I love reading all these theories about why Zcash has continued on this path of strength since late last year. Very few ask for the details. Let’s unwind the last three years, and I’ll try to illuminate why this is happening now and what it took to get here.
Three years ago, Zcash delivered world-changing cryptography but was struggling. ZEC was trading around $30 and had been for some time. Less than 11% of the supply was shielded. The forum was abysmal, largely dominated by governance disputes and infighting. Two orgs (ECC and the Zcash Foundation) held effective veto power over the protocol’s evolution through a US-based trademark agreement. At the same time, those two entities were fed from a development fund guaranteed to them, regardless of execution.
Today, ZEC is priced around $600, up roughly 1,500% on the year. Roughly 31%,over $3B in USD terms, is shielded and held in wallets that users control. The share of shielded transactions has climbed to 86.5% in mid-March.
Tachyon is funded as a community-aligned scaling effort. NU6 retired the direct-funding model entirely and reset the protocol’s funding model for its own development. ZODL closed a $25M round from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.
Nothing happens by chance. Here were the unlocks and why growth is accelerating.
The Governance Unlock
For its first eight years, Zcash distributed 20% of every block reward to the same two orgs (also later Zcash Community Grants). It created an incumbency problem. These organizations controlled governance and had no real pressure to compete on impact. The community had no real means to redirect resources. I witnessed the impact of perverse incentives while employed at ECC.
That changed. In May 2024, ECC unilaterally announced it would not accept direct funding. This move forced the issue. The legacy model could not survive its largest beneficiary refusing to participate. Network Upgrade 6 (NU6) cut direct funding and routed 8% to Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) for ecosystem grants and 12% into a protocol-controlled lockbox for ZEC holders to retroactively distribute grants to those delivering impactful benefits.
This model is explicitly time-limited. Both the 8% and 12% funds expire at the end of the third halving in late 2028. The community could renew them, but this is by no means a given, as there must be an overwhelming consensus across the community that they should be continued in any way.
Then, in August 2024, ECC served formal notice of termination of the trademark agreement that gave ECC and ZF 2-of-2 multisig control over the protocol. Six months later, the Zcash Foundation (ZF) announced that it would not use the trademark for governance. The stranglehold on Zcash governance was broken, and coin holders and other groups across the ecosystem were able to be heard. No single body, including the ZF’s ZCAP, has a monopoly on determining community sentiment.
Zcash was finally set free.
The Product Unlock
In January of 2024, we (then ECC) reoriented to focus on user adoption. This decision was a fundamental shift from the years up to that point.
For years, engineering focused on cryptographic research, the core protocol, and efforts that delivered excellent cryptographic privacy for Zcash, but attracted few new users. In fact, by 2023, the community was contracting.
On X, Zcashers were complaining about price stagnation and regulatory concerns, and questioning whether “privacy coins” would ever have their moment. 60% of X posts were negative or neutral. A survey of users by ZURE (aka @peacemonger), now head of ZODL marketing) showed that the NPS score for ZEC holders was a dismal -60, signaling deep dissatisfaction.
We listened and began building products with capabilities that people would want to use. This was, and is today, a north star. It is informing our work on the Zodl wallet, the Zallet CLI wallet, and all the way down to the core protocol.
Zashi (rebranded to Zodl), launched in March 2024, was the most visible expression of the new focus: shielded by default, hardware support, and swaps with other tokens. We delivered world-class private money, packaged in a simple-to-use user interface.
The impact has been clear. By the end of 2025, the shielded supply grew from ~11% to ~30%, an increase of more than 400% in absolute ZEC terms. Every coin in that pool is held in self-custody. The share of shielded transactions has climbed to 86.5% in mid-March. And the wallet has processed over $600M in ZEC swaps since October of last year. This is not centralized-exchange activity or accumulation by treasuries that own the asset but never touch the chain. These are real people choosing privacy and holding their own keys.
The Narrative Unlock
Zcash had a positioning problem. “Privacy coin” put it in a category that exchanges delisted, regulators scrutinized, and institutions avoided. The project’s actual proposition got lost in the category of opt-in shielded payments on a Bitcoin-style monetary policy, with cryptography that makes shielded transactions verifiable yet private.
Today, Zcash has become unstoppable private money and one of the most important projects in the world. Zcash is the protocol, ZEC is the asset, and Zodl is the gateway unlocking agency through privacy and enabling the freedom of speech, the freedom to transact, and the freedom to be self-sovereign. This is structural. The protocol is governed by a community, the scarce asset used for privately storing value and useful for spending, and a gateway that can compete on product quality without being tied to protocol governance. It’s the trinity of unstoppable private money.
Using this framework, exchanges, ETF issuers, and infrastructure providers can support the asset without taking a position on how users choose to use the protocol. It’s foundational for opening up ZEC access across chains, Robinhood’s listing, Multicoin disclosing a position, Grayscale’s ETF Filing, and Foundry launching a Zcash mining pool. The value proposition is now legible to allocators who couldn’t underwrite it before.
The Organizational Unlock
In January 2026, the entire ECC team left to form Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) after a dispute with its board of directors at Bootstrap, a US-based 501(c)3. The dispute centered on control and whether a small group of unengaged board members or the team itself was best positioned to make the decisions needed to get ZEC into the hands of billions of users. The board prioritized their own interests, and so the team was forced to leave to build under a structure that put the mission first.
Non-profits struggle to scale. Building consumer products at the speed Zcash needs requires startup-style capital, hiring velocity, and decision-making. The $25M ZODL raise from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Chapter One, Balaji Srinivasan, and others is a strong signal and endorsement of the team and mission to scale. Across the industry, “the Avengers” united.
Current Sentiment
The strongest sentiment indicator is the size of the shielded pool. People do not move ZEC into self-custody and shielded addresses to flip it. They do it because they trust and believe in it. They do it because they value it. The growth of the pool from 11% to 31% of supply represents hundreds of thousands of individual decisions to take custody and keep funds private.
LunarCrush data showed ZEC discussion growth at +15,245% over the past year, while Bitcoin’s was +190%. ZEC sat at AltRank #2 across the entire crypto market. Sentiment readings hit 81% positive. GitHub contribution velocity is up roughly 20% year-over-year. Forum threads have shifted decisively from governance grievance to product and technical work.
Where Now?
In short, the near-term priorities are UX, scalability, and post-quantum readiness.
In Zodl, we’re working to improve the user experience even further, with better performance, more options for swaps, on- and offboarding, and more features that users have been requesting, without degrading its ease of use. @ValarDragon and his team have also stepped up to help us build out even more, including in-app coin holder polling and performance improvements.
Scalability will improve with fast block times (moving from 75 seconds to 25 seconds) and through Tachyon, led by@ebfull and his engineering team. Tachyon restructures the protocol around stateless wallets carrying recursive ZK-proofs, eliminating the sync bottleneck that held back shielded adoption for years, with throughput targeting Visa- and Mastercard-level performance. Through this process, we’ll deprecate the old zcashd consensus node and migrate to the modern Rust-based zebrad software stewarded by the ZF, along with the ZODL-developed Zallet CLI wallet.
Quantum-recoverable wallets should ship within a month, with full post-quantum status targeted within 12 to 18 months, protecting user funds against the cryptographic transitions every serious financial system will face this decade. These are my guesses based on our current progress and velocity.
The next network upgrades will sequence these focus areas into protocol changes as the work matures. The specifics are still being shaped through ZIP discussion.
Net, Zcash will be faster, easier to use, more feature-rich, more scalable, and post-quantum secure.
The Pattern
Today’s energy and growth are rooted in hard decisions made in 2023 and 2024 and in compounding efforts since. We fixed a broken funding and governance model and gave people software they love using, while continuing to steward the evolution of the Zcash protocol. We’ve been intentional and uncompromising. And the ecosystem has grown as a result.
Three years ago, many wondered if Zcash would survive. Today, most are wondering about how big it will get. I’m not. We will win.
Combined two-week update from ZODL covering 27 April to 8 May 2026.
Zodl (formerly Zashi)
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Zodl 3.3.1 (iOS) hotfix shipped to resolve a Swap/Pay crash, closing out the 3.3 cycle on iOS.
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Zodl 3.4.0 is in final release QA on both platforms. Headline work: Keystone hardware wallet birthday-height detection so users can recover full transaction history on import, and accurate progress reporting during rewind/rescan operations.
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SDK 2.5.0 rewind/rescan plumbing fully landed on Swift and Android: rescanFromHeight and importAccount/importAccountByUfvk now route through rewindToChainState. Foundation for Resync Wallet and full-history discovery for imported accounts.
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Multi-server transaction submission merged into the Swift SDK: Broadcaster protocol extracted to fan a single transaction out to multiple lightwalletd nodes for reliability. Valar Group team contribution.
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Automatic and manual server selection in iOS review: the wallet can switch lightwalletd instances when one fails. Also Valar Group.
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Multi-Currency Conversion: designs locked, iOS and Android implementations both in review; seeded by a community PR.
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UIVK / UFVK export UI code complete, unlocking view-only setups, multisig vault flows, and portfolio-tracking integrations.
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Coinholder Polling stack connecting end-to-end. Three Swift SDK PRs merged for shielded-voting prerequisites: dependency catch-up to orchard 0.13 / pczt 0.6 / zcash_client_sqlite 0.20, a new Synchronizer.getTreeState(height:) API for height-anchored consumers, and fullyScannedHeight exposed on SynchronizerState. Error / edge-case designs and a Configurable Poll Data Source picker are now in design review. Nothing has shipped to users yet; landing the full stack and taking it through review is the focus.
Looking ahead at Mobile and Product:
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Ship Zodl 3.4.0 after final QA, then a 3.5.0 release candidate carrying the multi-server, server-switch, and multi-currency work.
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Take Coinholder Polling through code review on iOS and Android.
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Continue Multi-Account Support design refinement.
Zodl iOS Analytics
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Unique Installs: 41.4k (+0.8k)
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Total Downloads: 49.2k (+1.1k)
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App Store Rating: 4.9★ (no change)
Zodl Android Analytics
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Install Base: 15.3k (no material change)
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Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 49.5k (+0.7k)
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Play Store Rating: 4.26★ (no change)
Zcash Core (includes R&D)
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zcashd v6.12.2 shipped as the debut of the new bi-weekly Patch Tuesday cadence. Two consensus-divergence fixes via coordinated disclosure: a Sapling v4 valueBalanceSapling deserializer bug and a v5 hashBlockCommitments validation gap.
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zcashd v6.12.3 shipped as an emergency hotfix for CVE-2024-52911, a use-after-free in ConnectBlock script verification. Operators urged to upgrade.
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zcash_client_sqlite 0.20.0 shipped across librustzcash. Wallets get address-to-account lookup, control over which receivers go into a UA, a way to flag external address exposure, and rewinds that no longer drop received memos (a long-standing Sapling memo loss issue, finally closed). add_account was also refactored to use rewind_to_height for cleaner account-add behavior.
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Zallet alpha.4 progress. z_importkey / z_exportkey, the z_shieldcoinbase RPC, PIR proof validation FFI, and the zcash_voting Swift SDK dependency all reviewed and merged for the milestone. Alpha wallet now refuses to load an earlier alpha’s database after a breaking change and guides the user to start fresh.
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zcashd to Zallet migration cluster moving. --no-scan flag for migrate-zcashd-wallet merged; standalone pubkey and P2SH import support in review; parsing of watchs and cscript BDB records open; sapextfvk Sapling viewing-key import in draft; end-to-end integration test for zcashd key import into Zallet open.
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Rewind regression tests in flight: draft librustzcash #2333 targets incorrect spendability conditions in rewindToHeight, de-risking the broader Rewind propagation work that gates the next mobile SDK release.
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R&D and specs. ZIP 2005 (Orchard Quantum Recoverability) being finalized into a rigorous reduction-based proof. ZIP 248 (forward-compatible transaction format for NU7) and ZIP 316 Revision 2 continue. New filings this week: aligning ZIP 213’s anchor-selection advice with ZIP 315, and a friendlier error path for Keystone accounts signing an unintended PCZT. Zcash AI-skills repo opened to make AI-assisted Zcash development quicker and more reliable.
Looking ahead on Core:
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Cut a Zallet alpha.4 release candidate once the remaining sync-engine work lands: the put_blocks / store_decrypted_tx refactor, full-block scanning in zcash_client_backend, and migration to Zaino’s new ChainIndex trait.
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Continue zcashd migration correctness work and integration testing.
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Continued collaboration with Dev’s team on NU7 scope and performance.
Other
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Consensus Miami 2026 (May 5 to 7). I joined two sessions at Consensus this year:
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On Day 2 (May 6), I sat down for a CoinDesk Live studio interview.Clip.
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On Day 3 (May 7), I joined Fireside: Zcash, moderated by Mert Mumtaz (Helius), on quantum-recoverable wallets, the post-quantum timeline, scaling, and privacy positioning.
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Press clip: CoinDesk’s short news summary from the Fireside, leading on quantum-recoverable wallets and a 12 to 18 month timeline.
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Various meetings in Miami, including viaBTC engagement and feedback, will help us better engage with the mining community as a whole.
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Advanced engagement with U.S. and EU regulatory counsel to strengthen ZODL’s forward-looking regulatory positioning.
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Cypherpunk Policy Dinner: ZCG anchor-sponsorship request posted to the Zcash community forum. Side-event to the 2026 DC Privacy Summit; now recruiting additional Zcash-ecosystem sponsors.
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Zodl x Slope brand engagement underway; creative brief locked, moodboarding session next.
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Marketing Assistant offer extended; content-calendar planning and social-automation toolchain evaluation underway. Company info submitted to the DCG directory.
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We’re hiring. Open roles at jobs.ashbyhq.com/zodl.
Unlocking agency,
Onward.
