s been around a long time, all put their heads together and built Ironwood—not in a year or 2 years, but in 30 days. Ironwood launched in July. Four million coins have migrated, and there’s no longer a credible story that the vulnerability was exploited.
Another thing that had been there is that the Zcash community, and the cryptographers—Daira especially—have long been extremely paranoid about quantum. I wasn’t in agreement with that. I didn’t think quantum computers were going to be a problem until December 2024, and then I was like, “Okay, we’re actually screwed. This is an acute problem.” But they’d been paranoid from the very beginning.
They had this idea: if a quantum computer that can break cryptography comes out, we have to turn off all of the SNARK protocols currently being used in Zcash, because they’re all unsound in the presence of a quantum computer. Every one of them can do the same kind of thing as the Orchard vulnerability: make infinite coins.
So we’ve got to turn off all the proof systems. But we don’t want people ever to have to do what we just made people do, from Orchard to Ironwood, ever again: everyone has to set up a wallet and migrate their coins over a relatively short period of time. This is not what you want for a private store of value. This is a terrible story.
Even though Ironwood is cryptographically identical to Orchard, we added a little detail at the wallet level: an extra piece of information that the wallet understands. That way, we can turn off the Ironwood proof system at some point in the future, and no one has to migrate before that date. Afterward, there will be a migration system that a wallet can execute at any point in time to move you to the new post-quantum Zcash.
So, just to make sure I understand: as it stands today, Zcash is not fully quantum-safe, but you’ve laid some of the groundwork to make it more quantum-safe?
You use Zodl today, okay? A ninja assassin tranq-darts you, and you go into a coma for the next 10 years. You wake up, remember your PIN to unlock your iPhone, and unlock your phone. You’re like, “A quantum computer has come out. Zcash has migrated. Zcash is running a new protocol. Have you lost your coins?” No. That’s kind of all you have to know.
I don’t like the part where I’m getting ninja-darted, but I like that I have my coins. Even though I don’t think I’d be a big target, based on how much ZEC I shielded today, I’d be very low.
Effectively, every person who has ZEC in the shielded pool today—we have Ledger support and all of these things in place—could just forget about Zcash and come back in 30 years, and their Zcash would be accessible.
One thing to understand is that becoming post-quantum secure is not something you just do. You don’t just wake up and decide, “I’m going to do it today.” It’s a ridiculous amount of work, with all these unknowns as things develop over time. You can’t easily decide today, “I’m going to be post-quantum secure, and I’m going to make all these decisions.” It’s just not possible. So the best thing we can do now is make a future transition a lot faster and easier, especially as post-quantum computers become more real. That’s what has been done.
Or, more generally, being post-quantum secure is unlikely to be a one-time thing. The next thing after Ironwood is called Tachyon. Tachyon is Zcash, but scalable. It’s like Zcash with Solana TPS, basically. This is the Twitter-friendly version of a very complicated idea.
I want to get into that. I just have one more question I was thinking about with this migration from Orchard to Ironwood. What’s the timeline for being sure nobody is still hiding out in Orchard?
There are only about 400,000 coins left in Orchard, and over 4 million coins have moved. So 400,000 coins is about 2% of the supply today. There are about 17 million coins. When you talk about how many coins are in Orchard or Ironwood, is there any other information you can learn from the blockchain? I understand that’s what we want. We want that privacy. We know the transparent wallets, how many ZEC are in the pool, and how many transactions touch each pool every day. That’s it. We’ve had a bunch of Zcash meme coins recently that have created a lot of transaction volume, so that’s been great for everyone’s privacy.
I want to go a bit more high-level again. We were talking offline, and you mentioned all these different teams, foundations, and groups working toward this goal with Zcash. I was surprised to see this many different teams coming from different angles. We’ve talked a little about Zodl, but some we haven’t talked about are the Zcash Foundation, Cypherpunk, the DAT mining company I mentioned, the ETF, Project Tachyon, and Valor Group, which you mentioned in Telegram. I know I threw a lot at you, but could you put together the ecosystem map for us? You don’t have to spend a lot of time on each one; I’d like to know where each fits in and briefly what they do.
I think about it in a few concentric circles. In the innermost core, you have the organizations that have been around for a while. Chronologically, you have Zodl, previously known as ECC, which is the original organization. Then you have the Zcash Foundation, which makes a full-node client called Zebra. They’re also responsible for running Zcon, our annual conference. Then you have ZCG, the Zcash Community Grants program, which has a really large treasury for grants. Shielded Labs is the organization Zooko works at; they do a mix of protocol governance, and I believe they’re starting to look at enterprise-type products.
Then you have Zodl. They make the wallet, and they also work on protocol. As we said earlier, there’s Project Tachyon with Sean Bowe, who’s focused on hyperscaling. Then you have Valor Group, led by Dave Ojha, also focused on scaling. Together, Tachyon and Valor Group are working on an alternative full node called Zakura. In my mind, these are the core, innermost-circle organizations working on Zcash.
In the second layer, it’s important to note that Zcash community groups have sprouted up around the world over the years. They’re key to our presence and our success beyond our very Western-centric view of the world. Shout-out to those groups. They’ve been with us through the ups and downs.
Now you have different wallet groups that have started making Zcash wallets, like the Vysor wallets, which are from the former Keplr team. Cake Wallet also has a pretty good wallet. I heard a rumor at Token2049 this week that another long-time crypto privacy group wants to start pivoting to make a Zcash wallet. Then you have Foundry Mining and its mining pool, the Cypherpunk DAT, and Fortitude, a listed Zcash mining group.
Cypherpunk would be a DAT, if we still call them a DAT. They’ve kind of become more than a DAT.
I want to dive deeper into that because the CYPH ticker has been all over my timeline, and I’ve seen a lot of people talking about it. As far as they know, they’re the biggest mining fleet in Zcash now, too. For investors watching this, maybe they’re not called a DAT, but—
What I would say is that one of the interesting aspects of this Zcash run-up is that, for a long time, Zcash was isolated from both finance and cryptocurrency. There was DeFi happening on Ethereum and then Solana. We talked about how NEAR Intents has been a huge factor in ending that aspect of isolation.
So then there was the other aspect of isolation, which is that Zcash was hard to hold, hard to own, and hard to participate in through traditional finance, or non-cryptocurrency finance. Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL all had ways to access them through traditional finance in various forms, and have for many years.
The people in the Zcash world who have always had strong connections to finance, whether it’s the Winklevoss twins or Barry Silbert at DCG, who were also early funders of ECC, have been around forever. They’ve used this opportunity to bridge that gap. They did the standard kind of DAT reverse merger to create Cypherpunk.
But Cypherpunk isn’t exactly like a DAT; there isn’t as much leverage built in. There’s also a very large opportunity in Zcash mining right now because the supply of mining is very small, but the price has gone up a lot, so Zcash miners are very profitable. You’ve seen both Fortitude and Cypherpunk step into that opportunity—
Wait, sorry to interrupt. Do you know how profitable they are? I’m curious about the cost to mine right now versus a $1,300 Zcash. Even a ballpark.
I believe the payback period on a Z15 Pro is under 90 days.
Wow, that’s pretty good. Cool. Sorry to interrupt.
No, no. I mean, that’s a whole thing. But we have a product for miners called Relay, so we’ve been involved in this world. We’ve been trying to be active participants in it. Zcash mining is incredibly important.
Zcash has contemplated moving to proof of stake in the past. That seems unlikely to be happening in the near future, so it is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, and one of the fastest-growing ones, with this whole mining dynamic associated with it. Cypherpunk has stepped into mining, and I know they have other things, like consumer-facing products, that they also want to build.
Could either of you touch on what you just mentioned about Zcash having considered moving to proof of stake? We all know it as proof of work. Maybe you could explain the fact that it is proof of—
I almost regret saying anything.
Not to drag you through the mud over any infighting. I’m more wondering: If Zcash ever did move to proof of stake, what would the argument be for that? And what’s the simplified argument for sticking with proof of work?
There was a time when being a small, sub-billion-dollar-market-cap proof-of-work chain seemed very daunting for the future of Zcash. Exchanges were adding requirements, and it was threatening exchange listings. It was an issue for exchange listings. Coinbase, I think, had added either 200-something or 144 blocks, some huge number of confirmations needed to make deposits. That would lead to massive price distortions between Coinbase and Binance for Zcash.
We were having market-structure problems, and we were asking, “How long can we stay alive as a sub-billion-dollar-market-cap proof-of-work cryptocurrency?” “Number go up” has largely fixed this problem in the medium term. We talked about how a lot of the people we see buying Zcash are Bitcoiners, and I think we have to treat them as a significant new constituency in the Zcash community. They’re definitely less open to proof of stake than anyone else.
All of those are reasons why, in all likelihood, proof of stake isn’t happening. But there was an effort to build something that was partially philosophical and partially driven by the reality that, for a while, it was really unclear whether Zcash could stay listed.
How would you explain governance for Zcash? We’re talking about this age-old debate of proof of work versus proof of stake, and another important discussion when you talk about different approaches to blockchains is governance. Frankly, I don’t know: Is it closer to Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana? Is there infighting that’s common?
I recognize that the spring was probably a unifying force in the end. To overcome what was overcome there is definitely sending a positive signal to anyone about the Zcash community’s ability to come together and solve really difficult problems.
A sideways way of answering that is that I smiled when you asked, “Is there infighting?” I don’t think any privacy or security community comes without infighting. It comes with the territory: the personalities, the people who like to draw boundaries, who are very strongly opinionated and have lots of arguments for why they’re always right.
I think it’s very healthy. I don’t think any disagreements we’ve had have cost us so much progress that we’ve lost ground, as has happened very publicly in some of the other communities you mentioned. I think it’s a very hopeful time.
In terms of how decisions are made, from what I can observe, to the extent that many of these organizations are basically fully staffed by engineers, it’s a lot of them coming together and deciding what makes sense. People can disagree; they can fork if they want to. But it’s very engineering-driven, as far as I can tell.
To get into a little more specific detail, since 2024, Zcash has had a mechanism for coin-holder voting. Hilariously, they actually have a custom-built Cosmos chain that they use for the coin-holder voting. If you have coins in Zashi or Vysor, I think—if any other wallets support coin-holder voting, I’m not sure—you’ll periodically see a little thing pop up saying there’s a poll.
These polls don’t directly do anything. They’re not like Cosmos DAO governance, where you could upgrade the chain or change the consensus rules. They’re just preferences. There are 2 types of preferences expressed in that format. One is where a pool of funds held for retroactive funding should go. The second is protocol changes: Should we reduce the block time, which is happening soon? Should we sunset the Sprout pool, which is happening soon? Those kinds of things get polled.
There’s also been a long-standing process. The Zcash Foundation set up something called ZCAP, which is a poll of community members and another way people are polled. Then there’s the ZIP process, which is very similar to Bitcoin’s BIP process. It’s inspired by that, and it updates what the node implementers are effectively agreeing to.
For example, we’re shortening the block time on November 5. We’re going to change how many ZEC are issued every block to maintain the supply and halving schedule based on that shorter block time. We’re going to sunset the Sprout pool. How did this happen? People proposed the idea in a variety of different contexts. All the different polling operations recorded people’s opinions: people voted in the Sprout pool, people voted in the Orchard pool, and people in ZCAP voted.
All these votes happened, and it all went on the Zcash forum. Ultimately, everybody felt there was pretty broad consensus about what we should do. Shutting down the Sprout pool is controversial, but people read the room and felt that this was the right thing to do. The engineers, on the whole, really wanted it.
All of this comes together, and then there are ZIPs that say, “This is actually how we’re going to do it.” Then zcashd and Zebra modify their code to implement those ZIPs. After that, there’s a release, and then there’s a flag day that will upgrade the chain and change the consensus rules.
In the past, if you wanted to vote, it was very, very difficult.
Having voting incorporated into a wallet makes a big difference. No matter what size holder you are, you can participate and feel like you’re part of the community. I think that’s important for community-building, and maybe for emulating the cultish behavior in Bitcoin. That kind of feature is really important.
The other thing I wanted to say is that this retroactive funding idea is relatively new. I think it was implemented sometime in 2024. Before that, the block rewards were basically encoded to go to 3 organizations—the Electric Coin Company, the Zcash Foundation, and Zcash Community Grants—at a certain fixed rate. Some people in the community felt that disincentivized people from working hard and earning their keep. That’s why retroactive funding was proposed, and I think it’s a very healthy way for the community to self-manage.
In the most recent retroactive funding round, most of the funds didn’t go to the established organizations. They went to new organizations, which I think is a massive win.
5. Building Zcash Infrastructure
Speaking of organizations, we haven’t given you guys much time to talk about Shielded Labs. I’d love to learn a bit more about what problems you’re trying to solve. I think you mentioned Relay and how you’re helping the miners. What else are you trying to build within the Zcash ecosystem?
Like we said at the beginning, we’re newly reestablishing the community. We want to make sure we remain useful and earn our keep within the community. The way we think about the problems we want to solve is that they’re potholes: problems that affect everybody, but nobody really wants to stop and spend the resources to fix. Our first few products are focused on these kinds of problems. They’re important to the community, the security of the network, decentralization, and so on, but other organizations may not be well-suited or incentivized to fix them.
We have 2 live products that people are using today. One is called Argos. From Zcash’s launch in 2016 until Zashi became somewhat easy to use in 2023, there was a whole philosophy about why the Electric Coin Company didn’t build a wallet for a very long time. Part of it was regulatory fears and wanting to provide an ecosystem where the community could build things. Ultimately, all of that was a mistake.
One consequence is that self-custodying your Zcash between 2016 and 2023 could be a real problem. Even if you were a deep technical expert in Zcash, there was a pretty good chance you couldn’t figure out how to access your ZEC. We launched Argos, and it has now rescued over $30 million in ZEC for people. We’re pretty proud of that. When we built it, we had 1 person asking for it, so it’s been a really good outcome.
We support a lot of legacy wallets. If you have an old Zcash wallet in one of several different formats, you can download Argos and it will figure out how to help. We have a Signal support group, and I’m on the forums. There are lots of ways to find Zaki and say, “Hey, Argos isn’t working for me with this weird wallet I used,” because we’ve seen some strange ones. I’ll definitely be there to help you get your money out and into a more modern Zcash wallet. It’s incredibly gratifying every time we recover some sizable amount of money for an OG Zcash user.
The other thing we built is called Relay. I’m friends with BlueMatt from Bitcoin, Matt Corallo. He was one of the people who got me into cryptocurrency. Back in the day, he came up with FIBRE, a project to encourage decentralization among Bitcoin miners by making orphan rates fairer between mining pools. Christie and I—Christie is head of product at Shielded Labs—and I ported Matt’s work to Zcash, and we spun up a network.
Some mining pools have joined, and they’re starting to see their orphan rates go down, which is great. We also have all this data that nobody else in the world really has on the Zcash network. We’re talking to various people about things they could build on top of that data. We know things like the orphan rate per mining pool and the probability of getting a transaction included in the next block. It’s all really detailed. As Zcash becomes more like a Solana-type network, with high throughput and low latency, this kind of thing is more needed.
I want to go back to what I mentioned earlier: I did my first Zcash transaction today. When you actually try something like this, it’s kind of magical. All I did was buy ZEC, move it to this wallet, and shield it. After using so many apps in crypto over the years, I’ll say it was incredibly smooth, and it worked. You have to try this stuff; you can’t just theorize about it. I do think there’s a lot of magic unlocked by trying it.
6. The Future Of Shielded DeFi
My mind goes to what else you could eventually do with this shielded pool. I want to do DeFi in the shielded pool and do some cool stuff with it. I don’t know if that’s pie in the sky or if it breaks the security model. Can you speak to what might be possible down the road?
I can give you my take. This is an active point of tension in the whole Zcash community right now. It’s been a point of tension for a while, but it’s definitely getting frothier.
A camp has really emerged. For a long time, the lack of programmability in the shielded pool was a technical consideration: the technology didn’t exist. That’s not as much of a problem anymore. Now the problem is that we have to make choices. Even though we have all these resources, expertise, mental energy, and security resources are finite.
I’d say the biggest thing the Zcash community wants from the future shielded pool right now is the ability to do transactions at internet scale. We want Stripe-like transaction volume. On one hand, you could say that nobody wants to use Zcash like that today. That’s true; we’re not saturating the block space. On the other hand, if we really think Zcash is going to be the future transaction medium for all the AI agents and all the people in the world, we want that scalability. Technically, we know we have the technology to build it, so that’s where people want to put their energy.
There are Zcash Shielded Assets, or ZSAs, which are sort of like ERC-20 assets that could live on top of Zcash and in the shielded pool. They exist on testnet, but there’s a lot of resistance to putting them on mainnet. There have also been proposals to put some DeFi primitives directly into the shielded pool. There’s also an NFT project that raised $20 million selling an NFT, and they’re sort of ZK- or Zcash-affiliated. As far as we can tell, all of these NFTs live on a single server right now. They don’t even live on a blockchain, so it’s like, what is going on? They want ZSAs to happen.
This is something there’s contention about in the Zcash community right now, and it’s still to be determined how those tensions will work out. There are people in both the StarkWare ecosystem and the Mina ecosystem who have been advocating for this: if Zcash wants to be a Bitcoin-like, single-asset chain focused on being money and financial transactions, what if we pushed all of the Zcash DeFi somewhere else? Solana, Hyperliquid, and NEAR already have quite a bit of Zcash DeFi on them.
What are we getting by having more Zcash DeFi? I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about this, other than that, given that we formally verified Ironwood, I don’t think we’re ever going to put anything in the shielded protocol again that isn’t formally verified. AI has made formal verification substantially cheaper than it used to be, but there still aren’t that many people with the expertise to do it. Where is that finite resource going to go in terms of protocol upgrades?
This makes a lot of sense. I enjoy using DeFi, so I’d love to have those benefits for Zcash. But you make the point that you could potentially just move your Zcash to one of these other DeFi-centric chains and make use of that, while looking at Zcash through this very purist lens. It takes a very purist view in terms of doing one thing and doing it very well, and pushing to be a store of value and money.
I absolutely would not have appreciated this nuance 10 years ago. I think now, after what I’ve witnessed with Bitcoin, and considering the alternative to what I enjoy with DeFi on Ethereum or Solana, it makes a lot of sense to me. I’m very interested to watch that play out. I could see both sides really making their arguments.
I think you’re getting a sense of why I think Zcash is special here. Bitcoin has been very conservative, very ossified, and very slow-moving. In many ways, that’s been a strength for many years. It’s allowed a lot of people, in a lot of different ways, to feel comfortable holding Bitcoin.
But this is a liability in the AI-plus-quantum-computing era. It just is. On the other hand, you have chains doing a lot of experimental stuff and moving very quickly. Some are private, some aren’t, and they make various trade-offs. All power to them, and some of them have done really good things for Zcash: Solana, NEAR, et cetera.
Zcash is trying to be the middle thing. It has a coherent story about how it fits between these two things. We’ve had people like Kyle Samani argue that the middle thing isn’t needed. Solana maxis argue that the Zcash middle thing isn’t needed, and Bitcoin maxis argue that the Zcash thing isn’t needed.
I think the price action is ultimately just a reflection of people looking at the world and saying, “No, wait, that actually makes sense. Why would you…? You need that middle thing. That middle thing is the thing you need right now.”
Like you said, we’re at a fork in the road. It’s a live fork. You said you wanted to see how this plays out. I’d encourage you to get in there. If you’re truly interested in Zcash long-term as an asset, go on our community forums, pitch your ideas, and help us think through the pros and cons.
Share your knowledge. We’re building community and our future direction together, so please get involved.
I think this is a great place for us to start to wrap up. I appreciate you both staying much longer than we planned for—no surprise. This was an excellent conversation, and I think it was exactly what we were looking for: the chance to ask all the dumb questions about Zcash and better understand the chain’s perspective on providing the ability to hold a token that is a store of value and money, and to transact privately.
It’s absolutely fascinating, and I think the story of Zcash’s redemption arc is really a standout in the space. It was fascinating to get your perspective from behind the curtain. Zaki, Sudo, thank you so much for your time. We learned so much here today. Hopefully, this was a good catch-up for our audience on the most important things to know about Zcash. I’d love to give you a final word. Is there anything else you’d like to share with us before you go?
I thought your questions were really thoughtful, so thank you very much.
I just encourage people to understand that the story isn’t the price run-up. The story is all of this stuff, and the story is ongoing. There are plenty of ways to build and be involved, and plenty of opportunity here.
It’s not like this is the year of Zcash and Zcash is over now. It seems like we’re still really at the beginning of getting engaged. This is like Bitcoin in 2016. I think that’s where we’re at.