We’ve been ramping up our use of AI to gain better insights and accelerate our work at ZODL, including code review and development, roadmap planning, task allocation, bottleneck reduction, and UX reviews.
A friend of mine runs a landscaping and fencing business. While currently testing its effectiveness in back-office tasks, they are preparing for a future in which AI-enabled robots will handle most manual labor more consistently and efficiently. Much of the labor that he employs will eventually go the way of the knocker-upper.
It’s obvious that we are accelerating into a new world. It scares a lot of people to think that the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy will be ripped from beneath them, leaving the pyramid to crumble.
There are both reasons to be excited and reasons to fear. I was fascinated with Bernie’s interview with Claude this week. I’ve been warning about the dangers of aggregated, unencrypted data + AI for a long time.
I’ll state the obvious, follow the logic.
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Digital money is a fundamental primitive of a digital economy.
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AI will become better at most forms of labor than humans.
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A digital economy is not geographically bound.
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That includes the distribution and management of economic flows.
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Autonomous agents will not have bank accounts or comply with KYC.
“How long until agentic payments overtake human payments?”
Human-to-human payments require encryption for personal, business, and national security. A digital economy cannot thrive without the protections afforded by math. The only means to protect yourself from the agentic swarm is not to publish the data. And we can interact while minimizing information leakage using zero-knowledge cryptography (zk). We’ve been given the math to write powerful software, and the math to make it work without the surveillance, manipulation, corruption, or front-running.
Several projects are attempting to bolt on privacy, obscure information through mixing, or add backdoors (look for these in regulated stables). But these tools will not work. AIs can use heuristic analysis to deanonymize and quickly find backdoors and the keys to unlock them. Without zk, the agentic swarm will have access to everything.
Privacy is not a purely human need. Human-to-agent and agent-to-agent interactions require the same. Privacy is the necessary antibody to AI. An early and heavy investor in AI confirmed that with me this week. An antibody doesn’t destroy; it binds and neutralizes the threat. And it’s why, in a world of uber-powerful agents, Zcash is one of the most important projects for humanity.
And so, we have two options: give in, or use math to build privacy into all interactions.
There is no middle ground.
One of the beautiful things about zk math is that we are exploring its use beyond privacy. The same math will be used to scale post-quantum private money, supporting new messaging-based interfaces (see Project Tachyon) and enabling us to build agent-based software using payment standards that establish trust-based identities while limiting data leakage (see ERC-8004 and x402).
AI is an accelerator, and Zcash is a necessity for a digital economy that benefits all mankind. It will be used by billions of people, and by the machines.
It’s inevitable.
Zodl (formerly Zashi)
Zashi facilitated $460k in swaps across 6,300 transactions in Feb, up from $394k in Jan across 8,700 transactions.
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Finalized scope of Zodl 3.2.0, focused on fixes and improvements to cross-platform UI/UX consistency.
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Discovered and prepared a resolution for an issue with Swap/Pay reporting.
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Progressing on team growth with a new iOS developer candidate.
Zodl iOS Analytics
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Unique Installs: 39.2k (+1.4k)
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Total Downloads: 46.2k (+1.8k)
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App Store Rating: 4.9★ (no change)
Zodl Android Analytics
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Install Base: 15.6k (+2.1k)
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Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 46.6k (+1.7k)
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Play Store Rating: 4.28★ (+0.06)
Android total installs have now caught up to iOS total downloads, 46.6k vs 46.2k.
Zcash Core (includes R&D)
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Finalized the iOS SDK/FFI reunification.
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Prepared Rewind-to-chain-state method API for Android and iOS SDKs.
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Pushed a PR for adding support for storage and handling of P2SH redeem scripts.
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Proposed changes to ZIP 316 and ZIP 48.
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Progressed on the Zallet alpha.4 release scope.
Other
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Created an initial ZODL roadmap for 2026, to be released before the end of the quarter.
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Continued to meet with potential investors in ZODL as a follow-on to the recent raise announcement.
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Continued operationalizing policy and regulatory strategy. Plan to attend the MiCA Roundtable in Cannes on March 30.
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Attended EthDC, networking with DC stakeholders.
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Developed and released an integration between Luma (event ticketing) and CipherPay that enables Zcash payments for Luma events, to be used for future PGP meetings and the DC Privacy Summit. Give it a try.
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Zcash network hashrate hit an all-time high of 16.54 GS/s this month. Foundry announced a Zcash Mining Pool launching April 2026. (BeInCrypto)
zk all the things,
Onward.
