Tushar Jain, co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, told Miami Consensus that Multicoin Capital has established a “significant position” in zcash (ZEC) and that the acquisition is related to the idea that private stores of value will become more important as finance moves on-chain.
Jain did not disclose the size of the position. He said Bitcoin A protocol-level freeze can be tolerated, but public ownership still puts holders at risk if governments, creditors, or other actors can tie the token to an individual. In contrast, coins with built-in privacy features, such as ZEC, aim to reduce this risk by obscuring transaction details and user identities.
“Multicoin purchased a significant position in Zcash to make this argument,” Jain said during the panel discussion.
The disclosure marks a shift for Multicoin, which noted in a 2019 article that “privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not the product itself.”
The company said at the time that users would not have to sell BTC or ETH in exchange for ZEC to gain privacy. It also stated that Zcash’s privacy design trades off auditability and programmability.
As the privacy-focused cryptocurrency gains traction, ZEC is trading near $570, up about 122% in the past month and more than 1,500% in the past year.
The move follows a broader re-evaluation of Zcash’s role in crypto privacy. Zcash As a cryptocurrency network, CoinDesk Research states that 20% to 25% of circulating ZEC is held in crypto addresses, and approximately 30% of transactions involve shielded pools. Grayscale said ZEC’s advantages are related to the repricing of financial privacy in an AI-driven world.
Jain’s comments come amid a broader push to move privacy beyond standalone privacy coins. Vibhu Norby, chief product officer of the Solana Foundation, said that Solana builders are developing a privacy product to maintain DeFi composability.
Solana already has infrastructure for confidential transfer tokens. However, its documentation states that during a security audit, the ZK ElGamal program that supports confidential token transactions is currently disabled on the mainnet and development network, resulting in the confidential transfer extension being unavailable.
Zcash has also begun to enter the Solana decentralized financial ecosystem. At the end of last year, the transaction volume of Zenrock’s ZEC product packaged on Solana exceeded $15 million, linking Zcash privacy needs to Solana transaction activity.
The group views privacy as a market structure issue, not just a cypherpunk issue. Jain said public wallets expose funds and transactions to surveillance and front-running. Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz said visible DeFi positions can be targeted and hunted on the open market.
Zama Chief Product Officer Arik Galansky said that fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) can make private shared states composable in DeFi. Zama said its protocol enables confidential smart contracts on layer 1 and layer 2 protocols, with encrypted transaction inputs and states invisible to node operators.
