$ZEC

Zcash’s privacy protocol is completely outdated and has no practical value. Its Orchard privacy pool has just exposed a critical vulnerability that allows ZEC to be infinitely forged, and privacy transactions must be manually enabled. The shielded transaction share is only about 30%, with the vast majority of transactions remaining publicly transparent—privacy is effectively a sham. In stablecoin transfers and multi-chain scenarios, it is virtually ignored: stablecoins like USDC have never been widely deployed on the ZEC chain, and cross-chain privacy is still blank. In reality, the volume of private transactions is far lower than Monero’s, and it also falls short of BCH in terms of broader payment use cases and community recognition.

By contrast, next-generation privacy protocols have achieved all-round breakthroughs: Aztec provides programmable privacy smart contracts and the Noir language on Ethereum; Starknet STRK20 supports converting any ERC-20 into a privacy asset; Midnight launched on the Cardano mainnet in March 2026, using a dual-state architecture aimed at enterprises; Firo achieves private stablecoins through the Lelantus Spark protocol; Zano by default hides the amount and type, and supports wrapped assets; pERC-20 introduces encrypted memos and is compatible with compliance blacklists; Privacy Pools strikes a balance between on-chain privacy and regulation. These protocols have expanded privacy from a single transfer primitive into the programmable, compliant asset and application layers—while ZEC still clings to a backward architecture, with neither ecosystem innovation nor real-world adoption, fully left behind by the times.