Know your audience. If this was literally any other project, that would not be an issue. But this is specifically post-quantum chat, whose audience covers PEOPLE who fear tracking. Don’t view it as a “build a PQC chat using ZCash”, the problem is to “build a PQC chat in general”. ZCash is almost as infamous as Tornado Cash itself. The reputational damage is the same, except one can anonymise Ethereum without Tornado, one cannot buy $ZEC without being flagged with full name and address.
they can acquire ZEC through decentralized cross-chain swaps
Wait, wait, wait. Acquire $ZEC by swapping Ethereum?
Comparing Zcash to Tornado Cash is a massive stretch. Tornado is sanctioned by OFAC and its devs are on trial. Zcash is a compliant protocol built by a US company, traded on Coinbase and Kraken because of viewing keys. There is zero comparison legally or reputationally.
Also, how exactly do you anonymize Ethereum without Tornado or other mixers? Any mixer on EVM gets flagged instantly anyway. Yes, buying ZEC on Coinbase requires KYC. But so does buying ETH. The difference is that after you withdraw ETH, your entire transaction history is naked on Etherscan. With Zcash, once it hits a shielded pool, the trail is dead.
And yes, swapping ETH for ZEC via cross-chain swaps is incredibly common. People use THORChain, Maya, or instant non-custodial swaps to go straight into a shielded z-address without KYC every single day. This isn’t some theoretical tech, it’s basic OPSEC.
We are leveraging Zcash’s existing, battle-tested privacy pool so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel on the payments layer, and can focus 100% on the post-quantum mixnet.
if you want to support the development.