I understand that more people are paying attention to Zcash now So let me say this again: Zcash is basically Bitcoin with the latest version of the Zerocash protocol, which was proposed for Bitcoin in 2013 and took over a decade to refine. The biggest challenge, and the reason why Zcash didn’t really take off since launching in 2016, was user experience and the scalability of ZK SNARKs. You see, Zcash started from having the state of the art privacy. Then backtracked to make it usable on everyday devices. Until a couple of years ago, it was technically impossible to even have shielded Zcash transactions on a mobile wallet – due to the computation requirements and the hardware you needed to run the software on. But now there’s @zashi_app and @EdgeWallet and hopefully many more wallets that make it easy to send and receive shielded transactions on the go. Thanks to these optimizations, Zcash is finally ready for mass adoption. It finally became what it was supposed to be in 2016 when it launched as an altcoin. This is why this bull market is different and the chartists are wrong when they compare with past performance. They don’t know the technical details and the history of the project. They don’t understand that real adoption is happening via DeFi integrations, with users swapping into shielded ZEC to break the link between their trades. The future is also bright, with Tachyon scaling the protocol to billions of users without any privacy tradeoffs. Shielded assets are on the roadmap too. Zcash is the best research team in all of crypto. Started out with something purely theoretical (Zero Knowledge proofs) and made them practical. Refined their code to the point that it can be mass adopted. And through this journey, remained 100% compatible with Bitcoin – which means that even today, Bitcoin can just soft fork the latest version of the Zcash protocol. Thanks to Zcash Bitcoin currently has ZK rollups (Citrea, Alpen), shielded client side validation, ZK coins, and the Zside drivechain. Thanks to Zcash, Ethereum could build Tornado Cash, Railgun, ZK STARKs & all sorts of rollups. Of course, it’s the price that makes more people pay attention. But the problem is that these folks don’t have the proper context and didn’t spend more than 10 minutes doing some research about what Zcash is and what it does. Some may say that Zcash is overvalued and finds itself in a bubble today. I disagree: Zcash is the most influential privacy project in the space and deserves to be a top 10 crypto coin. It’s much more useful than Ripple, Cardano & Dogecoin combined. It’s more ambitious in scope than Monero and Litecoin. And I believe it’s only getting started. If you’re new here, I strongly recommend that you listen to my interviews with @zooko and @ebfull – if anything, spend a few hours of your time to learn about what you’re investing in before you put any money into this project. This goes way beyond speculation and NGU fantasies. It’s about the future that we want for this space and how we wish Bitcoin turned out to be.