zcash

At the Consensus 2026 Miami conference, Zcash Open Development Lab CEO Josh Swihart announced that Zcash will launch a quantum recoverable wallet within a month and fully achieve post-quantum status within 12 to 18 months.Additionally, the independent scaling solution aims to achieve Mastercard/Visa-level throughput within a similar timeframe. On the user side, the Electric Coin Company's wallet has enabled cross-chain swaps from assets like BTC, SOL, and USDC to privacy ZEC through the integration of Near Intents, with approximately $600-700 million in funds flowing through this route since its launch. The Near ecosystem's 30-day processing volume is close to $800 million, with Ethereum, Solana, and Zcash being the main chains.Furthermore, the project community is discussing reducing the Zcash block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, and the cross-chain bridge with Solana and Hyperliquid has gone live. A voting feature for token holders will also be launched, serving as an opinion layer for the project's existing consensus model. Currently, Zcash's shielded pool accounts for 30% of the circulating supply, reaching an all-time high. Analysts believe that if this ratio continues to grow with rising prices, this round of increase will be driven by real adoption rather than mere speculation.

Tushar Jain, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, disclosed on social media that he has significantly increased his holdings in the privacy coin Zcash since the beginning of this year. Multicoin Capital pointed out that Zcash has returned to the "cypherpunk" ideals on which cryptocurrency was founded. The proposed wealth confiscation bill in California is a warning signal.As the trend of confiscating private wealth through political means continues to grow, individuals and institutions will increasingly seek private assets that can protect their interests. Additionally, while Bitcoin has censorship resistance and cannot be frozen or blocked from use, this does not prevent governments from confiscating known held assets through wealth taxes. Therefore, assets that truly possess privacy, censorship resistance, and seizure resistance have a clear product-market fit, and the related demand is accelerating. In their view, ZEC is the most direct vehicle to express this investment theme in the public market.

Barry Silbert, the founder of Grayscale's parent company Digital Currency Group (DCG), stated on the X platform that the market has yet to realize the global demand for decentralized digital value storage tools like Bitcoin, which could be as high as $2 trillion. At that time, the industry generally believed that Bitcoin itself was sufficiently private and could serve as a relatively private global value storage and transfer tool. However, as market awareness increases, the demand for privacy is being more clearly identified, and therefore privacy coins like Zcash will benefit from the "first-mover advantage."

The Zcash Foundation officially announced the release of Zebra version 4.4.0. This update fixes multiple consensus-level critical security vulnerabilities and strongly recommends that all node operators upgrade immediately. This includes a denial-of-service vulnerability that can cause new blocks to stop being discovered permanently, consensus divergences caused by errors in block signature operation (sigops) counting, anomalies in the processing of transparent transaction signature hashes, and risks of memory allocation amplification attacks.The Zcash Foundation stated that some of these vulnerabilities could cause Zebra nodes to accept blocks that are rejected by zcashd, leading to chain forks. If not updated in a timely manner, nodes may face risks such as interruption in block discovery, consensus forks, and resource consumption amplification, and there are currently no alternative mitigation solutions.

The Zcash Foundation tweeted that it has released version 4.3.1 of Zebra. This version includes several critical security fixes, and all node operators are advised to upgrade immediately. Additionally, this version introduces a Dockerized mining environment, automated checkpoint management, and several CI enhancement improvements.

According to Fortune, Bitcoin mining pool giant Foundry has officially launched a new mining pool for the privacy coin Zcash.Foundry CEO Mike Colyer stated that this move aims to respond to the growing demand from large institutions for privacy coins. Currently, the mining pool has attracted several institutional miners, with its output accounting for nearly one-third of the newly added Zcash on the entire network.Zcash achieves transaction privacy based on zero-knowledge proof technology while supporting selective disclosure to meet compliance requirements, making it more favored by institutions compared to its competitor Monero.Boosted by this news, the price of Zcash has increased by over 75% in the past 30 days, with a current market capitalization of approximately $6.3 billion. Foundry currently controls about 31% of the global Bitcoin hash rate, making it the largest Bitcoin mining pool operator in the world.

The Zcash core development team Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) founder Josh Swihart released the latest progress on Zcash, proposing a strategic direction centered on "post-quantum security, scalability, and user experience," and using the Artemis II lunar mission as a metaphor to emphasize achieving seemingly impossible goals through technological breakthroughs. The ZODL team stated that Zcash is entering the "Zcash IV" phase, which will build infrastructure similar to a "lunar base" to support the protocol and application security scaling to billions of users, while promoting the vision of privacy transactions without large-scale financial surveillance.On the product and technology front, ZODL continues to iterate, with its 3.3.x version now launched on iOS and Android, adding hardware wallet connection management, SDK upgrades, and multiple experience optimizations, while advancing key developments such as Keystone wallet functionality and address system upgrades (ZIP 316, UIVK/UFVK). Meanwhile, the Zcash core team has fixed multiple system issues and is advancing the development of the Zallet alpha version, while strengthening unified address standards and wallet interaction experiences, laying the groundwork for future scalability and performance improvements.In addition, ZODL disclosed that its application data continues to grow and participated in a stablecoin privacy summit to strengthen industry collaboration. However, due to upgrades in regulation and network restrictions, ZODL has temporarily removed its app from the Russian app store. The team emphasized that privacy is not an option but a fundamental need in the digital age, and will continue to accelerate delivery pace to promote the popularization of ZEC and ecological development in the future.

The privacy coin Zcash recently disclosed and fixed a critical security vulnerability that could have been exploited by malicious miners to transfer over 25,000 ZEC (approximately 6.5 million USD) from the deprecated Sprout privacy pool. Security researcher Alex "Scalar" Sol disclosed on March 23 that the vulnerability stemmed from the zcashd node skipping proof verification when processing transactions involving the Sprout pool.The official statement indicated that the vulnerability had existed since July 2020 but had not been actively exploited, and user funds remained safe at all times. The development team has released version 6.12.0 to complete the fix, and mainstream mining pools have completed the upgrade deployment within a few days. Additionally, the unaffected Zebra full node implementation has the capability to trigger a chain fork, providing extra protection in the event of exploitation.It was disclosed that although the Sprout pool closed to new deposits in November 2020, approximately 25,424 ZEC remained untransferred. Even if the vulnerability were exploited, Zcash's "turnstile" mechanism would prevent inflationary issuance, ensuring that the total supply would not be breached. This vulnerability was discovered with the assistance of AI, and the researcher will receive a total bounty of 200 ZEC (approximately 51,000 USD). It is worth noting that this is not the first time Zcash has encountered a significant vulnerability; as early as 2019, it had fixed a serious flaw that could lead to unlimited issuance.

F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun stated, "In 2015, I bought an apartment in Naklua, north of Pattaya, for 2,900 bitcoins. This was the first house I owned in my life. While many Chinese miners were still celebrating the early prosperity of the crypto market and had not yet faced the subsequent regulatory crackdown, I had already experienced true freedom for the first time in Pattaya. It was also here that I personally built and launched our Zcash mining pool.Yesterday, I sold this apartment for 7 bitcoins."

According to CoinDesk, Bitcoin mining pool operator Foundry Digital plans to launch a domestic Zcash mining pool in the U.S. next month, providing a mining platform built around compliance reviews, reporting standards, and operational controls for institutional and publicly traded company miners.Foundry CEO Mike Colyer stated that Zcash has evolved into an institutional-grade asset, but its mining infrastructure has not kept pace. He pointed out that institutional and publicly traded miners looking to gain exposure to Zcash previously lacked a compliance-specific infrastructure in the U.S. The mining pool will implement KYC and anti-money laundering compliance reviews for participants, with mining rewards distributed through transparent Zcash addresses rather than concealed ones, using a PPLNS payment model, and with no minimum hash rate threshold.Privacy coins have recently regained market attention, with ZEC rising over 670% in the past 12 months, XMR increasing by 72% during the same period, and DASH up by 51%. After Bitcoin's halving in 2024, mining profitability has tightened, with hash rate prices dropping from over $60 per PH to $30, prompting several large mining companies to explore other PoW networks to diversify their revenue sources. Colyer stated that this move is not primarily in response to declining Bitcoin profits, as Foundry's Bitcoin mining business remains solid, and the company is currently focused on both Bitcoin and Zcash chains.

According to official news, the Zcash Open Development Lab, founded by former Electric Coin Company CEO Josh Swihart, has completed over $25 million in funding. This round of financing was participated in by Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Maelstrom, Chapter One, Balaji Srinivasan, David Friedberg, Haseeb Qureshi, James Nicholas, and others.ECC launched its flagship Zcash wallet Zodl in 2024, setting a new standard for Zcash usability. Earlier this year, the original ECC team, including the wallet product team, joined ZODL as a whole to continue building the main user interface for Zcash, aiming to create Zodl as an open self-custody privacy financial platform, expanding ecosystem interoperability through collaboration, and driving privacy ZEC transactions into the global mainstream.The development of the Zcash protocol remains a core focus for ZODL. Engineers who previously designed, built, and maintained key systems for Zcash at ECC have joined ZODL, continuing to advance the protocol evolution with the same commitment and integrity, ensuring that technological advancements support real needs and drive Zcash's product-market fit.At the heart of the Zcash Open Development Lab is the development of an open, self-custodied private financial platform, aimed at expanding ecosystem interoperability through collaboration and pushing protected ZEC transactions into the global mainstream market.

According to market news, the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization performed as follows, with the top five gainers: Humanity Protocol (H) up 17.6%, current price $0.1695; River (RIVER) up 11.99%, current price $17.78; Kite (KITE) up 5.62%, current price $0.2834; MemeCore (M) up 4.51%, current price $1.49; Pi (PI) up 2.27%, current price $0.1979.The top five losers: Zcash (ZEC) down 8.6%, current price $212.49; Morpho (MORPHO) down 8.35%, current price $1.78; Ethena (ENA) down 7.4%, current price $0.1071; Pump.fun (PUMP) down 7.29%, current price $0.001906; Worldcoin (WLD) down 6.19%, current price $0.3867.

According to Cointelegraph, Dash is a Layer-1 blockchain protocol with privacy features, announcing the integration of Zcash's "Orchard" shielded pool into the Dash Evolution chain, which is a secondary layer on the L1 network that supports smart contract functionality.The integration will go live after the completion of a network security audit, expected to launch in March. Initially, the integration will support the basic transfer functionality of Zcash. The announcement stated that the transaction will transfer from one party to another on the Evolution chain, with subsequent upgrades adding Orchard's privacy features for tokenized real-world assets (RWA).

Gray's Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm stated at the Consensus Hong Kong conference:"If you have a business need to make large payments to vendors but don't want other companies or competitors to see this, which could expose your business information, you would want this transaction to remain private.Paying with Bitcoin doesn't necessarily achieve this because the blockchain is transparent. We've all seen accounts specifically tracking on-chain transactions on platform X. So you can imagine scenarios where this demand exists.And privacy-preserving tokens like Zcash are interesting because of 'selective disclosure'; you can choose to disclose information to a specific party, such as proving to the IRS that you have paid your taxes correctly, while maintaining privacy in everyday business or personal transactions.So, we think this is a very interesting currency. We already have a substantial Zcash trust, and we are working on converting it into an ETF, just like we have done for several other products."

According to The Block, Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of the American blockchain investment group Digital Currency Group (DCG), stated that in the coming years, 5% - 10% of Bitcoin funds will flow into privacy cryptocurrencies represented by Zcash.Silbert mentioned at the New York Bitcoin Investors Roundtable that while he is optimistic about Bitcoin as a core part of a diversified portfolio, he prefers to invest in transformative projects that have the potential for 100 to 1000 times returns. He believes that projects like Zcash and Bittenser could achieve 500 times growth. Silbert pointed out that the narrative of Bitcoin being seen as "anonymous cash" is no longer valid in the era of blockchain analytics companies like Chainalysis and Elliptic, and he is skeptical about Bitcoin's ability to achieve any privacy features. Notably, Grayscale, a subsidiary of DCG, offers a Zcash trust fund and is seeking to convert it into an ETF.

According to The Block, Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group, stated at the Bitcoin Investor Summit that 5% to 10% of Bitcoin's total supply will flow into privacy-focused cryptocurrencies in the coming years, and he believes that privacy coins are currently the most asymmetric return potential investment in the industry.Silbert expressed that he remains optimistic about Bitcoin as a core asset, but under the premise that the dollar does not fully collapse, Bitcoin no longer has the potential for 500x growth. He believes that projects like Zcash and the zero-knowledge proof-based privacy blockchain Bittensor have such potential and has allocated assets accordingly.He pointed out that the early narrative of Bitcoin as "anonymous cash" has become difficult to sustain after the widespread adoption of chain analysis technology, and it is also unlikely that the network will integrate native privacy features in the future. Silbert also mentioned that Zcash serves as a hedging tool against the potential technological risks that quantum computing may pose to Bitcoin.

Zcash (ZEC) has plummeted about 60% since its peak in November 2025, while Cypherpunk Technologies, the treasury company for the Zcash digital asset supported by the Winklevoss brothers, has stopped increasing its holdings since its last disclosure of purchasing ZEC on December 30 last year. The company was established in November 2025 and currently holds 290,062.67 ZEC, accounting for approximately 1.76% of the total supply, with a goal of holding 5%.Since the last purchase, the price of ZEC has dropped over 50%, currently trading at around $245. Based on an average purchase price of $334, Cypherpunk has an unrealized loss of $25.73 million, a decline of 26.5%. ZEC started its upward trend at the end of September last year, reaching as high as $700 in mid-November, but has since given back most of its gains.In contrast, other major DAOs are still actively increasing their holdings. Michael Saylor's Strategy has made 5 Bitcoin purchases in 2026, despite an unrealized loss of $4.36 billion. Tom Lee's BitMine has also made the same number of ETH purchases this year, with unrealized losses reaching $6 billion this week.

An independent core development team led by Zcash (ZEC) founder Zooko, Shielded Labs, announced that it has received a donation from Vitalik Buterin, aimed at supporting the development of Crosslink.It is reported that Crosslink enhances Zcash's existing proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism by adding a parallel finality layer, thereby preventing chain reorganization and rollback attacks. All block generation and economic activity still occur on the PoW chain, while the finality mechanism anchors blocks and provides stronger settlement guarantees. By ensuring that confirmed transactions are irreversible, Crosslink reduces the risk of double spending and increases the reliability of transaction settlements. In commenting on the donation, Vitalik stated, "Zcash is one of the most trusted cryptocurrency projects, always maintaining a focus on privacy. The Crosslink project by Shielded Labs will make Zcash more secure while reducing the security budget, thus supporting its long-term sustainability."