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Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain said the firm’s recent investment in Zcash was driven by a convergence of stronger market traction, improving infrastructure and a broader return to crypto’s privacy roots. Speaking on the latest Bankless podcast released May 19, Jain argued that Zcash has moved from a “left for dead” asset into a credible private store-of-value contender.
Jain said Multicoin had watched Zcash for years without being convinced. The asset, in his view, had long suffered from weak attention, poor usability and limited evidence that privacy demand could translate into durable market interest. That changed after Zcash rallied sharply, corrected, and still retained both community intensity and a higher market baseline than in prior years.
Multicoin’s Zcash Thesis
“When I see something like that, I always pause and wonder, is this some manufactured thing? Is it sustainable? Is there a real groundswell of support here?” Jain said. “And when you see the price do what it did last year and then what we saw was it pulled back very significantly. As I saw it pull back, what I saw was one, the people who were talking about it were still excited about it. Two, the place where it pulled back on the chart actually demonstrated much better attention and strength than where the thing was trading for years and years before that.”
That, Jain said, helped get Multicoin “over the line.” The firm interpreted the correction not as a failed narrative, but as a stress test. Zcash, he argued, retained the “key people” supporting it and showed that interest in the asset was not merely a short-lived speculative burst.
The discussion, which also featured Helius Labs founder Mert Mumtaz, framed Zcash as a possible answer to what both guests described as crypto’s unfinished privacy problem. Mumtaz, who said he began looking more seriously at Zcash in early 2024 after reviewing its scaling plans, argued that privacy had become “the major thing that crypto has forgotten,” particularly as institutional adoption pushes more financial activity onto transparent rails.
Jain’s core investment thesis is not that Zcash becomes a high-throughput payments network. He described the asset’s real market as the store-of-value sector, where social coordination, brand and perceived monetary properties matter as much as raw technical capacity. In that context, he argued, Zcash is beginning to form a Schelling point around private wealth storage.
“The market that Zcash is competing for is the store of value market,” Jain said. “Like that’s the job that it does is it’s for storing value and it is far more scalable than Bitcoin and so enables more transactions and such. But the core value prop is store of value.”
Jain compared that dynamic to Bitcoin’s early reflexivity: more people treating an asset as a store of value makes it a stronger candidate for that role. He said Zcash now has the potential to benefit from a similar feedback loop, particularly if it remains the leading privacy asset by market cap, volume, attention and other relevant metrics.
The guests also contrasted Zcash with Monero. Mumtaz argued that Monero’s ring-signature design relies on decoys, while Zcash’s shielded model offers a stronger cryptographic foundation. Jain emphasized a separate but related point: brand. In his telling, Zcash is positioned less as a tool for illicit use and more as “privacy for the normal person.”
“Zcash is not for that,” Jain said, referring to Monero’s darker market associations. “Zcash is for the regular person who says, no, I care about my privacy, not because I’m doing anything illegal or I have anything to hide, but because I don’t need to reveal all of my financial transaction history to every single person with whom I interact.”
That positioning, he argued, could make Zcash more legible to institutions and a broader group of users. The asset’s transparent mode may allow institutional exposure, while improved wallet infrastructure and decentralized access routes could push more activity into the shielded pool over time.
The podcast also addressed the bear case directly: investors have repeatedly overestimated demand for privacy, and prior privacy narratives have often ended poorly. Jain acknowledged that Zcash had previously been “hugely inflationary,” difficult to use, weakly marketed and dependent on centralized exchanges for acquisition. But he said the last 18 months changed the setup, citing better wallet infrastructure, more attention, and a macro backdrop that has made private stores of value more salient.
Mumtaz added that upcoming catalysts could matter for adoption, including Ledger support for shielded ZEC, a rising shielded pool share of roughly 31% to 32%, planned block-time reductions from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, and further work on quantum resistance.
At press time, ZEC traded at $584.82.
English (US)