Bankless
Zcash Founder on Privacy, AI, and How ZEC is 'Encrypted Bitcoin' | Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
26 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What challenges has Zcash faced since its inception?
Okay, so here's the crazy guru metaphysical thing, okay? Remember, this was if you had the ETH and you thought to yourself, what I want is to have my ETH over in this new wallet that's unlinked. The AI read your mind. It knows you want that. Or it will eventually. It will eventually figure out that that's what you wanted, okay?
Chapter 2: What factors contributed to Zcash's recent institutional adoption?
But what if you said this? What I want is to convert half of my ETH into SEC.
Bankless Nation, we are joined by Zuko, the creator of Zcash and the former CEO of the Electric Coin Company. That's the foundation behind Zcash.
Chapter 3: How do cypherpunk values influence the future of crypto?
Zuko, welcome back to Bankless. Thanks. Good to be back. Suka, you've been here for well over a decade in this crypto industry, building Zcash for 13 plus years. Has the crypto movement, have we achieved our goals in 2026? We've been around for a while. Have we succeeded?
No.
Chapter 4: Can the cypherpunks win in the current crypto landscape?
Jeez, that's a leading question. You didn't expect any positive answer to that. Honestly, now that you say that, it makes me kind of depressed and negative. It reminds me of Linux. Like back when you were tykes and I was young, the Linux was a movement to empower people and free everyone. And then nowadays, it's just like some software that Google uses to run its computers.
The Linux movement died, went away, faded. What happened there?
Yeah, it failed to help users and failed to scale up in the number of users it was helping. And software engineers will scowl and object when I say this because they still run Linux, but everyone else who's not software engineers is not being helped very much by Linux today. So I can imagine negatively, let's get out of the negativity after this one.
Yeah, crypto could be like that, you know, 10, 15 years from now, it could be something that a couple of megacorporations like cost optimized by using cryptocurrency or blockchain or something and The other 99.9% of the people are not empowered or benefited in any way by it. That would suck.
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Chapter 5: What unique features does Zcash offer compared to Bitcoin?
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Chapter 6: How does the Zcash Dev Fund impact its development?
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Chapter 7: What governance challenges is Zcash currently facing?
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Well, Zuko, let's talk about then the gains we've made over the last decade or so or since you started Zcash and even before. So, I mean, what has succeeded in crypto? What are you excited about? What are you surprised by in terms of our progress?
I like technology. I'm a technologist. And what I most love about crypto so far is that it's funded a whole bunch of really good technology, like zero-knowledge proofs that Zcash pioneered. But there's a whole bunch of people, especially in the Ethereum ecosystem, that have taken that very far. And that's because of crypto funding and organizations. See what I'm saying?
As opposed to like DARPA and universities and mega corporations, they wouldn't have developed any of that in the last 10 years without crypto.
So the cryptography has been the big win in your mind.
Yeah, and that's damning it with faint praise, right? That's like an improved Linux kernel, which is not actually changing the world for the better.
I mean, some people, Zuko, they'll look at price charts and they'll say, we've made tremendous progress on that. So the world has a non-sovereign store of value now that is digital, that is not gold. They'll look at Bitcoin price charts, for instance, and they'll call that a win. I think lately there's been a lot of themes around
crypto or blockchain's ability to kind of transform Wall Street, for instance. So we're talking about a theme of last year has been suit coiners that are starting to build, you know, all these tokenized types of real world assets. on top of blockchains. And that feels maybe like a win.
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Chapter 8: Is ZEC a viable store of value in the crypto market?
They're going to make an operating system that does everything really well for them and preserves their freedom and their privacy and their ability to choose for themselves and so on. And then they're going to teach everyone else in the world how to use Linux. I tried. I was part of that movement a long time ago. Both of those movements.
So I think crypto is in a pretty similar space currently in terms of, and what I mainly think of it, following Moxie again, is it's all about UX. It's all about onboarding and cognitive load to use it. Like how many new things do you need to learn to use it and to make it do what you want it to do? And if that is like zero, that's good UX.
So we have to make tools. This is kind of the product, the tool side, the UX side, almost the number of users that we touch is now kind of the benchmark.
Yeah, let me tell another story from someone else that I admire. It was Brian Armstrong. This was several years ago during a time when Zcash was like down only technology, number go down. As long as anyone could remember, it had been number go down. But Brian was always a good supporter and gave me the time to talk to me anyway. And we were talking about regulatory risks.
This was under the Biden administration when we had the conversation. What do we do? How do we protect users from having their tools taken away by the government? I really appreciate when people give me simple one sentence, one simple sentence answers that I remember. He said, have at least 100 million users.
That was his strategy to solve regulatory risk, which is the same number that Moxie Myland Spike used in that other talk years earlier. Hmm.
When you think about the cypherpunk vision and when you apply that to crypto, Zuko, what sort of use cases come to mind? And I guess from observing crypto for so long, there are lots of cypherpunk things that have been hoped to be achieved by crypto natives. Most notably is kind of money. And that, you know, Bitcoin doing that, money, the idea of payments, that sort of thing.
Ethereum sort of expanded a little bit on that money vision with decentralized finance, but that's still finance. It's still to do with money. Recently, Vitalik has been talking more and trying to resurrect the whole Web3 thing, I would say. Maybe not using that term, but the idea of a decentralized parallel internet where you have storage, and you have completely decentralized compute.
How far do you think the crypto cypherpunk vision goes? Because there are some, I think, in the space who would say, hey, the main thing that crypto does, it's a ledger. It's about money. It's about debits and credits. Maybe you can extend that to DeFi, but it just sort of stops there.
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