The Illusion of Continuity

Does Zcash have a chance to become the main cryptocurrency of the cypherpunks?
Against the backdrop of the correction of Bitcoin and most major altcoins, the price of Zcash (ZEC) began to rise sharply — a coin that has historically positioned itself as an anonymous cryptocurrency.

Let's recall how this project came about and who is behind it, as well as understand whether ZEC can replace Bitcoin as a successor to the economic ideas of cypherpunks.
What is Zcash

Zcash is a peer-to-peer decentralized blockchain system with open-source code focused on transaction privacy. It is based on the Zerocash protocol, which employs zero-knowledge proof technology (zk-SNARK). The currency unit is the cryptocurrency ZEC.

A zero-knowledge proof is a cryptographic protocol that allows one party (the prover) to confirm the truth of a statement to another party (the verifier), without revealing any additional information about that other party (neither the content nor the source from which the prover learned about the truthfulness).

The fundamental foundations of Zcash were laid in 2013 with the emergence of Zerocoin. A year later, Matthew Green, Eli Ben-Sasson, and a small group of researchers refined the project. In the technical document, they criticized the lack of privacy in the first cryptocurrency and proposed a new solution – Zerocash. The authors noted that the protocol could be implemented on top of "any distributed ledger system, such as Bitcoin."

In 2015, identifying himself as a cypherpunk, cybersecurity specialist Zooko Wilcox founded Electric Coin Co (ECC) to refine Zerocash and turn it into a fully decentralized system with a focus on privacy. A year later, the team introduced ZCash.

Before the launch of the mainnet, the developers conducted a so-called trusted initialization ceremony, during which each participant destroyed fragments of the private key and equipment for the security of the protocol.
In 2018, the procedure was repeated in preparation for network updates. About 90 members of the community and development teams participated, using various approaches to generate parameters.

While writing the material, I could not find any absolutely independent external audit confirming that all equipment and each key were indeed destroyed during the ceremonies. One of the participants, programmer Peter Todd, admitted:

"[…] you just have to trust me and five other participants […]. It is impossible to prove to a third party that we did not collude to keep the secret key."

In 2020, Forbes magazine ironically noted that the "cryptopunk" Wilcox commissioned a study from the RAND Corporation, which closely collaborates with the U.S. government, on the potential use of Zcash for illegal purposes. Furthermore, in 2022 it became known that the launch of the coin was participated by former NSA and CIA employee Edward Snowden.
Initially, the protocol included two types of addresses: transparent "t" addresses and private "z" addresses. Users could transfer ZEC:

from "t" to "t" — public transaction;
from "t" to "z" — secure transaction;
from "z" to "t" — unmasked transaction;
from "z" to "z" — private transaction.

In 2022, as part of the major update Network Upgrade 5, developers introduced unified addresses—a format that provides users with a single Zcash address compatible with all existing pools.
On October 31, 2025, ECC published a roadmap for Q4 2025. Among the key priorities are the implementation of one-time addresses for ZEC exchanges via the Near Intents protocol and the automatic generation of new addresses after receiving funds. This coincided with a growing interest in the private coin sector and the emergence of the narrative of Zcash as a potential "ideological successor" to Bitcoin.
New leader

At the end of May, the market capitalization of the privacy-focused coin sector exceeded $10 billion. According to CoinGecko, at the time of writing, this figure is already estimated at $26.6 billion.