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Josh Swihart has spent the better part of a decade on Zcash, first at the Electric Coin Company (ECC), i.e. the closest thing the project has to an Ethereum Foundation, and now at the spun-out 
Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL).
His read on today's stakes for crypto is stark: without private money on the internet, we will veer into economic dystopia.
That said, Zcash is awake again and heating up once more after years in the doldrums, primed anew for the demands of the times. The share of ZEC sitting in private storage has roughly tripled since early 2024, and the price has followed suit. Even Naval has chimed in with a new framing that 
Bitcoin hedges the dollar while Zcash hedges Bitcoin.
So why now, what's the actual mechanisms that are key here, and can a coin built for the shadows scale smoothly into the light? That's the terrain of Swihart's convo with David Hoffman in the latest Bankless podcast episode.
Bankless
Why Zcash woke up
Swihart chalked it up to an aligning of the stars.
In other words, some of the big recent drivers have been 1) growing doubts about Bitcoin's financialization, 2) looming post-quantum fears (i.e. the worry that tomorrow's quantum computers crack today's encryption), and 3) AI supercharging surveillance threats in general.
Yet the real breakthrough atop these trends was product-driven, Swihart said. Once the ZODL team's flagship wallet, Zashi, since renamed to Zodl, made shielded ZEC easy to move in and out of via one-click swaps, adoption has gone literally vertical.
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William M. Peaster
The shielded pool surge
As some readers will recall, Zcash has two address types: transparent ones that work just like Bitcoin (i.e. fully public) and shielded ones protected by zero-knowledge encryption (i.e. private).
Moving coins into the underlying shielded pool grows Zcash's "anonymity set," which is just the formal way of saying the crowd of transactions yours gets to hide among. For his part, Swihart hailed the size of this pool as his single most important KPI, to which David added that it was also a de facto political statement: a live measure of how many people care enough about privacy to trade away easy liquidity for it.
The foundational dynamic here is reflexive, too, as Swihart pointed out. Put otherwise, as ZEC leaves exchanges to get shielded, there's less floating around to sell, and the price has tended to benefit accordingly.
David Hoffman
Cypherpunk, or 401(k)?
Zcash now has NASDAQ- and NYSE-listed treasury vehicles and a pending 
Grayscale ETF, i.e. the same sort of institutional onramps that some argue sanded the rebel edge off Bitcoin.
Do these mainstream forays betray Zcash's cypherpunk roots? Swihart's reframing here made for the heart of the conversation. His thrust was that the real cypherpunk spirit was never about shadowy-super-coder cosplaying, but rather about making privacy normal and accessible to everyone.
Still, Swihart noted the Zcash network won't bend just to become something everyone parks in a retirement account. On the flip side, continuing the current roadmap, like going post-quantum and scaling to billions, won't be trivial. Yet in crypto we need all the earnest privacy advances we can get right now, so it's great to see Zcash making strides.
This second wind is right on time, at least if the current state of the world is any indication.
