Original title: Why now? Update on Zcash Original author: Josh Swihart Original translation by Felix, PANews
Editor's Note: Zcash was once considered a pioneer in the privacy coin sector, but it has long been mired in governance deadlock and user growth difficulties. After three years of adjustments, Zcash has undergone a transformation. Josh Swihart, founder of ZODL (former CEO of ECC), is the core driver of this transformation. This article is his systematic exposition of Zcash's past, present, and future. Details are as follows.
I really enjoy reading the various theories about Zcash's continued strength since the end of last year, but few people delve into the details. Looking back over the past three years, I will try to explain why Zcash is on such a strong upward trajectory and everything it has gone through to get to where it is today.
Three years ago, Zcash delivered world-changing cryptographic technology, but it struggled to gain traction. At the time, the price of ZEC hovered around $30 for an extended period. Less than 11% of the supply was in anonymous pools. Community forums were in disarray, rife with governance disputes and infighting. Two entities (ECC and the Zcash Foundation) held a de facto veto over the evolution of the protocol through a US-based trademark agreement. Simultaneously, these two entities received a development fund guaranteed to be disbursed to them regardless of its implementation.
Currently, ZEC is priced at around $600, representing a year-to-date increase of approximately 1500%. About 31% of the funds (worth over $3 billion) are held in user-controlled anonymous wallets. By mid-March, the percentage of anonymous transactions had climbed to 86.5%. Tachyon, as an expansion project aligned with community goals, received funding. NU6 completely abolished the direct funding model and reset the protocol's own development funding model. ZODL raised $25 million from institutions including Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.
Everything has a cause and effect. Here are the key breakthroughs and the reasons for the accelerated growth.
The removal of governance shackles
For its first eight years, Zcash allocated 20% of each block reward to two fixed entities (later joined by the Zcash Community Grants Fund). This created a vested interest monopoly. These entities controlled governance but faced no pressure to increase their influence, and the community was unable to reallocate resources. During my time at the ECC, I witnessed firsthand the negative impact of this distorted incentive mechanism.
The situation changed. In May 2024, the ECC unilaterally announced that it would no longer accept direct funding. This move brought the issue to the forefront: the old model could not be sustained if the biggest beneficiaries refused to participate. NU6 reduced direct funding, allocating 8% to the Zcash Community Grants Fund (ZCG) for ecosystem grants, and depositing another 12% into a protocol-controlled "safe" for ZEC holders to retroactively distribute to those who have made significant contributions.
This model specifies time limits. Both 8% and 12% of the funding will expire at the end of 2028 with the third halving. The community can choose to renew, but this is not mandatory and requires an overwhelming consensus within the community.
Subsequently, in August 2024, ECC officially notified the termination of the trademark agreement, which had granted ECC and ZF "2-of-2 multisignature control" over the agreement. Six months later, the Zcash Foundation (ZF) announced that it would no longer use trademark rights to interfere with governance. The monopoly on Zcash governance was broken, and token holders and other groups within the ecosystem were finally able to voice their opinions. Including ZF's ZCAP, no single institution can monopolize the interpretation of community opinion.
Zcash was finally free.
Lifting Product Shackles
In January 2024, we (then called ECC) shifted to a user growth-centric approach. This was a fundamental change compared to the past few years.
For years, the engineering team focused on cryptographic research, core protocols, and improving privacy. While these efforts made Zcash's privacy technology outstanding, they failed to attract new users. In fact, by 2023, the community had even begun to shrink.
On the X platform, Zcash holders complained about stagnant prices and regulatory pressure, questioning the future of "privacy coins." At the time, 60% of the tweets were negative or neutral. A survey initiated by ZURE (@peacemongerz, now the marketing director of ZODL) showed that ZEC holders had a Net Promoter Score (NPS) as low as -60, indicating extreme user dissatisfaction.
We listened to the feedback and began developing products that users truly wanted to use. This served as our guiding light then and now, directing the development of the Zodl wallet, the Zallet command-line wallet, and even the core protocol.
Zashi (later renamed Zodl), launched in March 2024, is the most direct manifestation of this new strategy: default anonymity, support for hardware wallets, and cross-currency exchange. We delivered a world-class privacy currency and packaged it in a simple and easy-to-use interface.
The impact is evident. By the end of 2025, the anonymous supply had grown from approximately 11% to approximately 30%, representing a growth of over 400% in absolute ZEC terms. Every token in the anonymous pool is self-custodied by the users. By mid-March, anonymous transactions accounted for 86.5%. Since last October, the wallet has processed over $600 million in ZEC exchanges. This is not the result of centralized exchanges inflating trading volumes or accumulating assets in vaults; it is the result of genuine users choosing privacy and controlling their own private keys.
The Lifting of Narrative Shackles
Zcash faced positioning issues. The label "privacy coin" led to its delisting from exchanges, scrutiny by regulators, and avoidance by institutional investors. The project's true value was obscured: a Bitcoin-like monetary policy and verifiable, private payments achieved through advanced cryptography.
Today, Zcash has become an unstoppable force in privacy currency. Zcash is the protocol, ZEC is the asset, and Zodl is the gateway to empowering autonomy, freedom of speech, freedom of transaction, and sovereign independence through privacy. This is structural: a protocol governed by the community, a scarce asset for private storage and payments, and a gateway that competes solely on product quality, independent of protocol governance. This is the "trinity" of privacy currency.
With this framework, trading platforms, ETF issuers, and infrastructure providers can support the asset without having to dictate how users use the protocol. This lays the foundation for ZEC's entry into the multi-chain ecosystem, its listing on Robinhood, the disclosure of positions by Multicoin, Grayscale's submission of its ETF application, and Foundry's launch of its mining pool. The value proposition is now clearly visible to allocators who were previously unable to underwrite the asset.
The removal of organizational shackles
In January 2026, following a dispute with the board of directors of Bootstrap (a US 501(c)3 nonprofit organization), the entire ECC team resigned to form the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL). The core of the dispute lay in control: whether it belonged to a small group of board members who were not involved in actual work, or to the team itself. The board prioritized its own interests, thus forcing the team to leave and start afresh under a mission-driven organizational structure.
Nonprofit organizations struggle to scale. Building consumer-grade products at the speed required for Zcash demands startup-style capital, rapid hiring, and efficient decision-making. ZODL's $25 million funding from Paradigm, a16z, and others is a strong signal of recognition for the team and its mission to scale. Across the industry, the "Avengers" have assembled.
Current market sentiment
The strongest indicator of sentiment is the size of the anonymity pools. Users don't move ZEC to self-hosted anonymous addresses for speculation. They do it because of trust and faith. The anonymity pools have grown from 11% to 31% of the supply, representing hundreds of thousands of independent decisions to choose self-hosting and protect privacy.
LunarCrush data shows that ZEC's discussion volume has increased by 15,245% over the past year, compared to Bitcoin's 190%. ZEC ranks second in AltRank across the entire crypto market. Positive sentiment accounts for 81%. GitHub contribution growth has increased by approximately 20% year-over-year. Forum topics have shifted from governance complaints to product and technology work.
What should we do next?
In short, the immediate focus is on user experience, scalability, and preparations for the post-quantum era.
Zodl Wallet: We are further optimizing performance, adding more exchange options, deposit and withdrawal channels, and features that users have been requesting, while maintaining its simplicity and ease of use. The @zkDragon team has also joined in to help develop features such as in-app voting for token holders.
Scalability: Scalability will be significantly improved with the reduction of block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, and the Tachyon project led by @ebfull. Tachyon refactors the protocol around stateless wallets with recursive zero-knowledge proofs, eliminating the synchronization bottleneck that has plagued it for years, and targeting throughput at Visa/Mastercard levels. In the process, we will deprecate the old zcashd nodes and migrate to the modern zebrad written in Rust.
Quantum-resistant: The "quantum-recoverable" wallet is expected to launch within a month and achieve full quantum-resistant states within 12 to 18 months. This will protect user funds from the cryptographic changes that the financial system will have to face over the next decade.
As the work progresses, the next network upgrade will gradually translate these key areas into protocol changes. Specific details are still being refined through ZIP discussions.
In summary, Zcash will be faster, easier to use, more feature-rich, more scalable, and post-quantum secure.
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