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The Zcash Community Grant Committee (ZCG) has announced that it has decided not to proceed with the proposal put forward on October 29, which aimed to allocate approximately 98,000 ZEC as future mining rewards. The committee stated that subsequent funding arrangements should be determined through Zcash's existing governance processes. ZCG currently automatically receives 8% of newly issued ZEC, amounting to about 144 coins per day, and the treasury size is sufficient to support expenditures for many years, although its funding model and accountability have recently sparked controversy within the community.According to the original proposal, the committee intended to allocate 36,200 ZEC from its treasury of approximately 91,500 ZEC to inject into a sustainable network mechanism to supplement miner block rewards, thereby reducing the expected income until the halving in 2028. Co-founder Sean Bowe, founder Zooko Wilcox, and developer Daira-Emma Hopwood have proposed various alternatives, such as terminating automatic grants, restructuring the use of funds, or focusing on promoting the use of ZEC, but none have been approved yet. Until the network upgrade changes the rules, ZCG will continue to receive approximately 144 ZEC daily.

Gemini has now launched new prediction markets for Zcash and Hyperliquid.

Helius, the infrastructure company for Solana, CEO Mert stated that Anthropic and Claude are using Zcash to apply similar cryptographic technology globally for the first time.According to Anthropic's official website, Anthropic open-sourced the research prototype FlashProve on November 2, utilizing zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARK) to achieve "provable reasoning," meaning that the model provider can prove that a certain response was indeed generated by the model it claims, without revealing the model weights.It is reported that the provider first publishes a commitment of the model weights offline, and then generates proofs for each request, which users can verify in seconds on a regular CPU. For example, with the 400 billion parameter Llama 4 Maverick, a single H100 can generate about 110 proofs per second for tokens, with each proof for a request of 1024 tokens being approximately 19 MB. This system was optimized with the participation of Claude, and its security properties are formally described using Lean.Anthropic stated that the current proof cost is about 70 to 95 times that of conventional inference GPU time, and it is still a research prototype, not yet ready for production use.

The current development fund model of Zcash (ZIP-1016) was proposed by joshs on the Zcash community forum, suggesting to terminate the Zcash development fund early before its scheduled expiration in November 2028.Currently, the development fund accounts for 20% of each block reward, with 12% going to the Coinholder Fund, which is distributed through retrospective funding voted on by coin holders every quarter; 8% goes to the Zcash Community Grant Committee (ZCG), composed of 5 elected community members. The total value of these two funds exceeds 300 million dollars.According to current rules, after the development fund expires, the entire block reward will belong to the miners. This proposal is a response to another proposal to "cancel the ZCG and retain the Coinholder Fund," which the poster believes is merely a compromise. The proposal is currently in the community discussion phase and has not yet entered the voting process.

Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of Gemini, tweeted that Zcash does not need to reinvent its governance mechanism. Stakeholder voting has been functioning in capital markets for hundreds of years, and holder voting is merely its on-chain form. Experimental governance is not the mission of Zcash; its mission is privacy.Cameron Winklevoss stated, "It is time to end ZCG and all the distractions and misaligned goals it brings." Previously, Cameron Winklevoss and his twin brother Tyler Winklevoss's Winklevoss Asset had submitted an S-1 registration statement for the Winklevoss Zcash ETF to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This ETF plans to directly hold ZEC, intends to list under the ticker WINK on Nasdaq, with an expense ratio of 0.25%, and Gemini Trust Company will act as the custodian.

The Euronext exchange suspended the Zcash ETP from the cryptocurrency asset management company CoinShares just hours after its launch on the Paris market. The reason for the suspension is that the central securities depository is unable to support the related settlement operations, which prevents CoinShares from participating in the Zcash ETP trading.A spokesperson for Euronext stated that the suspension is not related to regulation but is a settlement infrastructure issue; the ETP will remain frozen until the central securities depository can fully support standard settlement operations. Currently, related products from 21Shares, Virtune, and Valor are still trading in the European market. According to the page content, the EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation will come into full effect on July 1, 2027, prohibiting licensed cryptocurrency companies from handling privacy coins like Zcash and interacting with anonymous wallets.

The funding scale of the Zcash development grant program continues to expand, with the current net funding estimated at approximately 125 million USD, far exceeding current expenditure needs. Sean Bowe, co-founder of Zcash and current head of Tachyon, has proposed a draft suggesting the termination of the current 8% block reward allocated to ZCG in a future network upgrade.There are currently four proposals in the community regarding the development funding mechanism, which involve terminating ZCG grants, canceling the entire development fund grant mechanism, or gradually reducing the grant proportion to zero. Supporters believe that the current mechanism allows funds to accumulate as the price of ZEC rises, but ZCG is not directly controlled by holders; opponents worry that cutting development funds without alternative solutions may impact the subsequent development and maintenance of the protocol. All proposals are still in the discussion stage and have not yet been finalized.

According to Cointelegraph, exchange operator Euronext suspended CoinShares' Zcash exchange-traded product (ETP) on Wednesday, which was originally scheduled to be listed on the Euronext Paris exchange that day. Euronext announced that the CoinShares Zcash ETP (ticker ZCSH) is suspended from trading effective immediately until further notice, and the announcement did not specify the exact reason.Flavio Bornancin-Tomasella, Euronext's Media and Communications Manager, told Cointelegraph that the product will remain suspended until the Central Securities Depository (CSD) can fully support standard settlement operations. He stated that this measure is strictly limited to the scope of "operational settlement requirements."This suspension prevented the product from becoming the fourth ETP based on Zcash in Europe. Earlier this year, 21Shares, Virtune, and Valor launched their Zcash ETPs. CoinShares announced its plans to list the product on Euronext Paris earlier on Wednesday, and as of the time of publication, it had not responded to Cointelegraph's request for comment.

According to Cointelegraph, Jordi Visser, founder of Visser Labs, former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, and Chief Investment Officer at Weiss, stated in the Cointelegraph podcast "Trade Secrets" that crypto assets may yield better returns from the AI boom than AI stocks. He believes that AI entities are creating demand for crypto payments and tokenized assets, stating, "Without AI, the crypto market will not emerge from this bull market."Visser compared AI entities to the App Store or smartphones in the crypto industry, where users can instruct the entities to execute financial operations such as trades on their behalf. He also cautioned about risks: if AI experiences a severe downturn and drags down the stock market, it could cause the crypto market to retest previous lows, but it would not end the bull market. He mentioned that the "fireworks show" of AI has ended, not the end of AI itself, and investors should lower their expectations for returns from AI stocks.In terms of holdings, as of August, Visser only held Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, and then began buying a broader range of tokens, with Bitcoin still being his largest position. He is watching Dogecoin as a signal of retail enthusiasm returning and maintains an equally weighted index composed of 42 tokens and 4 publicly traded stocks, which has outperformed Bitcoin since June. He has also positioned himself in privacy themes, believing that Zcash and Monero align with his investment logic.

Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe released a ZIP draft proposing to stop the automatic allocation of block subsidies to Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) and redirect the original 8% subsidy share to the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM).The draft states that ZCG currently holds approximately 91,452.98 ZEC, valued at about 125 million dollars, and the existing funds are sufficient to continue supporting related activities without the need for ongoing block subsidies. If the proposal takes effect, from the specified activation height, the original 8% share will be allocated to the NSM fund until the original funds expire; the existing assets and governance rules of ZCG will remain unchanged.

Asset management company Grayscale reported that the privacy cryptocurrency Zcash celebrates its tenth anniversary this week. The report states that Zcash's ability to continuously innovate partly stems from allocating 20% of block rewards for developer funding, with the protocol evolving from the Sprout pool to Sapling and Orchard.Launched in 2026, the Ironwood pool adds quantum-resistant addresses and formal verification to address code vulnerabilities. Grayscale expressed hope and expectation that Zcash will continue to expand transaction capacity and prepare for post-quantum era and AI-driven cybersecurity risks, which may require ongoing funding from multiple parties and efficient allocation.

Zcash Labs announced the launch of the JavaScript SDK Zcash JS, which developers can use to build web, server, and mobile applications based on Zcash. The official statement mentions that applications that can be developed include wallets, light clients, and data dashboards.Zcash Labs stated that it will continue to maintain Zcash JS and build supporting tools and code library ecosystems around it. Project documentation and the GitHub code repository have been made publicly available.

According to SoSoValue data, yesterday (Eastern Time October 22), the total net inflow for the US ZEC and NEAR spot ETFs was $14.7439 million, with ZEC at $14.2308 million and NEAR at $0.5131 million.For ZEC, only the Zcash ETF (ZCSH) recorded a net inflow of $14.2308 million, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $183 million. As of the time of writing, the total net asset value of the ZEC spot ETF is $681 million, with a net asset ratio of 3.31%, and a historical cumulative net inflow of $183 million.For NEAR, only the Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR) recorded a net inflow of $0.5131 million, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $87.2702 million. As of the time of writing, the total net asset value of the NEAR spot ETF is $85.1683 million, with a net asset ratio of 1.33%, and a historical cumulative net inflow of $87.2702 million.

According to SoSoValue data, yesterday (Eastern Time October 21), the total net inflow for the U.S. ZEC and NEAR spot ETFs was $15.1766 million and $830.7 thousand respectively, totaling a net inflow of $16.0073 million.For ZEC, only the Zcash ETF (ZCSH) recorded a net inflow of $15.1766 million on that day, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $169 million. As of the time of writing, the total net asset value of the ZEC spot ETF is $745 million, with a net asset ratio of 3.26%, and a historical cumulative net inflow of $169 million.For NEAR, only the Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR) recorded a net inflow of $830.7 thousand on that day, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $86.7571 million. As of the time of writing, the total net asset value of the NEAR spot ETF is $91.3767 million, with a net asset ratio of 1.32%, and a historical cumulative net inflow of $86.7571 million.

Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini co-founders Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss stated in an interview that Bitcoin is a public, auditable blockchain where anyone can see transaction records, and this openness makes it unsuitable for privacy needs. Privacy coin Zcash is used for private transactions and payments, so the two can coexist. They mentioned that ideally, privacy should be built into Bitcoin, but currently, it is a practical model of Bitcoin storage and Zcash transactions. Bitcoin remains important, but the privacy exposure risk of public chains is greater in the face of artificial intelligence.The Winklevoss brothers stated that Zcash complements the missing privacy features of Bitcoin, serving as a privacy-focused Bitcoin, and the privacy value of ZEC has yet to be fully realized. If it reaches 10% of Bitcoin's market value, ZEC could rise fivefold, easily surpassing $5,000. They are optimistic about ZEC's price performance in the next 5 to 10 years, especially as privacy demand increases, and they described Zcash as a financial privacy protection tool in the era of artificial intelligence, an antidote against AI-driven surveillance and tyranny, and a hedge against artificial intelligence or quantum threats in the cryptocurrency space.

The core feature of the NU7 upgrade is to reduce the time interval between Zcash blocks from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. This change means that the time required to wait for three transaction confirmations will be shortened from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds. This upgrade has been running on Zcash's test network and is awaiting final integration into the node software.In addition to improving speed, NU7 will also bring two important adjustments: first, 60% of the fees collected from each block will be removed from circulation, and these tokens will begin to be returned to miners around February 2031. Second, Zcash's original Sprout privacy system will be completely shut down, so all funds still held in that system must be transferred out before the upgrade is activated; otherwise, they will become unusable.

According to SoSoValue data, the total net inflow for the ZEC spot ETF in the United States was $1.6074 million, while the total net outflow for the NEAR spot ETF was $2.5389 million.For ZEC, only the Zcash ETF (ZCSH) recorded a net inflow of $1.6074 million, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $154 million. As of the time of writing, the total net asset value of the ZEC spot ETF was $650 million, with a net asset ratio of 3.08%, and a historical cumulative net inflow of $154 million.For NEAR, only the Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR) recorded a net outflow of $2.5389 million, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $85.9264 million. As of the time of writing, the total net asset value of the NEAR spot ETF was $83.0221 million, with a net asset ratio of 1.27%, and a historical cumulative net inflow of $85.9264 million.

Zakura has announced an experimental network layer P2Pv2 for Zcash nodes, intended to replace the old protocol inherited from Bitcoin. This layer combines high-throughput networking, resource control, and a consensus engine tested for properties, allowing developers to add services without permission. Zakura states that approximately 50,000 transactions per second require each full node to continuously receive about 100MB/s of block data, while the 25-second block of NU7 can carry a maximum of 2MB, with existing network throughput differing by more than a thousand times from this rate. Tachyon can reduce the proof after entering the block, but the network still needs to propagate a large number of individual transactions.P2Pv2 replaces the protocol stack from about a decade ago with protocols that can be optimized for latency, throughput, or robustness, allowing a secure connection to carry multiple independent services. The transport layer uses its own zakura-quic, based on quinn-proto, utilizing QUIC and TLS 1.3, and authenticating peers with Ed25519 node identity. Related changes remove the dependency on Iroh, allowing nodes to configure socket buffers, flow control windows, timers, and connection admission before the TLS handshake. The new transport directly connects to peer addresses without using relays, external address lookups, automatic port mapping, or QUIC NAT traversal. Nodes sign identities, addresses, protocol scopes, and service IDs, allowing clients to find peers based on specific services.The independent component zakura-header-chain verifies block headers and retains competing branches in a directed acyclic graph, selecting the best qualified chain. Block synchronization schedules requests based on the delivery rates measured by each peer, and a verified commitment tree is used to skip the reconstruction of Sapling, Orchard, and Ironwood trees for each block. Currently, the Mainnet still defaults to the old P2P stack, while the Testnet and Regtest run dual stacks by default, with the native protocol version being p2p-v2/3. Zakura notes that P2Pv2 still has known denial-of-service risks and has not yet become a hardened trust boundary; production hardening, resource control, and block relay protocols are still in progress.

The Zakura team, which operates the Zcash network, released a technical article stating that they plan to allocate a unique viewing key for each ZEC exchange completed through NEAR Intents, in order to block future quantum computers from exploiting public refund addresses to piece together user payment histories. NEAR Intents supports cross-chain token exchanges, and when users exchange the privacy coin ZEC for USDC, the service will publish a Zcash address for the user on the NEAR public blockchain, which will be used to return any unused ZEC.The Zcash address contains a public key generated by the wallet's viewing key, which cannot be reverse-engineered by ordinary computers, but large quantum computers running Shor's algorithm could theoretically deduce the key from the address. Zcash wallets can generate multiple seemingly unrelated addresses, but they typically share the same viewing key. Once an attacker cracks it, they can associate all payments received by the account and read the amounts and notes. Zakura's solution allocates a unique viewing key for each exchange, while the spending key remains in the user's main account. Even if the future refund address is compromised, the attacker would only be able to see payments related to that specific exchange.This design also addresses a practical issue: wallets conducting hundreds of exchanges would generate hundreds of keys, requiring each key to scan the entire Zcash chain during backup recovery. Zakura's solution is a privately queryable database that uses private information retrieval technology, so when the wallet inquires about the refund destination, the database will not know the address being queried. Zakura claims that wallets built on its open-source library (including Vizor) will be able to add this feature in the coming weeks, and hardware wallets will follow after firmware support, ahead of the January quantum-resistant payment target set by Zcash developers this month.