Multicoin Capital Reveals Significant Zcash Position at Consensus Miami

Multicoin Capital has built a significant position in Zcash (ZEC), CoinDesk reported. Tushar Jain, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital, disclosed the position at Consensus Miami without revealing its size. Jain said bitcoin can withstand protocol-level freezes but public ownership leaves holders exposed if a government, creditor or other actor can connect coins to a person.

Tokens with built-in privacy features such as ZEC aim to mitigate that risk by obscuring transaction details and user identities, he added. “Multicoin has bought a significant position in Zcash to express that thesis,” Jain said during the panel. The essay stated that users should not have to sell BTC or ETH for ZEC to get privacy and that Zcash’s privacy design came with trade-offs in terms of auditability and programmability, CoinDesk reported.

ZEC is trading near $570, up about 122% over the past month and more than 1,500% in the past year, CoinDesk reported. Between 20% and 25% of circulating ZEC is held in encrypted addresses, with about 30% of Zcash transactions involving the shielded pool, according to CoinDesk Research. Zenrock’s wrapped ZEC product on Solana crossed $15 million in volume late last year.

Solana already has confidential-transfer token infrastructure, though the ZK ElGamal program powering confidential token transactions on Solana is currently disabled on both mainnet and devnet during a security audit, CoinDesk reported. Vibhu Norby, chief product officer at the Solana Foundation, said Solana builders are working on a privacy product to preserve DeFi composability.

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. 58, CoinDesk reported.

M.