IBT Exclusive: Is Zcash The New Bitcoin? ZEC Potential In 2026

In an exclusive interview, Cypherpunk strategic advisor Arjun Khemani lays out the case that encrypted money is a trillion-dollar problem and why ZEC’s run is just getting started.

Zcash was supposed to be Bitcoin with a privacy upgrade. For most of its life, the market never bought the pitch. In 2026, that consensus broke.

ZEC has rallied roughly 1,278% year-to-date, lifting its market capitalization to about $9.8 billion and pushing it past Cardano into the top dozen cryptocurrencies. The coin still trades at a fraction of its older sibling — roughly one one-hundred-sixtieth of Bitcoin’s $1.6 trillion footprint — but the gap has finally started to close.

In an exclusive interview with International Business Times, Arjun Khemani — a protégé of Silicon Valley legend Naval Ravikant and strategic advisor to Cypherpunk Technologies (Nasdaq: CYPH), the Winklevoss-backed Zcash treasury vehicle — argues the rally is the opening act.

His thesis: in an open digital society is impossible without encrypted money, and that need is worth orders of magnitude more than today’s market cap.

1. Is Privacy Really a Trillion-Dollar Story?

Skeptics still note that most ZEC sits in transparent addresses by default, and that regulators have not warmed to privacy coins. But shielded adoption has quietly inverted the chart. Roughly 30% of circulating ZEC now lives in shielded pools — meaning it is totally private — a record, and nearly a fourfold jump since the start of 2024.

Khemani says that’s the entire pitch. Optional shielding makes Zcash “private by default, compliant when needed.”

“I don’t think Zcash is a multi-billion-dollar narrative. It’s a trillion-dollar asset. It’s not a trade, it’s not a narrative — I want it to be the global internet account the world transacts in. You need encrypted money for an open society in the digital age.”

Pair that thesis with a credible scaling roadmap and SNARK-grade cryptography, he argues, and a $100-billion-plus market cap starts to look closer to arithmetic than fantasy.

2. The Quantum Question

Privacy advocates have long argued that zk-SNARKs give Zcash a head start against quantum attacks because shielded transaction data never lives on-chain to begin with. Bitcoin, by contrast, still lacks a production-ready answer.

Zcash’s formal response is Project Tachyon, a Halo 2-based upgrade that promises full post-quantum privacy alongside a roughly two-orders-of-magnitude shrink in transaction size. Quantum-recoverable wallets, the interim safety net, are scheduled for June 2026. The full protocol upgrade is set to roll out in phases from late 2026 through 2027.

“Tachyon brings full post-quantum privacy even if the address is exposed, plus quantum recoverability: freeze the vulnerable pool, migrate coins to a quantum-secure one. By 2027–2028 we aim for full quantum proofing.”

3. Monero in the Mirror

Monero still leads the privacy-coin pack on raw usage and grassroots developer culture. Khemani is dismissive of its cryptographic foundation, however: ring signatures, he says, are statistical camouflage, not encryption.

“AI will eat ring signatures for breakfast,” he warns. Zcash took the harder route: real encryption, with “no ball under the cup to find.”

4. The ECC Exit and the Z3 Stack

Confidence took a real punch in January, when the entire Electric Coin Company team — the original Zcash builders — walked out after a governance fight with the Bootstrap nonprofit board and immediately spun up Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), launching a successor wallet called cashZ. ZEC dropped roughly 14% on the news.

The recovery has been led by the Zcash Foundation, which is retiring the legacy zcashd node in favor of the Rust-based Zebra implementation, shipping the broader Z3 stack (Zebra, Zaino, and Zallet), and integrating FROST v3.0 to bring multi-signature support to shielded transactions.

“I can’t say much about the ECC thing just yet, but I do know what they’re trying to do is going to be super awesome for Zcash and for coin holders and Zashi wallet users. They’re wanting to turn into a startup… you need a market-based structure for these things to really scale. It’s gonna be super bullish.”

Cypherpunk has voted with its balance sheet, holding more than 290,000 ZEC — about 1.76% of supply, acquired at an average of $334 — and recently committing another $5 million directly to ZODL alongside a16z, Coinbase, Paradigm, and Balaji Srinivasan.

5. Where ZEC Goes From Here

After the parabolic move from under $60 in early 2024 to a recent high near $600, chartists now flag $500 as the line in the sand, with deeper support around $300 and stacked resistance at $600 to $640. Year-end forecasts cluster between $650 and roughly $1,000, with a downside scenario near $480 if buyers lose $500.

Khemani refuses to put a number on it.

“I can’t predict the price and I won’t pretend to. ZEC only recovers if we build through the chaos: scale it, make it quantum-resistant, wire it into the real world, and treat privacy like critical infrastructure.”

If Zcash actually becomes the encrypted unit of account for the open internet, he argues, today’s run-up — and the volatility around it — will eventually look like background noise.