Zcash: I THINK the Worst is Over
Zcash has been an utter disaster for the better part of two years. Yesterday, the ECC said the company is exiting "Emergency Mode." Let's take a look at how we got here and where ZEC may be going.
I’ve made it no secret that I’m a major advocate for privacy-focused cryptocurrencies in the past. I obviously have an affinity for Zcash (ZEC-USD), which is not something that has helped my crypto investment portfolio all that much. ZEC has essentially been in meltdown mode for a good 18 months or so. There are a lot of reasons for this:
Down with everything due to Crypto Winter
Block space attack in 2022
Core developer company layoffs earlier this year
Privacy-focused crypto being generally out of favor
Unprofitable mining hurting network security
It has been a bloodbath for ZEC longs to say the least. Back in May, I wrote that the “bottom was in” on Seeking Alpha. ZEC was $37 per coin at the time. Today, it’s about $27. Evidently, the bottom was not in. One of the things that I loved about running BlockChain Reaction (my crypto-only research service through SA) for the year that I did was that it opened my eyes to just how awful some of these protocols, coins, and tokenomic structures in the crypto industry truly can actually be. I explored literally hundreds of these coins looking for diamonds in the rough and it is admittedly a harder thing to do than I anticipated when I launched BCR. Most of them just don’t solve a real problem.
For all of the problems ZEC bulls have endured the last two years, the Zcash protocol is not a project that fails to solve a problem. Namely the lack of privacy on base layer chains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. For the remainder of this article, I’ll detail why I think 4 or the 5 issues listed above are effectively now solved or close to solved. I’ll also detail what I think the last major hurdle is.
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