It appears that for the first time in its history Zcash (or maybe Zashi) may have found Product-market fit (PMF). The resulting price action enables our community to allocate significant additional resources. I believe we would be wise to focus our resources on reinforcing this newfound PMF.
We offer what nobody else in Web3 does: a usable, permissionless bank account.
A bank account that exposes your entire financial history to your coffee shop is not usable. A bank account where your stablecoin balance can be frozen is not permissionless. A bank account that can only be used with other customers of that same bank is not a usable. No one else has our anonymity set, which is measured in the millions. Nobody else in the privacy space has our ecosystem integration, with support NEAR intents, Brave, a shielded hardware wallet and too many others to mention.
We should reinforce the Zashi experience and develop for massive scale and broad ecosystem integration. We should also use the breathing room afforded by the favorable policy landscape and additional resources, to make our network as resilient as possible. Just as the winds have turned before, they may well turn again.
However, I think we should be cautious not to go too broad, too fast and lose our PMF. I know that some of the proposals on this forum, like a 'Starknet‑style L2’ and ZSAs are well-intentioned and interesting from a technical perspective. In my opinion, however, they stray too far from what is just starting to make us successful. The future is not the Zcash-everything-chain with private smart contracts, private stablecoins, private ENS and a private trading platform. That is not what we see in the non-private Web3 space either: Ethereum just is not simultaneously taking moneyness from Bitcoin and meme coins from Solana; to the great dismay of its supporters.
The future is us improving what our real users already use our network for today. We should integrate with all the aforementioned projects as they arrive (and in the meantime, their non-private precursors). At least that is my opinion and I think it should be discussed so that we don’t waste development resources.