The Zcash Comeback: Why Insiders Say ZEC’s Price Run Isn’t a Fluke — And Just The Beginning

Summary

• Zcash’s comeback rests on a wallet people can finally use and connections to the wider crypto market. Zaki traces the first turnaround to summer–September 2025, when usable software and NEAR Intents made years of cryptographic work tangible; October’s price action followed. He identifies crypto Twitter and Bitcoiners as the clearest buyer constituencies, citing Bitcoin-heavy NEAR Intents flows, while stressing that Naval supported the project from its earliest days.
• The privacy thesis centers on holding indistinguishable money inside a shielded pool. Zaki’s strongest framing is “money at rest”: transactions can leak information, while coins left inside the pool reveal much less. Sudo favors the pool-wide anonymity set and the flexibility of transparent and shielded ZEC, but supports competing privacy approaches; wallet-level Tor addresses a separate layer of network exposure.
• The Orchard vulnerability was an existential inflation risk, and its resolution became a test of the ecosystem’s competence. Zaki says Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 helped uncover a four-year-old flaw permitting forged proofs and money creation. Ironwood combined formal verification with a new pool and migration: over 4 million ZEC moved, roughly 400,000 remained in Orchard, and Zaki says there is “no longer a credible story that the vulnerability was exploited.”
• Ironwood’s quantum safeguard is a path for dormant holders to recover funds after a future upgrade. Zcash is not fully quantum-safe today; extra wallet information is intended to let users migrate after the existing proof system is disabled, without meeting an advance deadline. Sudo calls full post-quantum security a “ridiculous amount of work,” and Zaki says it is unlikely to be a one-time transition.
• Mining economics and public equities give investors additional exposure to the revival. At the host’s roughly $1,300 ZEC reference price, Zaki estimates a Z15 Pro’s repayment period at “under ninety days,” with mining supply lagging the price increase. Cypherpunk, ticker CYPH, and Fortitude are pursuing that opportunity; higher prices and a growing Bitcoin constituency also make a proof-of-stake switch unlikely in his view.
• The next strategic choice is how much scarce security expertise goes toward payments scale versus shielded DeFi. Tachyon targets “Solana TPS,” while shielded assets already exist on testnet but face mainnet resistance; Zaki expects future shielded-protocol additions to require formal verification. Current block space is not saturated, and the direction remains contested—his “This is like Bitcoin 2016” analogy describes an ecosystem he considers early in its development.

Deep dive

1. Usability turns a struggling project into a credible comeback

• Zaki describes Zcash as “almost dead” for most of his board tenure: supporting it was a matter of mission rather than a convincing path forward. Sudo recalls joining ECC’s board in late 2023 and agreeing this was the “last shot”—“do or die.” Treasury constraints meant considering team cuts and financial trades to survive; renewed interest brings new talent and supports experimentation.
• The practical turning point came in summer–September 2025. A usable wallet—Zashi—working cryptography and NEAR Intents finally let someone say, “Install this app. I’ll send you a ZEC.” Insiders might have experienced incremental improvement; newcomers felt the magic of their first Bitcoin transfer. Zaki frames October’s rally as the reward for that work.
• Zaki also argues that Bitcoin’s issuance schedule makes the first two halvings “incredibly punishing” for price because so much supply reaches the market early. Projects that survive can eventually benefit. His comparison is to Bitcoin’s difficult 2009–2016 period, adding a supply-side explanation to the software improvements rather than attributing the rally solely to attention.
• Naval’s public enthusiasm was newly visible to the hosts, but Zaki says his support dated to day zero: probably the second investment commitment and the first money wired to ECC. For current buyers, Zaki points to crypto Twitter and Bitcoiners, with Bitcoin-heavy NEAR Intents flows as the observable evidence. He distinguishes that observation from whatever explanatory story people construct around it.

2. The privacy case starts with money at rest

• Zaki describes successive shielded pools—Sprout, Sapling, Orchard and now Ironwood—as places where coins cannot be distinguished from one another. His central distinction is holding money privately: public-chain balances carry address histories, while shielded holdings lose that visible linkage. “Money at rest” is his strongest privacy case; payments and interactions introduce opportunities to leak information.
• Sudo favors privacy based on the entire shielded pool, contrasting millions of transactions with approaches he describes as groups of fewer than 10. He also values having transparent and shielded ZEC available. But his broader position is pluralist: different transactions require different guarantees and trade-offs, so choosing one system should not mean forcing every transaction through the same privacy funnel.
• Chain privacy and network privacy are separate. Mobile wallets use indexing infrastructure, whose operators might otherwise associate requests with a phone’s IP address; Zodl’s Tor option helps obscure that connection, especially around transparent activity and pool entry or exit. Sudo links this capability to an earlier community grant for Arti, a Rust implementation of Tor. Zaki calls network privacy unfinished work.

3. New rails make ZEC accessible across crypto and banks

• A host’s acquisition question exposes the boundary: shielding ZEC does not erase everything disclosed while buying it. Zaki recalls access once depending heavily on Coinbase, Binance and Gemini. Today, users can buy bridged ZEC through Solana DEXs and use NEAR.com to move it onto native Zcash, substantially widening the routes into the asset.
• NEAR Intents also lets wallet users exchange ZEC for native Bitcoin, ETH and assets elsewhere. NEAR’s Confidential Intents offers a more private route through NEAR.com; Zaki thinks it will reach Zodl in the future. He additionally cites Hyperliquid purchases with a bridge back to Zcash and newly added THORChain support, emphasizing that several routes already carry substantial daily volume.
• For smaller purchases, Zaki highlights Peer.xyz: a peer-to-peer path from an ordinary bank or Venmo account into Zcash, using zero-knowledge proofs between the endpoints. His scale qualification matters: this is not how someone executes a multimillion-dollar purchase. Buying approximately $100 of ZEC with “really, really good privacy” is the concrete use case he gives.

4. An inflation bug exposes the cost of hidden balances

• Shielded Labs funded security researcher Taylor Hornby, ECC’s launch-era security lead, to perform AI-assisted audits. Zaki says Hornby reran standard queries as new models appeared, and Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 found the critical vulnerability upon its May release. Zaki places this discovery within a broader period of unusually frequent, multibillion-dollar vulnerabilities across crypto since December 2025.
• A “soundness” vulnerability sounds technical but carries the worst consequence: “You can forge a proof, and therefore you can create money from nothing.” The Orchard flaw had existed for four years. The concern was not an observed counterfeit balance; it was that someone might already have created enormous quantities of ZEC and gradually withdrawn them without detection.
• Zcash’s “turnstile,” introduced after an earlier inflation vulnerability associated with the original ceremony, counts coins entering and leaving each pool. Withdrawals cannot exceed cumulative deposits. But when legitimate users are net shielding, those inflows can leave room for an attacker to withdraw counterfeit coins without immediately breaching the limit. Patching the code therefore did not settle the historical supply question.
• The flaw was patched quietly before Zooko publicly explained its severity. Zaki estimates the absolute price trough at roughly a 60% decline lasting only minutes, settling into approximately a 25% drawdown; Sudo remembers the crisis around June. For Sudo, investors then had to assess whether serious teams could coordinate under pressure rather than merely benefit from a fashionable privacy narrative.

5. Ironwood turns the rescue into a test of supply integrity

• The response combined formal verification of the Orchard circuit with a new, cryptographically almost identical pool, Ironwood. Zaki says verification had previously been beyond the ecosystem’s financial means: “The same AI that had found the vulnerability gives us the ability to do this formal verification.” The plan was to freeze Orchard and get holders to migrate.
• Tachyon and Valor Group spearheaded the emergency development, drawing on contributors with experience across Zcash, Cosmos, Celestia and Penumbra. Zaki describes an approximately 30-day build and a roughly five-week emergency period, with Ironwood launching in July. Sudo says people effectively went without sleep for three weeks: teams that might have disagreed instead “swam in one direction.”
• Asked when the community can rule out money hiding in Orchard, Zaki cites over 4 million migrated ZEC and roughly 400,000 remaining—about 2% against approximately 17 million outstanding. His reasoning: either the flaw was not exploited, or legitimate holders would complain that withdrawals failed during migration. He says there is “no longer a credible story that the vulnerability was exploited.” Public observers can see pool totals and transaction counts, alongside transparent-wallet activity.

6. Quantum readiness starts with keeping dormant coins recoverable

• Zaki admits changing his mind: he did not consider quantum computing an immediate problem until December 2024, after which his assessment became, “This is an acute problem.” Other Zcash cryptographers had worried much earlier. A cryptographically capable quantum computer would make the current proof systems unsound, allowing the same kind of infinite-money creation, so those systems would have to be disabled.
• Ironwood adds wallet-level information intended to support migration after that shutdown, avoiding another compulsory migration window. Zaki’s example is deliberately vivid: a “ninja assassin tranq darts you,” you spend ten years in a coma, and awaken after Zcash has changed protocols. Unlocking the wallet should still let you recover your coins through the subsequent migration system.
• The host presses the distinction: Zcash is not fully quantum-safe today. Sudo says achieving that involves a “ridiculous amount of work” and unresolved choices; the practical accomplishment is making a future transition faster and easier. Zaki adds that post-quantum security is unlikely to be a one-time event. Sudo says holders could forget about Zcash and return in 30 years to find their ZEC accessible.

7. Mining and public equities reopen Zcash’s link to finance

• Sudo maps the core organizations: Zodl, previously ECC; the Zcash Foundation, which develops the Zebra full node and runs Zcon; Zcash Community Grants, with its grant treasury; and Shielded Labs, where Zooko works. Zodl makes the wallet and also works on protocol. Tachyon and Valor Group focus on scaling and jointly develop the alternative full node Zakura.
• Beyond that core sit longstanding international community groups, Vysor from the former Keplr team, Cake Wallet and Foundry Mining and its pool. Sudo emphasizes that local groups sustained Zcash through its weaker years and extend its reach beyond a Western-centered ecosystem. The renewed activity includes several independent wallet efforts rather than dependence on a single application.
• Zaki describes two former forms of isolation: separation from DeFi, addressed by cross-chain rails, and separation from conventional finance. Longstanding supporters including the Winklevoss twins and Barry Silbert at DCG helped bridge the latter. Cypherpunk, ticker CYPH, emerged through a reverse merger but, Zaki says, has less leverage built in than a typical DAT.
• Cypherpunk and listed miner Fortitude are pursuing mining profitability after ZEC’s price rose while mining supply remained small. Asked about economics at approximately $1,300 per ZEC, Zaki believes a Z15 Pro’s repayment time is “under ninety days.” He also says Cypherpunk wants to develop consumer products, making its ambitions broader than simply holding a treasury.

8. Coinholders express preferences while engineers implement consensus

• Zaki says proof of stake was considered when Zcash was a sub-$1bn proof-of-work chain facing listing and market-structure problems. Coinbase required either 200-something or 144 confirmations in his uncertain recollection, creating price distortions against Binance. “Number Go Up has largely fixed this problem” in the medium term; incoming Bitcoiners are also less receptive to proof of stake. He considers a switch unlikely soon.
• Since 2024, coinholder polls have run through a custom Cosmos chain, with participation available through wallets including Zashi and Vysor. These are “just preferences,” covering funding and protocol changes, without automatically upgrading the chain. ZCAP community polling, forum debate and the ZIP process contribute additional signals; node developers ultimately implement the agreed changes. Sudo characterizes decisions as predominantly engineering-driven.
• For November 5, shorter block times come with adjusted per-block issuance to preserve the supply and halving schedule; Sprout is also being sunset, a controversial change engineers strongly favored. Sudo dates retroactive funding to around 2024, replacing fixed allocations to ECC, the Foundation and ZCG. Sudo says most funding in the latest round went to new organizations—“a massive win.”

9. Argos and Relay fix neglected infrastructure

• Sudo calls their organization’s mandate fixing “potholes”: problems affecting everyone that few teams stop to address. Zaki traces one to ECC’s delayed wallet development, partly driven by regulatory concerns and hopes that community developers would provide it. “Ultimately, all of that was a mistake.” Between 2016 and 2023, even technical experts could acquire self-custodied ZEC that later proved difficult to access.
• Argos handles legacy wallet recovery and has rescued over $30 million in ZEC, according to Zaki. It began with one person asking for help and expanded across old wallet formats, with hands-on support for unusual cases. The November 5 Sprout shutdown makes recovery urgent for early holders who may have forgotten funds or cannot open their original wallets.
• Relay adapts Matt Corallo’s Bitcoin relay work to Zcash, aiming to make mining fairer by improving orphan rates among pools. Zaki says participating pools are starting to see lower rates. The network also supplies unusually detailed data, including per-pool orphan rates and probabilities of next-block transaction inclusion, which he expects to matter more as Zcash pursues higher throughput and lower latency.

10. Scaling competes with programmable money for scarce expertise

• The hosts want to do more with shielded ZEC, including DeFi. Zaki says the technical barrier to programmability has weakened; the constraint is now choosing where finite expertise, attention and security resources go. Tachyon’s shorthand is “Solana TPS,” with “Stripe-like transaction volume” as the ambition. He explicitly acknowledges that current block space is not saturated and demand does not yet require that capacity.
• Zcash Shielded Assets, or ZSAs, would provide ERC-20-like assets inside a shielded pool. They exist on testnet but face resistance to mainnet deployment; shielded DeFi primitives have also been proposed. After Ironwood, Zaki does not expect additions to the shielded protocol without formal verification. AI reduces its cost, but the supply of people qualified to perform it remains limited.
• One pressure point is an unnamed Zcash-affiliated NFT project that raised $20 million selling an NFT. “As far as we can tell,” Zaki says, its NFTs live on a single server; its supporters want ZSAs. Others advocate putting Zcash DeFi elsewhere, especially given existing activity on Solana, Hyperliquid and NEAR. Zaki expresses no strong preference on how that dispute should resolve.
• A host accepts specialization in money despite wanting native DeFi. Zaki places Zcash in “the middle thing” between Bitcoin’s ossification, which he calls a liability in the AI-plus-quantum era, and experimental chains; Bitcoin and Solana maximalists dispute that role. Sudo invites holders into the forums to shape the choice. Zaki’s closing frame is, “This is like Bitcoin 2016.”