Just a few years ago, Zcash looked almost dead. The treasury was tight depending on ZEC price, the team was shrinking, and their wallets were nearly unusable. Now the price is up 40x, Bitcoiners and Crypto Twitter are buying, and the insiders say this is just the beginning.
Sudo is Project Lead and Zaki Manian is Head of Engineering at Sovright, an organization building critical infrastructure for Zcash. Both have been on the ECC (Electric Coin Company) board through the darkest years of the project — and both chose to recommit full time when the energy started coming back.
In this new episode of The Edge Podcast, they walk through the full comeback story and why they believe we're at Bitcoin 2016 for ZEC..
A few details Nomatic and I found most interesting from our interview:
The Zodl wallet was a major unlock. For years, Zcash was technically brilliant but practically unusable without any easy way to store shielded ZEC. Zodl changed that. When Nomatic and I downloaded it before recording, we shielded our first ZEC in minutes. That friction to adoption is now gone.
Near Intents opened the DeFi floodgates. You can now buy ZEC on Solana DEXs, Base, Hyperliquid, BSC, or Thorchain and bridge it directly to a shielded Zcash wallet via Near Intents. Zaki mentioned the most observable onchain metric is Near Intents flows are very much from BTC to ZEC. Bitcoiners are the buyers.
The Ironwood bug was an existential crisis and Zcash passed the test. In May, Claude Opus 4.8 found a soundness vulnerability in the Orchard pool, the worst possible bug in a zero knowledge proof protocol, allowing creation of money from nothing. The community patched it in 30 days, launched a new pool called Ironwood, and migrated over four million coins. The price dropped 25% and came right back. The community banded together when it mattered most.
Your shielded ZEC is quantum safe for practical purposes. Zaki's test: "A ninja assassin tranq darts you, you go into a coma for ten years, you wake up, remember your PIN, and a quantum computer has come out. Have you lost your ZEC? No. That's all you have to know."
This is Bitcoin 2016 according to Zaki: "The story is not that the price went up. The story is all of this stuff. And the story is ongoing. Zcash is not over. This is just like actually the beginning of getting engaged."
Listen to the full interview on the latest Edge Podcast!
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🔗 Guest Links 🔗
► Sovright website: sovright.com
► Zodl wallet website:zodl.com
► Sovright on X: x.com/sovright_
► Sudo on X: x.com/sudo_ml
► Zaki on X: x.com/zmanian
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DISCLAIMER: Nothing said on The Edge Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice. Any views expressed by hosts or guests on the show are solely their opinions. Always do your own research. DeFi Dad, Nomatic, and guests may have positions in the assets or other matters discussed in this podcast.
