Behind Zcash's surge, the privacy track begins to revive

This is the 2229th original issue of Plain Language Blockchain
Author | Clow
Produced by | Plain Language Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)

In the 1970s, the most expensive service at Swiss banks was not the safe deposit box, but silence.

An account number, a ledger that wouldn’t be casually flipped through. Back then, privacy wasn’t a geek term, nor was it a prop in crime movies; it was the most costly part of financial services.

Decades later, the on-chain world has swung to the other extreme. Every transfer, every address, every settlement is like hanging on a glass wall. You think you’re using future finance, but your wallet balance is more transparent than your social circle.

So, Zcash has once again been pulled out by the market.

In the first week of May, ZEC surged from just over $400 to above $600. What’s truly worth watching isn’t how fierce this candlestick is, but why the market suddenly is willing to pay again for “financial privacy.”

01

No one laughs at privacy coins anymore

A few years ago, privacy coins were basically considered trouble by exchanges.

Monero, Zcash, Dash—these old projects were often lumped into the same regulatory category. Exchanges found them hard to explain, market makers disliked their liquidity awkwardness, institutions found their compliance stories hard to tell. At their worst, privacy coins looked like a bunch of veterans from the last cycle—technically tough, with outdated narratives, and hard to price.

Zcash was especially awkward. It’s not that it lacked technology; on the contrary, it was one of the earliest projects to bring zk-SNARKs into production networks. Later, Ethereum Layer-2 made zero-knowledge proofs a hot topic, but Zcash had already integrated this into a real, functioning currency system back in 2016.

The problem is, the market doesn’t reward “I was right early.” It only rewards “someone is willing to pay for it now.”

The initial surge of ZEC was like regular capital rebalancing. Robinhood opened retail access, and short covering added fuel. Around May 7, a large holder closed their ZEC short position, losing about $6.54 million.

But if it was just short covering, the story wouldn’t go far.

What’s more interesting is that ZEC, from the “privacy coin” label that’s a bit dirty, has been squeezed out a new narrative: an auditable privacy asset.

02

Privacy isn’t about hiding

There’s a bizarre default setting in the crypto industry: openness equals honesty.

So fund wallets are under surveillance, project transfers are watched, and traders who just withdrew coins from exchanges are immediately analyzed by on-chain bots writing little essays. Industry rhetoric talks about sovereignty assets, but in practice, it’s all about constant surveillance.

Transparency isn’t a sin, but full transparency is frightening.

EU DAC8 takes effect on January 1, 2026. Simply put, crypto asset service providers will need to start collecting and reporting transaction data of EU residents, with the first reporting cycle in 2027.

This affects not just tax evaders. A cross-border procurement company might not want competitors to see how much they pay suppliers; a DAO might not want every salary, bonus, OTC deal to be exposed; journalists, dissidents, survivors of domestic violence—none of them want their fund paths to be public.

In the past, privacy coins were always portrayed as “tools for bad guys.” That’s lazy.

Cash can be used by bad guys, lawyers’ letters can be used by bad guys, offshore companies can be used by bad guys. The real issue isn’t the tool itself, but who has the right to know your entire financial life.

As on-chain monitoring becomes cheaper, privacy becomes more valuable.

03

Zcash’s win isn’t anonymity

The biggest difference between Zcash and Monero isn’t who’s more “hidden,” but who’s easier to explain to regulators.

Monero enforces privacy—every transaction defaults to concealment. The advantage is strong homogeneity; the downside is straightforward: exchanges and custodians don’t know how to clearly explain it to regulators.

Zcash takes a different approach. It has transparent addresses and shielded addresses. Shielded transactions hide sender, receiver, amount, and memo, while still allowing the network to verify transaction validity. More importantly, Zcash has viewing keys: you can give viewing permissions to auditors, accountants, or compliance officers without exposing the entire ledger to everyone.

This is the key to Zcash’s narrative turnaround this round.

It’s not “don’t mind me.”

It’s “what should be seen, you see; what shouldn’t, don’t ask.”

This isn’t perfect for regulators, nor is it pure enough for cypherpunks. But for institutional funds, it’s an intermediate ground for discussion. The financial world has never lacked absolute stances; what it needs are solutions that can be signed off, audited, custodial, and explained to the board.

04

Institutions buy the pipeline

Zcash’s renewed attention is driven by two real catalysts: capital and infrastructure.

First, Multicoin. Around May 6, Tushar Jain, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, said they started building a ZEC position as early as February 2026. The reason is straightforward: Bitcoin is resistant to censorship, but a public ledger doesn’t solve the “wealth visibility” problem. The market will seek truly private, censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant assets again.

This narrative may not be fully proven, but it’s enough to make funds take another look.

Then there’s ZODL. In March 2026, Zcash Open Development Lab announced over $25 million in seed funding, with Paradigm, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and others on the list. More important than the money is ZODL’s wallet product Zodl, formerly Zashi. It pushes shielded transactions from a cryptographic feature into a “clickable button” for ordinary users.

Foundry’s entry is along the same lines. In April, it officially launched an institutional-grade Zcash mining pool, with several institutional miners already connected, capturing about 30% of the Zcash network hash rate.

When an asset enters the institutional view, it often starts not from a white paper, but from custody, mining pools, accounting, auditing, and legal memos.

It’s boring, but valuable.

05

Don’t treat roadmaps as deliveries

However, Zcash’s story isn’t just a comeback anthem. The most overestimated part is often the roadmap.

Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSA) is indeed an important direction. It aims to enable Zcash not only to transfer ZEC but also to issue and transfer custom assets within shielded pools. If realized, privacy USD, privacy tokens, and privacy on-chain assets could all have room for imagination.

But it remains a roadmap, not a delivered product. At least for now, it can’t support the judgment that “shielded USDC is already in large-scale circulation.”

Project Tachyon is similar. It envisions a lighter, faster Zcash that also considers post-quantum privacy, but it’s still an upgrade proposal requiring community approval to activate. PoS is the same; ECC discussed transitioning from PoW to PoS as early as 2023, but that’s not a finalized staking product yet.

This cold water must be poured. Because the current ZEC price reflects not “completed products,” but “the possibility that, as privacy becomes a necessity again, Zcash could become a compliant gateway.”

The potential is valuable, but it can also retreat.

The most attractive thing about Zcash today isn’t that it suddenly turned from an old coin into a new one. Quite the opposite, its appeal lies in the fact that a long-neglected old project has encountered an increasingly new problem.

06

Summary

On-chain surveillance is getting stronger, tax data is becoming more centralized, AI analysis tools make address profiling cheaper, faster, and more detailed. In this environment, privacy is no longer a fringe hobby; it’s becoming a form of financial protection.

Of course, risks are also evident. If major jurisdictions expand restrictions on privacy coins again, ZEC will be the first to suffer; delays in ZSA, Tachyon, or PoS routes could exhaust their narratives; and the May price rally itself carries elements of short covering and emotional chasing, not a straightforward fundamental improvement.

But the market has already sent a signal: when everyone is used to going naked, those who can put the curtains back will suddenly become very important.

Zcash is not the end.

It’s just bringing a long-standing issue back to the table: in a world where all financial actions can be machine-scanned, how much of our privacy remains unobserved?

Privacy is becoming valuable again.