Honestly, just kind of freestyling here, but I’ll try to explain what I mean.
Aside from the ECC (and maybe the Zcash foundation?) I don’t think anyone really knows what shielded assets would look like until they are developed. What if all this time and energy is spent building them and no one uses them?
I guess my simplified version is that Zcash evolves into providing zk-snarks as a service (ZKaaS) like Starkware is doing, which any blockchain can plug into (ancillary grants such as: Elemental ZEC – UI Component Kit and Payment Processor would be beneficial for integrations), instead of trying to be an alternative to Bitcoin, ETH, etc. Then ZEC becomes more of a utility token rather than a payment coin upon the move to PoS (if that happens which it looks likely) and any chain that integrates said ZKaaS tech, must use this token for transactions (akin to gwei) and it goes into some type of community fund, which the rewards are disbursed to people holding it (not sure about tokenomics here, just spitballing).
In the current proposal, sure THORchain integrates Zcash, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the value of Zcash will increase (but this is a large thread and I May have missed where someone already addressed this).
Like everyone knows that zk-snarks are amazing and should be integrated into current L1s… just seems like maybe Zcash needs to think about being an L2 instead.