The Zcash Daily — Monday, September 28, 2026
Clara Shikhelman and the team at Alloc Init dropped a paper this week proposing Zcash-style privacy for Bitcoin. No soft fork, no bridges, no operators — “just Bitcoin,” in their words. The deposit/withdrawal mechanism that would make it actually work doesn’t exist yet. Robin Linus called the underlying cryptography “highly experimental.” The trusted setup means compromised participants could mint fake bitcoin inside the layer. (A Liquid sidechain consensus bug just let attackers cash out ~4,000 real BTC. So this isn’t theoretical.)
Nobody trying to solve Bitcoin’s privacy problem builds their own cryptography anymore. They reach for Zcash’s. And on the actual Zcash network, the usage data is doing something unusual: 4,361 ZEC moved into the shielded pool on September 26 — a 7.2σ outlier against a 30-day average of 1,434/day. 53% of daily transactions are now shielded, up from 21% a year ago. Shielded supply sits at 4.89M ZEC out of 16.9M total. The people who built the math are also the ones whose users showed up.
Meanwhile, a forum thread worth reading quietly: @aaal posted “Threads — Part II” on September 25, mapping ZODL’s investor base — Paradigm, a16z, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures — and estimating they collectively hold ~10-11% of current and future ZEC. The post raises Howey test questions about the shift from nonprofit ECC to for-profit ZODL. @aquietinvestor responded defending Shielded Labs’ Swiss nonprofit independence. Nobody else has weighed in yet. Could that silence be its own kind of data?
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