Bitcoin has three problems no one wants to talk about.
First, it has been co-opted. What started as a cypherpunk experiment in financial sovereignty has become a line item in BlackRock's portfolio, a strategic reserve asset for the US government, and a political talking point. Nearly 9% of all BTC now sits in ETFs or government treasuries. The asset that was supposed to exist outside the system has been absorbed by it.
Second, it was never private. Every transaction, every balance, every send and receive is permanently etched on a public ledger for anyone to analyze. Pseudonymity is a weak substitute for privacy, and the chain analysis industry has spent a decade proving it.
Third, it may not survive the quantum era intact. Google's Willow chip put quantum computing back in the headlines, but Bitcoin Core's track record on proactive upgrades is glacial. For an asset positioning itself as a multi-generational store of value, "the developers will figure it out when they need to" is a significant asterisk.
None of this diminishes Bitcoin's role as the Schelling point for digital scarcity, the most liquid crypto asset, and the one with genuine institutional rails. But something does not add up.
The Privacy Bitcoin Was Supposed to Have
Bitcoin's lack of privacy was a concession.
In a 2010 Bitcointalk post, Satoshi wrote: "If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible." The cryptography to solve privacy simply did not exist yet. Zero-knowledge proofs were still impractical for real-world use.
The early Bitcoiners made a bet: privacy would come later as the math matured. But Bitcoin ossified. The community coalesced around "do not change Bitcoin" as a core value, treating any protocol modification as an existential threat. When the Zerocoin proposal came to Bitcoin Core in 2013, offering a cryptographically sound privacy layer, Bitcoin rejected it because the culture had already shifted toward risk-aversion. It meant abandoning the cypherpunk vision that animated Bitcoin's creation: money that could not be surveilled, censored, or controlled.
The solution was zero-knowledge proofs: cryptographic techniques that can prove a transaction is valid without revealing anything about it. This is the difference between encryption and obfuscation.
Monero hides transactions among 16 decoys, an approach that degrades as analysis techniques improve. Zcash proves a transaction exists somewhere in a Merkle tree of millions of notes without revealing which one — a mathematical guarantee that holds regardless of computing power. That distinction also matters for quantum: Zcash's anonymity is information-theoretically hidden, meaning there is nothing for a quantum computer to decrypt.
That vision moved to a different project.
Enter Zcash
In 2014, a team of cryptographers published the Zerocash paper showing how zk-SNARKs could prove a transaction valid without revealing sender, recipient, or amount. Zooko Wilcox, a cypherpunk mailing list veteran who had worked at DigiCash in the 1990s, assembled a team to build it. On October 28, 2016, the Zcash genesis block was mined.
Zcash has been live for almost nine years. Why now?
Three things changed that made it accessible for the average person.
In 2022, Halo eliminated the trusted setup. No ceremony, no toxic waste. The security is purely mathematical.
Then the wallets caught up. Zashi, along with hardware wallet support and the Near Intents integration, made Zcash functional on phones. Shielded transactions require significant computation; getting that to run smoothly on mobile hardware took years of cryptographic optimization.
Finally, the ZK layer disappeared behind the UX. You do not need to understand zero-knowledge proofs to use Zashi. You just use it like any other wallet — with your transactions private by default.
The October 2025 Near Intents integration was the unlock, giving users a frictionless way to move into ZEC from any chain without touching a centralized exchange. ZEC quickly became a top-5 asset by volume on the platform, often trailing only BTC, ETH, and major stablecoins. Over the past 30 days, ZEC has done $285M in volume on Near Intents, over 80% of BTC's $348M. A top-30 coin running neck-and-neck with the largest asset in crypto.
The shielded supply has grown from roughly 11% of circulating supply at the start of 2025 to approximately 30% today — more progress in one year than the previous eight.
Shielded ZEC tends to be stickier than exchange-held coins. These are users who have actively chosen privacy. As the shielded pool grows, liquid supply on the open market shrinks.
The Macro Moment
We are living through the most favorable backdrop for a sovereign store of value in a generation. Currency debasement is accelerating. Governments are getting more aggressive with financial surveillance, from CBDC pilots to asset seizure regimes. AI is about to supercharge the state's ability to monitor and control capital flows.
Gold has ripped to all-time highs. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is underperforming both the Nasdaq and gold, struggling to hold momentum despite ETF inflows and a friendly administration.
Maybe "digital gold" is not enough.
The Case for Zcash
Bitcoin will likely remain the dominant digital store of value for decades. But Bitcoin cannot and will not offer privacy. The transparency that enabled institutional adoption is the same transparency that makes it unsuitable for anyone whose threat model requires actual financial privacy.
Halo removed the need for any trusted ceremony. Orchard replaced the entire proof system with one that requires no trust assumptions. Tachyon, targeting the protocol level this year, is designed to bring throughput to Bitcoin-level without sacrificing privacy. And Zcash's ZK architecture already addresses quantum risk in ways Bitcoin's exposed public keys do not.
The SEC closed its investigation into the Zcash Foundation with no action. Grayscale filed for a spot ZEC ETF. Institutions are recognizing the cryptography works and that privacy is a feature with durable demand. The world is getting less private by the day. The asset engineered for that world just became usable.
Read the full report from @simononchain for a deep dive on Zcash's cryptographic architecture, competitive landscape, valuation frameworks, and more.