Multicoin goes big on zcash as privacy trade returns

Multicoin Capital has built a “significant position” in zcash ($ZEC), Co-Founder and Managing Partner Tushar Jain said at Consensus Miami, linking the purchase to a view that private stores of value will matter more as finance moves on-chain.

Jain did not disclose the size of the position. He said bitcoin can withstand protocol-level freezes, but public ownership still leaves holders exposed if a government, creditor or other actor can connect coins to a person. By contrast, tokens with built-in privacy features, such as $ZEC, aim to mitigate that risk by obscuring transaction details and user identities.

“Multicoin has bought a significant position in Zcash to express that thesis,” Jain said during the panel.

The disclosure marks a shift for Multicoin, which argued in a 2019 essay that “privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in and of itself.”

The firm said then that users should not have to sell BTC or ETH for $ZEC to get privacy. It also said Zcash’s privacy design came with trade-offs in terms of auditability and programmability.

$ZEC is trading near $570, up about 122% over the past month and more than 1,500% in the past year, as privacy-focused cryptocurrencies have gained traction.

The move follows a broader reassessment of Zcash’s role in crypto privacy. Zcash works as an encrypted-money network, with CoinDesk Research citing 20% to 25% of circulating $ZEC held in encrypted addresses and about 30% of transactions involving the shielded pool. Grayscale has said $ZEC’s upside is tied to a repricing of financial privacy in an AI-driven world.

Jain’s comments came alongside a broader push to move privacy beyond standalone privacy coins. Vibhu Norby, chief product officer at the Solana Foundation, said Solana builders are working on a privacy product to preserve DeFi composability.

Solana already has confidential-transfer token infrastructure. However, its documentation notes that the ZK ElGamal program powering confidential token transactions is currently disabled on both mainnet and devnet during a security audit, rendering the confidential-transfer extension unavailable.

Zcash has also begun to cross into the Solana decentralised finance ecosystem. Zenrock’s wrapped $ZEC product on Solana crossed $15 million in volume late last year, linking Zcash privacy demand with Solana trading activity.

The panel framed privacy as a market-structure issue, not just a cypherpunk concern. Jain said public wallets expose funds and trades to surveillance and front-running. Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, said visible DeFi positions can be targeted and hunted in public markets.

Arik Galansky, chief product officer at Zama, said that fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) could make private shared state composable across DeFi. Zama says its protocol enables confidential smart contracts on Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols, with encrypted transaction inputs and state that are not visible to node operators.

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