Zcash Founder on Privacy, AI, and How ZEC is ’Encrypted Bitcoin’ | Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox joins Bankless to argue that privacy is back on the critical path—because AI turns chain surveillance into pattern-recognition at scale—and that the real bottleneck for cypherpunk tools has always been UX and onboarding.

We dig into Zcash’s “encrypted Bitcoin” meme, the dev fund’s evolving design (and why it helped Zcash survive), recent ZEC momentum, and the wallet/intents stack that makes private spending actually usable.

Plus: why “value at rest” beats “value in flight,” what it would take for Ethereum to get meaningful privacy, and the debate over strengthening the 21M cap (and whether Zcash should add new security mechanisms without losing the meme).

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:46 What Failed

3:58 What Succeeded

5:04 Institutional Adoption

6:53 Areas Neglected

10:51 The Cypherpunk Vision

18:53 Can The Cypherpunks Win?

23:19 Crypto’s Path to Success

27:44 Crypto vs Linux

30:39 AI Cypherpunks?

33:05 Optimism

35:49 AI Surveillance

37:10 Zcash

43:02 Zcash Dev Fund

51:45 Zashi Governance Drama

56:32 Zcash Privacy Practices

1:15:56 AI Privacy Consequences

1:22:31 Is Zec a Store of Value

1:26:01 Encrypted Bitcoin?

1:29:01 Ethereum Privacy & Anoma

1:33:14 Closing & Disclaimers

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RESOURCES

Zooko

https://x.com/zooko

Zcash

https://z.cash/

Zashi

https://z.cash/ecosystem/zashi-wallet/

Anoma

https://anoma.net/

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:

https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠