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Ethereum and Zcash Are Crypto’s True Innovations Post Bitcoin, Says Balaji

Balaji Srinivasan has distilled 15 years of crypto experimentation all the way down to a stark declare: after Bitcoin, solely two core protocol breakthroughs actually matter—Ethereum for programmability and Zcash for privateness.

In a wide-ranging look on Mert Mumtaz’s “Accelerate with Mert” podcast, Srinivasan argued that the business has already accomplished the “programmability period” and is now getting into a decisive part the place privateness and zero-knowledge cryptography grow to be central to crypto’s mission. “The two main improvements on Bitcoin had been programmability within the type of Ethereum and privateness within the type of Zcash,” he mentioned.

From Bitcoin To Programmability To Zcash

Srinivasan breaks crypto’s historical past into three arcs. First, Bitcoin merely needed to show that non-sovereign, cryptographic cash may work in any respect. Then, Ethereum generalized that right into a programmable platform with sensible contracts, stablecoins, NFTs, DEXs and on-chain capital markets.

By now, he argued, that second part is successfully validated. “We now have scalable on-chain sensible contracts that may assist [a] massive variety of customers, massive numbers of transactions with finality. There’s a number of good chains. It works. It runs 24/7,” he mentioned, noting that crypto is already functioning in creating markets: “In Bolivia, they quote costs in Tether. In Nigeria, they save in Bitcoin. This stuff is now not concept. It’s truly there.”

The subsequent part, he says, is privateness by design. “Now the following eight years… privateness,” Srinivasan mentioned. “Taking every part we simply did and encrypting it utilizing ZK.” That consists of ZK-based KYC (“ZKYC”), privacy-preserving DEXs, and sensible contracts that reveal solely the minimal obligatory info. He pointed to business work displaying how conventional KYC may very well be replicated with zero-knowledge proofs: “If you nail ZK then you’ll be able to change the complete [compliance] system.”

This is the place Zcash issues: not as a advertising and marketing model, however as the primary mainstream proof that superior zero-knowledge privateness will be embedded on the protocol stage. Ethereum represents programmability; Zcash represents privateness. In Srinivasan’s framing, the longer term is about merging these concepts—Ethereum-style expressivity with Zcash-style cryptographic concealment—throughout L1s, rollups and application-specific techniques.

Srinivasan pushed again onerous on the concept that crypto is now primarily a speculative or industrial area. “Crypto isn’t simply concerning the industrial half,” he mentioned. “It’s concerning the ideological half. It’s about the truth that the banks have failed. It’s concerning the reality the political system has failed. It’s about the truth that we want an exit. It’s about the truth that we want self-sovereignty. And the lacking a part of that’s privateness.”

He in contrast this to the way in which Christmas is commonly defended by spiritual believers as greater than procuring and Santa. “Remember the explanation for the season” turns into, in his telling, a reminder that crypto’s “season” is about exit and self-sovereignty, not simply yield, DeFi and token costs. Privacy, he argued, is what reconnects trendy “industrial crypto” to these original cypherpunk and anti-censorship roots.

Notably, Srinivasan is a long-time advocate for ZK based mostly applied sciences. In November 2024, he wrote by way of X: “Yes, Zcash is nice and it’s already match for goal. One can proceed utilizing it for personal transactions. But ZK is to encryption what the transformer is to AI. It generalizes many particular case hacks into a brand new compute paradigm. We will get a ZK financial system. So we do need a chain with ZK primitives along with a easy Zcash-like chain.”

At press time, ZCash traded at $501.59.

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