S17 E28: Josh Swihart on Zcash's Comeback & the Orchard Bug

Twenty months ago, Josh Swihart came on this show to talk about Zcash at its darkest hour: Binance was threatening delisting over low volume, the price was hovering around $30, and there was genuine uncertainty about whether the project could even keep the lights on. Fast forward to today, and the man leading the effort is somehow one of the hot shots of this industry: Zcash flirts with the top 10 on CoinMarketCap, the biggest names in the space are talking about it, and everyone wants to work on it. The project has been reborn. So I had to bring Josh back and ask him: what’s the secret?

His answer set the tone for the entire episode: “Zcash is in a class of its own, which is good, but it also means that from time to time it’s self-defeating.” It’s so good that it makes mistakes which cost it momentum for a while… and then everything gets rebuilt, stronger each time. Stumble, fall, get back up. That’s evolution. The resolve is there, the technology keeps hardening, and the community keeps growing.

Because this was a livestream, we did something only Zcash can do natively: viewers sent shielded notes with their questions (some with actual ZEC attached: thank you, Chewbacca, for the 0.1 ZEC), which got priority in the queue. And Chewbacca’s question went straight to the elephant in the room: the run on the Orchard pool, with over 3 million ZEC withdrawing to transparent addresses ahead of the Ironwood upgrade.

Can key people like Josh and Zooko alleviate it? Should there be a “pass the torch”-style Twitter campaign? Josh’s answer was principled: people need to make their own decisions about their own money. There are no heuristics indicating any exploit; he personally keeps his funds in the Orchard pool; others prefer the trade-off of moving to transparent, and he respects both. No marketing campaign to tell people what to do with their coins.

For those living under a rock, we defined the terms. Zcash is a code fork of Bitcoin (Bitcoin plus zero-knowledge cryptography) which gives you two options: a transparent address (Bitcoin UTXO style) and a shielded address protected by cryptography. Every time the cryptography upgrades, you get a new shielded pool: Sprout was first (very slow), Sapling came next (much more performant), and Orchard is the current one. A vulnerability in Orchard was discovered by security researcher Taylor Hornby, and it has since been patched.

And for the Bitcoiners wondering why this is on a Bitcoin podcast: Zcash exists because of the 2013 Zerocoin paper and the Zerocash improvement that followed: cryptographers who wanted to bring privacy to Bitcoin itself. The original plan was always to prove this technology and mature it for Bitcoin. Bitcoin lost interest along the way (I still hope it’s temporary), but Zcash kept grinding: from the 2016 trusted setup ceremony of six compute nodes, to a much larger second ceremony, to Sean Bowe’s Halo 2 in 2021 which removed the trusted setup entirely. Scalability is still being conquered (syncing a node took me three and a half days) but that’s what the upcoming upgrades are for.

So how do you go from a Binance delisting threat to near the top 10? Josh calls it a convergence of things. Some of it just takes time: in 2016 you couldn’t create a zero-knowledge proof on a mobile device; that changed in 2018, but then all the surrounding infrastructure had to be built. There was also a chicken-and-egg problem: hardware wallets won’t add shielded support if the price is down and there’s no market demand.

Good wallets like Edge and Unstoppable added support anyway. But Josh was vocal back in 2023 that deeper changes were needed: governance was effectively a 2-of-2 multisig between the leaders of two organizations, and organizations had their addresses embedded into the chain, receiving dev funds directly from the protocol… which he considers inappropriate for a public good and a source of perverse incentives, since you get paid regardless of performance.

So they killed the governance structure, killed the funding structure, and got opinionated about user experience. Josh left ECC in mid-2023, came back as CEO at the end of the year, and refocused: one team can’t do everything without crowding everyone else out. Researcher Peacemonger’s user interviews had shown a negative NPS score (literally nobody in the community was happy with the UX) so the 2024 goal was radical in its modesty: make 100 people happy using Zcash as intended, as money to store and spend, not as a speculative asset.

They shipped Zashi (now the ZODL wallet), added Keystone hardware support, and integrated NEAR Intents so anyone could turn Bitcoin into shielded ZEC in a couple of clicks. The shielded pool went from ~11% of circulating ZEC at the start of 2024 to over 30% before the recent incident. KOLs started paying attention, Sean Bowe published a roadmap to scale the protocol to billions, and the macro environment (the Canadian truckers, asset seizures, the need for mobility and self-custody) did the rest. Everything became reflexive.

A word for the sponsors who saw this coming: Cake Wallet has been sponsoring this show specifically to give people Zcash, and CEO Vik Sharma sends his regards. Vik was admittedly frustrated that his team’s Orchard integration (with NEAR Intents, no less) got little recognition from Zcash organizations at launch… but as Josh acknowledged, it landed in the middle of ECC’s internal governance battle and corporate fork. “Vik, thank you for doing it.”

For a while, Cake genuinely brought peace among privacy coins: the Monero guys calmed down when their favorite wallet added Zcash: until recently, when they came back swinging. Josh is gracious about it: Monero is a cousin he discovered back in 2016, there’s been mudslinging on both sides, but the “Zionist coin” style FUD and Reddit-style trolling coming out of that community has tainted things for a lot of Zcashers.

That led us to one of my favorite segments: the chat’s claim that Zcash “doesn’t feel cypherpunk” because it had institutional investors and a built-in reward structure… and the Monero camp’s corollary that if nobody goes to jail, the privacy isn’t real. I offered the Bitcoin parallel: Samourai Wallet vs. Wasabi Wallet. Same technology category, radically different framing. Samourai told Russian oligarchs to come launder their bitcoin; their devs went to jail because of their speech. Wasabi said privacy is for everyone, including grandmas, and its devs still roam free.

Josh was blunt: the claim that cypherpunk means criminal is ridiculous. The whole cypherpunk fight (the crypto wars, Eric Hughes, the tradition out of which Satoshi emerged) was about making privacy normal and normalized through encryption for everyone, not about building tools for criminals. That framing got co-opted by people who in some cases weren’t even alive during the crypto wars. Zcash engages with regulators and policymakers, the technology is completely neutral, the cryptography is best-in-class, and the goal is privacy for billions of people.

The neutrality point matters technically, too. In my previous interview with someone from Railgun, the unsaid difference was that Railgun works with a blockchain analysis firm to ensure coins entering its anonymity pool are “clean.” Zcash has no such gate: you are part of the system no matter where your coins came from, and that’s the value proposition. Fungibility (one ZEC is one ZEC) is non-negotiable for money. I wish we had more of this on Bitcoin.

Among the shielded notes: will zemaps.com (a globe mapping retail locations that natively accept ZEC, now including Flexa’s network) be integrated into the Zodl wallet? Maybe… Josh hasn’t had time to look deeply, but imagine opening your wallet, thinking “I’m hungry,” and seeing where you can buy lunch with Zcash nearby. Through Flexa you can already spend shielded ZEC at Chipotle, Ulta Beauty, Regal Cinemas, Barnes & Noble and more.

Which reminded me of Vegas a month ago: I had lunch at Chipotle every single day, paid with Zcash at $300, watched it run to $600, and I have no regrets: it felt infinitely better than tapping a card like the other Bitcoiners. Josh one-upped me: he bought a Ford F-150, half in cash and half in Zcash, and by his own admission way overpaid for that truck.

Mid-show we ran the 0.1 ZEC giveaway (courtesy of Cake Wallet): Josh wrote a number from 1 to 100 on paper, the chat got one guess each. After a small magic trick involving his virtual background swallowing the paper, the number was revealed: 23. Nobody guessed it. The closest were Nakamoto 666 with 22 and Rip me a good one with 24… so Josh ruled they should both win, splitting the prize. Winners were told to drop their (preferably shielded) Zcash address in their YouTube channel description. Democracy in action.

Then came the question I loved most: “I’ve noticed that Zcash is lied about a TON. Why?” Josh’s theory: the internet is full of zero-sum thinkers, while he believes in a world of abundance. This is all a grand experiment, and we need more privacy options in more places, not fewer… especially when the alternative is stablecoins, which he describes as outsourced CBDCs, completely under government control. Zcash people have never been crypto bros; the mission is private money. But people whose incentives are tied to their bags believe they must win and everyone else must lose: so narratives get manufactured, FUD gets created, and historically, people have even admitted to being paid to lie about Zcash.

Disgusting, but free speech is free speech. My own answer: Zcash is lied about because it’s easy to misunderstand : the math is novel. People claim its anonymity set is small without understanding that once you enter the shielded pool, your anonymity set is everyone who has ever used it (which is exactly what Monero is now trying to replicate with full-chain membership proofs). People say “nobody accepts Zcash” without knowing about the DeFi rails (Maya, NEAR Intents) where you spend from the shielded pool and your counterparty receives BTC, USDT or Litecoin from a service that knows nothing except the amount that left the pool.

The coins have no identity. And then there’s the main-character syndrome: “Zcash is only pumping because Jewish elites are covering up Monero’s wonderful progress.” Right. Meanwhile, the two keep flipping each other on the market cap rankings, which I consider healthy competition that keeps both dev teams sharp. Tyler Spalding of Flexa (S17 E2 guest) was in the chat, by the way… the man responsible for the whole Chipotle affair and for that glorious Flexa ad featuring David Duchovny from the X-Files.

And the classic counterattack (“who’s paying Arthur Hayes, Barry Silbert and the Winklevoss twins?”) got the shortest answer of the night: “We’ve never paid anybody.” Employees, sure. KOLs, never. Why would Barry Silbert or the Winklevii risk their reputation to shill anything for a few bucks? It makes no logical sense.

From there, Josh articulated what might be the episode’s most important idea. We live in a multi-chain, multi-coin world, and nobody can mandate otherwise: that’s the whole point of freedom. But you get to choose what you spend. Someone sells a bike for $1,000 and wants USDC? You send exactly 1,000 USDC straight from your shielded ZEC balance. They receive exactly what they asked for; you keep complete privacy: they can’t see your balance, your transaction graph, your history, nothing. You stay private even when your counterparty doesn’t care about privacy. It matches the reality of the world: there is no single winner, just a very long tail of preferences.

Of course, success breeds hatred… especially when ZEC was hitting near all-time highs while Bitcoin bled. When the Orchard bug was disclosed, I watched Samson Mow and other Bitcoin maximalists celebrate: “going to zero,” “unlimited Zcash printing,” “thank God this never came to Bitcoin.” None of them read what actually happened: the vulnerability allowed double-spending using unupdated states… bounded by time and by the rest of the network catching up, not unlimited printing. Yonatan Sompolinsky of Kaspa even implied that any developer would have exploited it: wait a few months, withdraw one ZEC at a time, or slip out during the Ironwood migration.

I disagree: white-hat security people tend to be ethical: remember 2018, when a Bitcoin Cash developer found a serious inflation bug in BTC and disclosed it honestly. The ironic trap the critics fall into: you can’t claim Zcash privacy “sucks” while also claiming we can’t see whether inflation happened. Make up your mind. Josh, who has known Taylor Hornby for years (he was ECC’s security director), vouched for him completely: the discovery combined AI with deep protocol knowledge (not just pointing AI at a repo) and the man is gifted, loyal and of unbelievably high character.

And here’s the game theory: if the bug had been exploited, we’ll know: the Orchard pool would drain to zero while honest users find themselves unable to move funds. The turnstile mechanism will let everyone verify the circulating supply. Don’t trust, verify. As for the old Sprout pool’s inflation bug and the coins that never moved out of it: probably lost. Josh has given his children multiple Zcash that died inside phones. Legacy pools always keep some remnants.

A zero-ZEC note asked the profound one: the security budget problem inherited from Bitcoin, as fees asymptotically approach zero. Josh pointed to Shielded Labs’ proposed Network Sustainability Mechanism, which could collect ZEC for long-term network security… and more broadly argued the problem is solvable as long as the chain keeps innovating. Unlike Bitcoin, where ossification is treated as a feature (see the quantum computing debate), Zcash’s spirit is that technology changes, new problems appear, and the protocol must evolve to meet them.

On scaling: once Tachyon ships, what happens to nodes storing everything? Josh’s answer: don’t overload the chain with information it doesn’t need. With Halo 2’s recursion, you only need a proof of the chain’s prior state plus the new transactions — no need to re-scan the entire history, because you have a mathematical proof the state is valid. Around the base layer, services flourish: light client infrastructure, the Valor Group’s private information retrieval services (already used for community polling), and Tachyon’s oblivious syncing service. Node operators end up needing only a minimal set of information.

Are the shielded memo notes we’re using for Q&A bloating the chain, then? They’re about 512 bytes: not much, and genuinely useful: since you can’t see where a shielded transaction came from, the memo carries that context. There’s a memo bundles proposal on the table enabling authenticated reply-to. Zooko talks about shielded love notes on the blockchain; my viewers sent zero-ZEC notes that still paid miner fees. More data always makes scaling harder, and the community holds different opinions on memos. But it’s not an issue today.

Then the Shielded Labs-flavored question: private stablecoins on Zcash: KYC’d at the on/off-ramps, but free and unsurveilled on-chain? Here’s the context: QEDIT built the capability for Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs), but ZSAs require an issuer, and Circle and Tether come with requirements (KYC on issuance and redemption, the ability to freeze funds, and blacklists) that run counter to everything Zcash stands for. The community was polled (coin holders, the Zcash Advisory Panel, various groups), and under Zcash’s rough-consensus model, no clear consensus meant no activation: some felt ZEC itself should be the focus, some noted shielded stables flopped on every other chain that tried them, some didn’t want to enlarge the hackable surface.

Josh and others spent time with both the Tether and Circle teams: no path, no strong demand. You can layer some of those controls onto ZSAs without compromising the core protocol, but anything that touches the base layer’s integrity is a hard no. Aleo is now pushing shielded stables instead; ZODL is focused on driving adoption of ZEC itself. And honestly, the ZSA push always smelled like a bear-market identity crisis: a search for users via the one crypto product with proven traction. With the asset itself in demand, the calculus looks different.

A new user asked the most honest question of the night (after complaining the ZODL app was making his phone hot enough to assassinate him… “it’d be great entertainment,” Josh laughed): if I must cross into non-shielded territory to spend, where’s the privacy? Josh: when you hold shielded ZEC, nobody but you can see your balance or history. When you swap out to a transparent asset, that chain’s heuristics apply (chain analysis firms can assign probabilities to identities and behaviors) but nothing leaks backward into the shielded pool.

You remain private even if your counterparty doesn’t. Ideally everyone just accepts ZEC directly. I added my own explainer: shielded-to-shielded, the world sees only that a transaction happened: no amount, no sender, no receiver; your odds of guessing are one in billions. Shielded-to-transparent, the world sees the amount leaving the pool and can follow it until it’s reshielded. And if you’re ordering from an online shop anyway, you’re handing them your name, shipping address and email regardless: shielding protects you (your holdings, your history), not the merchant’s compliance department.

The Visa/Mastercard crypto debit card question split us in an interesting way. I called it admitting we lost the battle: Satoshi in November 2008 said Bitcoin could scale to Visa’s throughput; the point was to replace banks, not embed ourselves inside the machine we were competing against. Josh pushed back gently: it’s a means to an end. We’re building the parallel financial system, but until the world comes along, people need edges (on-ramps and off-ramps) and exchanges are essentially banks anyway. “If it becomes the means, then I think we’ve lost. But the end goal isn’t Visa-managed KYC debit cards. It just makes life easier for people who can’t yet live fully outside the traditional system.” Fair.

To me the whole point remains a parallel economy: and I’ve watched what financial capture did to Bitcoin, where we can’t even get a harmless soft-fork upgrade because of entrenched financial interests, and where Adam Back himself argues against changes that might “scare away the people who invested a lot of money.” As Ross Ulbricht put it in his Las Vegas speech last year: altcoins are part of the decentralization. Zcash today is building a bridge between mainstream finance and privacy, normalizing private money for everyday people… and the AI narrative genuinely helps, because anyone can now paste a Bitcoin or Ethereum address into Claude or ChatGPT and get in seconds what used to take 30 minutes on a block explorer.

I maintain that Satoshi’s chapter 10 on privacy was naive but hopeful (the best tech available at the time) and that privacy was an aspiration of Bitcoin all along. New math exists; we should use it. Tapping cards and LARPing about sovereignty on Twitter will not get us there. I’ll even confess: I’m sometimes ashamed of the things I told people Bitcoin would become, because so far we’ve mostly produced a digital gold whose main use is making more US dollars. It doesn’t have teeth anymore.

Josh’s diagnosis of Bitcoin is surgical: there are two ways to kill a threat: ban it or co-opt it. Bitcoin is too big to ban, so it got co-opted into traditional financial boxes, and now it’s their asset, not the people’s. Financial incentives are the biggest trap: laser eyes, number go up, the primal need to provide for your family. We willingly walk into the capture because of money. “We’re not trying to make everybody rich. We’re actually trying to free the world.”But it gets very difficult once people start making real money.

So what prevents Zcash from being co-opted the same way… especially now, with new stakeholders like Mert arriving from Solana with store-of-value expectations, and with the Winklevoss twins’ Cypherpunk DAT and Grayscale offering ZEC exposure in 401(k)s? Josh’s answer: decentralization of voices, and the fact that governance ultimately happens at a fork: any group can express its opinion through code. The dev community disagrees on plenty (payments vs. store of value, PoW vs. PoS) but unites on things like Ironwood.

The financialization products are great for some people; they’re just not what ZODL is building. And critically: don’t ossify the chain. My rejoinder: culture is nice, but systems that are structurally hard to co-opt are better: number-go-up has a way of stalling progress. To its credit, Zcash has never grown complacent.

On concrete decentralization steps (shoutout to Paul ZK in the chat): one of Josh’s first acts as returning CEO was to kill the Zcash trademark agreement: ECC backed out, and the Zcash Foundation now holds the trademark purely to enforce against scammers, not as a governance lever. That opened the door to pluralism: ZF polling, ZecHub polling, coin-holder polling, and even the core engineers across orgs running their own sentiment polls. Where once only one organization built Zcash, there’s now the Foundation, Shielded Labs, Tachyon, the Valor Group, and more (Cypherpunk Inc. too, though not in core dev).

Coordination gets harder and that’s a good problem. Compared to Bitcoin, where Blockstream, Chaincode, MIT (until the Epstein scandal) and even exchanges fund developers, Zcash has never received funding from exchanges or mining pools: nobody has even offered. (The Winklevoss donations to Shielded Labs came from individuals, as far as Josh knows. Shielded Labs can answer for itself.) On the node software front: the legacy zcashd still runs the majority of nodes, but the plan is to deprecate it by the end of July alongside Ironwood and move everyone to the Foundation’s Rust-based zebrad.

Then the story everyone wanted: why did ZODL (the Zcash Open Development Lab) break away from ECC, and how does a for-profit even work here? Grab your popcorn. Josh was flying to Token2049 in Singapore when Naval tweeted “Bitcoin is a hedge against the US dollar; Zcash is a hedge against Bitcoin.” By the time the plane landed, Balaji wanted him at the Network State conference and out at the Network School.

Balaji’s message: “Zcash is one of the most important projects in the world: not just in crypto. Do you have enough funding for the season that’s coming?” Josh’s honest answer: less than a year of runway, and understaffed by 30-50% against existing demand. So Balaji helped build a coalition, and fundraising began in earnest in November. That put the team at odds with certain members of the board of Bootstrap, the 501(c)(3) that wholly owned ECC.

Inner turmoil, disagreement over direction, and then (in Josh’s words) some unfortunate actions that made it impossible for the team to stay. In less than a week, they created a new company and 100% of the ECC team moved over to ZODL. Crypto Twitter chaos ensued while they couldn’t talk about it. “We had to fork the company.” The business model: ZODL currently charges 50 basis points on swaps inside the wallet (revenue, though not yet profit) with more paid services and decentralized financial infrastructure coming.

Rapid-fire hardware corner: Keystone remains the airgapped option compatible with Orchard (the phone builds the proof; the device signs). And yes, there’s a referral code inside the ZODL wallet, and my own BTCTKVR code supports the show. The Foundation Passport, with its open-source app store, could theoretically host Cake Wallet or even ZODL. Josh said he’d look into it.

And on the Trezor Safe 7: I asked the Trezor folks about shielded Zcash and was told the Model T used to support an older pool. Josh says that’s simply not true: they received a Zcash Community Grants grant to build shielded support, the lead person left the company, and the work was never finished or shipped. Stick (Pavol, co-founder) told me the old hardware wasn’t powerful enough for the hashing Zcash requires… but the Safe 7 might finally have the specs.

And here’s a story most people don’t know: Slush, creator of the first Bitcoin mining pool and co-creator of Trezor, discovered Bitcoin through an internal email Zooko sent at Tahoe-LAFS in 2010: “hey, try this Bitcoin thing.” Slush started mining, invented pooled mining, and much of Prague’s Bitcoin scene owes its existence to that email. Slushpool even mined Zcash at launch; its successor Braiins doesn’t anymore, but maybe they’ll change their minds.

Mining is booming, by the way: Summer Meng, Bitmain’s main ASIC distributor for North America and Europe, told me Zcash ASICs are completely sold out pre-ordered long in advance. Josh confirmed a shipment went out last month, the hash rate sits at all-time highs, and much bigger shipments later this year are already spoken for. I’d love to see the Bitcoin-style commodification (old ASIC chips repurposed into plug-and-play home miners) and also a double-click app that installs a Zebra node plus lightwalletd without Docker wizardry. Josh thinks those building blocks get packaged up pretty soon. (No, we won’t vibe-code it. It needs proper auditing.)

What happens to ECC now? After the departure, a settlement was reached with Bootstrap: ECC is being formally wound down. No employees remain: everybody is at ZODL. Bootstrap still has its board; Josh has zero idea what they’ll do with remaining assets, and they haven’t been active in the community for years.

And no, nobody’s collecting 25% of block rewards: Josh rejected baked-in dev funds outright. The founders’ reward covered the first four years, the dev fund (roughly 12% ECC, 5% community grants, 8% Foundation) the second four, and when it expired in November 2024, the “default” of continuing org funding was refused.

Now 12% goes into a lockbox, and coin holders vote retroactively to fund people and orgs that made significant contributions. ECC even applied for and was awarded a grant by coin holders… but it was never dispersed, because the corporate fork happened right at that moment. Funding and governance today are genuinely more decentralized; ECC functionally does not exist.

On ZNS (the Zcash Naming Service: a shielded ENS of sorts): Josh hasn’t reviewed its security guarantees closely enough to opine; the eternal question is what privacy leaks, and whether it rotates unified addresses. User-friendly addresses have real benefits. (Tangentially: I ran for community grants last winter, lost the election, and the conspiracy theories that followed were so creative that not even Claude could have made them up. And no, chat, my nose comes from my Greek grandmother.)

How does Josh handle the FUD behind the scenes: the “Zionist coin” smears, the Silbert/Naval/Winklevoss cabal theories, the “it only pumps on Gemini” claim that collapses the second you check and see Gemini does less than 1% of daily volume? It’s tiresome, but most of it is trivially dispelled with facts, and Josh does a great job ignoring the noise and focusing on signal: including in his weekly updates (which I’ve long enjoyed for their sports, literature and history analogies; the latest one covers the behind-the-scenes of the vulnerability disclosure, and yes, he missed a week… they were a bit busy).

Which brought us to the closing theme: why disclose the bug publicly at all? Much of the industry would have patched it quietly and called it routine maintenance. Disclosure raised suspicions (“look how easily they coordinated a soft fork with miners: so centralized!”) and knocked the price down. Is honesty always worth the price? Josh didn’t flinch: transparency is worth the price. Yes, it eroded some trust in the shielded pool (people can’t see inside) but it increased trust in the teams.

Valid criticism is welcome; accountability is the point. The coordination itself was monumental: 24/7 for days with pools, exchanges and infrastructure operators, on a need-to-know basis, with existing relationships (he knew the head of ViaBTC from Miami, Foundry has group channels set up), including live video liveness checks (“am I compromised?”) before information was shared. After responsible disclosure to other projects using the same cryptography came full public disclosure.

“I think that should be the gold standard for how decentralized protocols and their teams work.” It reminded me of Bitcoin’s accidental 2013 hard fork: the IRC coordination that made a young Vitalik Buterin write about Bitcoin’s centralization in Bitcoin Magazine, months before he announced Ethereum. In that sense, Zcash feels like Bitcoin in 2013: not because of the mistakes, but because stuff is happening. Zcash turns ten this year, with many of the same early people still grinding through bears and bulls. The objective is unchanged: ZEC in the hands of billions.

And the roadmap: Ironwood (the next shielded pool) is essentially patched Orchard, but this time formally verified (circuits used to be hand-checked by auditors because formal verification was too hard; that’s changed). Target: mid-to-end of July, and based on Josh’s conversation with developers that very morning, they’re way ahead of schedule with testnets already live. Tachyon follows: a radically simplified circuit with much simpler assumptions, also to be formally verified… months away, and Josh won’t speculate beyond that.

We closed as tradition demands: thanking the 1,000+ live viewers across Twitter and YouTube, and getting Josh to do the Zcash dance on camera… the same one Sean Bowe did, the same one I did when the price hit $97 and everyone accused me of signaling the top. Some memes are worth it.

This episode is sponsored by Cake Wallet (now with shielded Zcash, swaps & gift cards, and provider of our 0.1 ZEC giveaway), Sideshift.ai (swap your stablecoins for real coins before they get seized), Orange Rock (no-KYC trading with privacy coins: leverage at your own risk!), and LayerTwo Labs (drivechains and the Zside chain, check out ecash.com ahead of the August hard fork). Special thanks to all the sponsors for making this freely available to everyone!

Follow Josh on Twitter at @jswihart, follow ZODL and download the Zodl wallet. See you in 20 months — hopefully when Zcash is top 5. “We’ll get there.”