Exactly. The evidence is out in the open and very obvious. Have a look at active wallet counts, transaction values, transaction counts, coin valuation trends, DeFi/ NFT TVL, etc etc of well established 2014-2016 era projects.
The successful equation appears to be whatever these projects have been up to: Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Monero, arguably Ethereum Classic & Bitcoin Cash (this list is without even getting into all of the post 2018 altcoin projects that have also grossly outperformed Zcash, with an even shorter timeline)
The most common shared trait is that their native coins all have obvious upward valuation trends. Sure people who bought near the 2017 or 2021 tops have suffered losses, but over the long timeframe any disciplined buyers are sitting on comfortable gains today (even as we continue to stagnate through a bear market). The coin’s ability to sustain value is the necessary pre-condition for any users to then evolve into transactors (whether spending or accepting the coins). Zcash ZEC has not been able to sustain value, which is why so few users have ever evolved into transactors, instead they become discouraged sellers who aren’t retained in the ecosystem.
Ethereum and ETH classic serve users with stablecoins and Defi. The others are Bitcoin/ Bitcoin-like value transaction networks.
If ZEC cannot preserve and grow user value, then it will never succeed because Store (and growth) of Value is the predominant user aspiration in crypto. Its a romantic dream to be on the chase to pick the right demographics/ regions, and cater a boutique ZEC use case for them… its illogical and wasteful.
As JGX has reiterated many times, if we are taking Zcash serious it needs to have a clearly defined narrative. Zcash coins are rare, optionally private digital assets that have the chance to provide Bitcoin like returns in the future. The other Zcash network feature should be a private, permissionless, fast, free Z-stablecoin money layer (first operating as a 1:1 USD peg, and potentially in the future adding additional fiats). Zcash wallets should work and be simple, allowing for storage or transaction with ZEC or Z-stablecoins.
There needs to be no vision quest, conducting intimate user interviews with a tiny and arbitrary selection of current Zcashers from now. It is irrational to try and pull future directions from our current user base - they’re niche, they’re biased, and clearly they are not representative of the ~average individual from the crypto native or crypto adjacent demographics. These efforts have been happening at ECC for years, and the results (poor) already speak for themselves.