The Zcash Moment - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026

You know, last year at this exact conference, when I had just landed in Singapore, I think Zcash was around 50 to 60 dollars. And I just posted a tweet about it, and then Naval obviously quote-tweeted saying, 'Zcash — Bitcoin is insurance against fiat, and Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin.' Pretty spicy. And then that's kind of when this whole run started. And now we're back again in Singapore, so no pressure. Let's start pretty simple. So, Balaji, you recently said, and I quote, 'It's Zcash or communism.' Can you elaborate?

Absolutely. So, okay, communism was both surveillance and seizure. And those actually went hand in hand. Which is to say, in the 20th century, the way that Lenin and the Bolsheviks could go and seize the farms, seize the land, is they had a list of all the farmers, the wealthy men, the guys who had two cows, the kulaks, and so on. So, they could send their guys house to house, and obviously later the communists also, you know, wiretapped everybody, the KGB, and so on and so forth. And today, what is that? That's like the total police state. That's like surveilling everything with AI. And if AI is this Panopticon, this, you know, Eye of Sauron, well, you have this Zcash shield that gives zero knowledge, right? Because AI can synthesize even the tiniest leak of information and put it all together into a picture that no one's ever had before. But Zcash is the shield that actually restores privacy underneath that, because it is itself zero knowledge about financial transactions, but it's also helped bootstrap the entire zero-knowledge space. And so, like everything digital eventually gets protected by zero knowledge. So, that's why it's Zcash or communism.

Cool. And Tyler, Cameron, one thing people might not know about you guys is that Gemini was actually the first exchange to have listed Zcash back in the day. And you guys also listed — or the first US-based — and you guys also supported shielded Zcash. That was a long time ago. Everybody here has been very early, but you guys were particularly early. What did you sort of see back then, and how has the thesis evolved until today?

And so, let's maybe double-click on that because some people think of Zcash and Bitcoin as complements. Some people think of them as hedges. Some people think — so, you choose your adjective. Balaji, how do you think Bitcoin and Zcash — do they coexist? Can they coexist?

Yeah, actually I've got a post coming on this, but Bitcoin's transparency is actually a feature in a certain sense, which is, you know, when President Bukele of El Salvador posted a Bitcoin address, anybody can verify how much BTC is at that address. By contrast, if somebody today was to post a video of how much gold there was in Fort Knox, because of AI, you wouldn't necessarily believe that there was that much gold in Fort Knox. And so, we've actually hit a flippening in a post-AI, post-crypto era, where digital gold is much more easy to remotely verify without trust than physical gold. So, in the West, where trust is collapsing, especially in the state, I believe that Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency of Western institutions in the post-fiat, post-AI, post-crypto era. But Zcash is the currency of Western individuals, which is to say it's the thing that people actually zip around and use to avoid surveillance. You know, with Western institutions, they need to prove their solvency to many people, but a Western individual doesn't need to do that. And that's a fundamental difference where, you know, crypto and the internet in general takes things to extremes. So, Bitcoin is now completely public and totally trackable, and Zcash is the opposite — completely, you know, private and untraceable, at least in the shielded pool.

Right. So, cash is centralized but private. Bitcoin, decentralized public. Zcash, decentralized private.

Well said.

Well said. I'm stealing that one. Well, actually, while the mic's on you guys, you released — you announced an ETF filing for Zcash. Now, you also have Cypherpunk, which is the treasury company. So, why don't you sort of tell us about how those two fit together, what's the intended outcome?

Actually, so maybe diving a little deeper on that. I'm not an expert on this. I just tweet things, but you guys actually work with institutions and actually even governments, Balaji. And so, how do they think, or how do you think it'll play out, this intersection of sort of privacy, but with the regulatory landscape? Like, how do those things play together?

So, that's a good question. I mean, so, you mentioned earlier — Tyler, Cameron mentioned — so, you know, in 2018, we listed Zcash at Coinbase. And actually, I think I had a blog post like the HTTPS/HTTP analogy, which we had talked about also. And I actually think that's a very important precedent, because in the '90s, there's something called the encryption wars. And really, arguably, we're in like the third or the fourth encryption wars, the crypto wars. And in the '90s, basically, crypto — or cryptography, rather — was considered a munition, like a weapon, by the US government, because it was like, you know, let's say it was classified, or what have you. It wasn't so — you weren't supposed to have — everybody wasn't supposed to have access to strong cryptography. So, there was a huge back and forth on that. And eventually the cryptographers won. And HTTPS was legal. And then by the early 2010s you had a site called https.cio.gov which actually said that every government website has to use HTTPS, okay? Which — and basically every website does nowadays. So, the point is that in about 13 years it went from banned to mandatory. Right?

So, wait, you mean the government got that wrong?

Yes, exactly. So, the government just completely flipped on that, right?

Shocking.

Yeah, and whenever anything is like that where it goes from like banned to mandatory or law of the land — like when something has to be banned, that actually usually means there's a lot of pressure for it, right? So, trying to keep it in a box, right? That doesn't necessarily mean it's good. It just means there's a lot of demand for it, right? So, trying to keep it in a box, and if it bursts out of the box it can often flip the whole society like this, right? And there's certain things that are almost like binary switches at the top of a program. You know, like light mode, dark mode will change the entire like sense of a site, for example, right? Is cryptography legal or not changes the entire, you know, like — or like are firearms legal or not? Is speech free or not? These kind of — those things, but they're not always necessarily good. If you could have, you know, tons of firearms, that can be bad in some ways. But point is those are very important switches at the top that change things. So, we got cryptography legal. And my view is like truly private money is — you know, what's funny is it's a back-end technology. So, it's not as visible in some ways as AI, right? Because AI is — I mean, AI is also a back-end technology, but it's also front-end technology to see crazy visuals on your screen, right? Just the truly private money at scale, arbitrary amounts, teleporting it anywhere, breaks many assumptions that, you know, like 20th century states have. And so I think that on the other hand, it's also going to be necessary for individuals to protect their privacy. So, there'll be an enormous demand for it. And net-net, where I think things land up on the other side is it is legal and governments actually move to a Dropbox or Google-style model. Should I explain that, the subscription state? Okay. All right, so just to digress a little bit. Basically, if you think about how Dropbox, Google, a lot of these companies work, they collect more than most governments do in quote tax revenue via subscription globally. Right? That's to say, they should have a subscription and you pay that subscription, and if you don't pay, then your digital services are shut off. And if you pay, then it comes back on, right? And Google and others make enormous amounts of money this way and they don't have a single tax collector around the world. They don't have to audit anybody. They just literally — you just pay whatever dollars per month, right? That is where things will ultimately go in my view. You're going to have the subscription state where every country you just pay like 2,000, 3,000, whatever amount of money flat fee per month and that's just your fee, right? And they don't have to go and get everything else. They just get a flat fee. That is ultimately where I think things land up by 2040-ish or thereabouts. There'll be a lot of churn between now and then.

Anything to add? In terms of, let's say, the general question to reiterate: how do you foresee privacy and private money specifically contrasting with certain governments all over the world and regulatory overreach, and especially in a world where AOC is president?

Oh my god.

And so I'm sure a lot of people in the audience, you know, maybe they've heard of Zcash, but I would say relatively speaking it's this super old coin that's actually new again and maybe there's sort of a renaissance behind it. So what exactly changed? Right, is it AI? Is it quantum scares? Is it the fact that ZK technology now scales, or some other combination?

It's a few things. First is like the technology did work 10 years ago, but it took a while for the proofs to work on mobile, for example, you know, to get rid of certain — like the setup ceremony, certain kinds of things. The cryptography had to evolve, number one. Number two is I think, you know, there were like — the usability of it had to evolve, like, you know, everything had to work on mobile. Apple had to make that easier for things to work. It had to get listed — privacy, like a lot of crypto regulations had to move forward and so on. There were a lot of things that were both technical and social and geopolitical even. And now I think it's hit its moment. Also, there's like talent had to come into this ecosystem and so on and so forth. Zcash had an interesting — I shouldn't say failure mode because now it succeeded. But, you know, most crypto projects if they fail, they fail because they go too capitalist, they market it too hard and, you know, it just does the Burj Khalifa formation, you know, like bing bing like this, right? Like the pump.fun kind of thing, right? And Zcash for a long time had the opposite problem of being too PhD, right? Too .edu, which I see often in biotech, right? Where it was not — like most things in crypto it's because they're too commercial. Zcash almost wasn't commercial enough in some ways. It didn't have the, you know, like — it was so pure, right? But that's good because it actually works. And so people were in it for a long time for more than money. And so now it is, you know, very good money.

Perhaps we should do a show of hands. How many people in the audience own Zcash? Well, that's not very private.

Man, you guys are very good at talking about it. I'm jealous. Well, let me ask you — let's maybe fast forward. Let's say, you know, our efforts and everybody's efforts in the ecosystem, going from Zashi to Visor wallet and all these other things, they work. What do you hope for it to look like in, let's say, 10 years, right? Or let's maybe assume the year's 2049, just for our sake.

2049. Well, 2049's — I mean, that's what, 23 years from now? 23 years from now — 23 years ago, I think Facebook's in its first year, Twitter didn't exist, and so on and so forth. Like Gmail didn't exist yet. 23 years is a long time. But in the future, well, you know, ZK will be there for everything. So, a few things. You're going to see ZKYC. So, the entire — this is a big thing, by the way. The entire premise behind KYC is, 'Oh, the government is protecting you from some criminals or something. Therefore, upload all your passport and other stuff.' But, almost certainly today the cost-benefit of uploading that stuff and creating this honeypot with millions and millions of, you know, passports and so on, in the age of AI, that's just guaranteed to eventually get hacked at some point, right? And which we saw with, you know, like various companies had their stuff. And the Pentagon's hacked over and over again. And those are the hacks that people only know about, right? So, the entire KYC model that's ostensibly meant to protect is actually endangering, right? And in general, no government should be able to force a collection of something they can't secure. If they're collecting things that are hacked on the back end, they're causing home invasions, they're causing identity thefts deterministically because there's a probability they're going to get hacked, right? So, now instead, if they have some legitimate public service thing, you do ZKYC. Example: you've got your passport, it's got a chip in it. It can prove that you're not North Korean or whatever, right? That you're one of X different nationalities that are allowed to use the service. And you can have the NFC reader in your phone interact with it and issue a ZK proof to the server, right? And that's actually going to be necessary for everything because AI makes it possible to fake scans and screenshots. So, everything will be like your passport that has a chip in it. It will need to be like that because the digital will be able to do a handshake and authenticate, and the physical will be able to be faked. So, then that means that due to AI and due to — you know, due to AI, everything that's not a chip is fake. With ZK, you can upload only the zero-knowledge proof, right? And so, we need a smart country, a far-sighted country to start with this, whether it's Estonia, Kazakhstan, maybe Singapore, El Salvador, UAE, a place like that to start with ZKYC and eliminate the honeypots. And then there'll be something like https.cio.gov, where it becomes mandatory to limit the honeypots because otherwise you will, you know, be collecting the data that you can't secure.

In France in particular.

Yeah.

What's that?

Yes.

So, using zero knowledge to authenticate yourself without handing over all your information seems inevitable.

Jesus.

Yeah. Actually, you know, we should make some AI videos on that. Like showing these crazy — or, you know, maybe I can make the AI videos on this, right? Like we have to show the impact of these crazy regulations because the impact is distal. You know, when a hack happens, this is one of the issues is we're starting to finally get the right sensors, you know, like Apple will tell you like, oh, this password looks like it was compromised or something like that, right? Because it's in — it's, you know, Have I Been Pwned? It interacts with those databases. But often what happens with a hack is you don't like feel anything. It's not like your phone vibrates or like there's a pain sensor. What happens is it's used like by somebody else like years down the line. And the worst is for these poor people, for example, who they have their addresses hacked, they can't move. That's like a huge pain because then, you know, right? Which is why, you know, in general, you can use remailer services. You know what those are?