I’m honored to nominate myself for a third term on the Zcash Community Grants Committee. As the name implies, Zcash “Community” Grants, I believe that the future of Zcash looks brightest when our vision and efforts align. If elected I strive to continue to advocate for these community values within ZCG, leveraging my experience as a software engineer to add value and accelerate decision making. I believe ZCG can continue to play a key role in achieving our shared vision of making privacy and financial freedom normal.
Last June, I asked for your input on funding priorities. You emphasized governance features, wallet usability, and community initiatives. I’ve worked to deliver on these priorities, and I’m proud of the meaningful projects ZCG has funded during my tenure.
Looking ahead, I’ve been reflecting on Zcash adoption challenges. What complications exist when integrating Zcash into payment systems? What barriers do newcomers face? Every friction is a hurdle that prevents people from discovering Zcash’s benefits.
I believe ZCG should prioritize funding projects that prepare Zcash for the adoption era. By targeting grants that lower these barriers and illuminate the path forward, we can create lasting impact and accelerate our collective mission.
If I cross my fingers I think within 24months, hopefully sooner, Zcash should be at a point where we should formalise t-address deprecation, as a ZIP. I’ll become much louder on the issue when we approach that point. Within 36months, if not deprecated yet, I believe many of us might feel deep regret not having done it sooner. Unfortunately I’m merely a mortal so my future predictions are barely as good as a coin toss .
For those that haven’t made up their mind on t-addresses yet I believe it’s almost certain we will reach a point where the burden of t-addresses will objectively outweighs any benefits. Currently the benefit/burden of t-addresses is case-by-case depending on the user, their country, and their usecase. Deprecating any widely used features is hard so I think it’s important we formalize this transition sooner than later otherwise it’s all going to catch-up to us very quickly. I believe any of the valid usecases left for t-addresses in the future can be managed off the Zcash chain (e.g. a zec or other token on another chain/dex/etc). @Tsupportisharmful I appreciate you championing this issue as I believe if we don’t come to a consensus on deprecating t-addresses soon it will become a heavy burden politically, technically, and for our users .
Thank you for your thoughtful response. Based on the above I support your candidacy!
We need more people like you that understand the need to keep development (and funding) moving in the correct (shielded) direction while depreciating t addresses ASAP for the reasons you mention.
I tentatively agree. I think that you’re (correctly) asserting that the existence of shielded DEX shifts the equation to make the case for complete deprecation much stronger.
To paraphrase what I believe to be your point:
“Now that we can access the feature set of other cryptocurrencies without t-addresses, they’re completely obsolete.”
Is that complete and accurate?
That having been said, I am very glad they were available in summer 2025 to facilitate the first ZEC DEX.
This gives me a handy rule-of-thumb going forward, since now if I am presented with a t-address use-case I can just ask myself:
Why can’t that be handled with a FOO-coin?
Oh, and also.. I think your assertion about off-chain handling was prescient, and that’s worth noting!
This is a very interesting and difficult question and not without controversies…
As a ZCG candidate myself, I will give my thoughts on this.
First, shielded addresses are what makes Zcash Zcash. Uncompromising Privacy is the whole reason of being for Zcash.
The question is what would we gain from removing t-addresses and what would we lose by removing them.
This is not an obvious decision because there are significant pros and cons. Some people / use-cases will get hurt while others will benefit. So the question is, overall, will it be a net positive for Zcash. That in itself is a vague question and will depend on who answers the question.
Let’s delve into the details by establishing the main pros and the main cons of removing t-addresses:
PROS:
Simpler code bases. From nodes to wallets, the code base will be simplified, even though t-addresses aren’t the most complex parts of the code. This will definitely help with maintenance. In my opinion, this is maybe the biggest gain of all for the long-term
Simpler UI/UX. Only dealing with one type of addresses (shielded) helps with the confusion of whether the transaction is private or not. It also simplifies the wallet UIs and interaction with the blockchain in an always private fashion. Unaware users who don’t do their homework won’t unknowingly put themselves at risk because they assumed Zcash is private when it is not with t-address. However, this use case is for the lowest common denominator of people who aren’t interested in understanding what they do and we have to be careful harming others for the benefits of the “lazy” ones.
FUD: The argument some people make by claiming Zcash is a bad privacy coin because it has t-addresses will be shut down. However, those people act in bad faith when they say that because it is not the truth for the aware users who knows that Zcash has the best privacy technology in existence for blockchain. Those same social attackers will then find another low-haning FUD to blemish Zcash’s reputation and since they lie, they’ll find something else.
Regulatory risks: t-addresses could be flagged or frozen by exchanges since they are visible. This is the same issue that all other blockchains face and it hasn’t yet occurred except in a few rare instances, especially for stable coins.
CONS:
Onboarding. Removing t-addresses has the potential to hurt onboarding the masses to Zcash because the vast majority of people’s first steps into crypto is via CEX (Centralized EXchanges). Almost all of them (except for Gemini AFAIK) only support t-addresses because they are in the regulatory clear when they do that (t-addr ~~ BTC addr). Cutting off t-addr means cutting off today’s largest on-ramp to Zcash.
Speculators who are part of the eco-system do not care about privacy. We don’t want to cater speculators but at the same time we want to have a large inclusive tent under which all kinds of people can use Zcash for their own purpose (hopefully privacy but not always).
The banning of Zcash shielded addresses from exchanges and from society by governments will slow down onboarding.
t-addr play an important role in transparency when needed. There are real use cases where transparency is desirable like easier auditing, public funds, multi-sigs, … that use t-addr for that reasons.
Atomic swaps and DeFi bridges use t-addresses via tBTC, renZEC, …
t-addr are faster and more efficient (no shielded computational overhead and smaller fees) which is a bonus but shouldn’t matter much.
As we can see, it is not a clear-cut, easy decision, depending on where one comes from.
That said, having options is rarely bad assuming the person making decisions has a certain level of education about Zcash.
The fact that there are these nuances suggests to me, that a nuanced approach (which we are already effectively pursuing) is correct.
Shielded-Only wallets effectively allow “Shielded Only” Zcash from the Users’ perspective. This is itself not without important caveats, but there’s a lot of truth to it.
Centralized exchanges like Gemini that support shielded addresses gain a competitive edge over transparent-only systems like Binance.
It’s now possible to mine to shielded pools.
taddresses have been removed from UAs in all major wallets.
The net effect of these “soft deprecations” is that the transparent pool is now shrinking as a fraction of total Zcash value.
So.. I think we should keep doing what we’re doing.
I think the low-barrier to entry is worth the cost of potential misuse.
I think within 24months, hopefully sooner, Zcash should be at a point where we should formalise t-address deprecation, as a ZIP. I’ll become much louder on the issue when we approach that point. Within 36months, if not deprecated yet, I believe many of us might feel deep regret not having done it sooner. Unfortunately I’m merely a mortal so my future predictions are barely as good as a coin toss 
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