Multicoin Capital has built a “significant position” in zcash (ZEC), co-founder and managing partner Tushar Jain told Consensus Miami, linking the purchase to the idea that private stores of value will matter more as finance moves up the chain.
Jain did not disclose the size of the position. He said Bitcoin can withstand protocol-level freezes, but public ownership still leaves holders exposed if a government, creditor, or other actor can connect coins to a person. In contrast, tokens with built-in privacy features, such as ZEC, aim to mitigate this risk by hiding transaction details and user identities.
“Mulcoin purchased a large position in Zcash to express this thesis,” Jain said during the panel.
This disclosure marks a change for Multicoin, which asserted in a 2019 essay that “privacy is a characteristic of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in itself.”
The company then stated that users should not have to sell BTC or ETH for ZEC to ensure their privacy. He also said that Zcash’s privacy design had tradeoffs in terms of auditability and programmability.
ZEC is trading at nearly $570, up about 122% over the past month and more than 1,500% over the past year as privacy-focused cryptocurrencies have gained traction.
The move follows a broader reassessment of Zcash’s role in cryptocurrency privacy. Zcash functions as a crypto money network, with CoinDesk Research citing 20-25% of circulating ZEC held in crypto addresses and around 30% of transactions involving the protected pool. Grayscale said ZEC’s advantage relates to a reassessment of financial privacy in an AI-driven world.
Jain’s comments are part of a broader initiative to evolve privacy beyond standalone privacy coins. Vibhu Norby, chief product officer at the Solana Foundation, said Solana builders are working on a privacy product to preserve DeFi composability.
Solana already has a confidential transfer token infrastructure. However, its documentation states that the ZK ElGamal program that powers confidential token transactions is currently disabled on mainnet and devnet during a security audit, making the confidential transfer extension unavailable.
Zcash has also started to enter the Solana decentralized finance ecosystem. Zenrock’s wrapped ZEC product on Solana surpassed $15 million in volume late last year, linking Zcash’s privacy demand to Solana’s commercial activity.
The panel presented privacy as a market structure issue, not just a cypherpunk concern. Jain said public wallets expose funds and transactions to scrutiny and monitoring. Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, said that visible DeFi positions can be targeted and tracked on public markets.
Arik Galansky, chief product officer at Zama, said fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) could make shared private state composable in DeFi. Zama claims its protocol enables confidential smart contracts over Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols, with encrypted transaction inputs and state that are not visible to node operators.
