Zooko Wilcox - Zcash: Unstoppable Private Money - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Hello. Thank you all for coming and taking some of your precious time to learn about Zcash. Zcash is unstoppable private money. Zcash is a technological innovation and I'll tell you more about that in a couple of minutes. But more than that, Zcash is a global social movement and it is a civilizational innovation.

I've lived half my life in the 20th century and half my life in the 21st century. In the world I was born into, most communications were direct persontoerson with no intermediaries and no possibility of your conversation being eavesdropped by a third party. And in the world I was born into, most transactions were the same, personto person with no intermediaries and no observation by a third party. This was the rule in every longlasting and successful civilization in human history. The only exceptions were in the monstrous experimental societies of the 20th century that are now in the graveyard of history.

But at the turning point of my life and of the century, the advance of technology changed things. Technology made it possible for the first time ever for computers to monitor and record the behavior of billions of human beings at once. And now here we are one quarter of the way into our century and technology has just changed everything again because now for the first time it is possible for billions of humans to be not only monitored but also controlled by AIs as living slaves. Now the people who imagine themselves the rulers and beneficiaries of this new order will tell you that it is for your safety. But I tell you this is not safe.

It is a reckless and unstable perversion of the natural order of human civilization. Zcash is an alternative vision of civilization, a return to the traditions of private property and freedom that have sustained the civilization I was born into and every lasting and prosperous human civilization. But in addition to being a return, Zcash is an acceleration because of technology. Zcash takes the natural properties of money like scarcity and fungeibility and makes it purely digital so that it's weightless and instantaneous. We Zcashers uh have a positive vision of technology.

We turn technology from undermining the foundations of civilization to strengthening those foundations and encouraging the growth of civilization. The Zcash community that I speak of is far-flung and very diverse and mostly invisible. I am uh like their ambassador to the visible world, but uh almost all of the improvement and um the governance and the support of Zcash that goes on is uh people far outside of my personal influence. Um the only things the Zcashers agree on is this vision and that they hold Zcash. That's the two things that unify them.

One secret I can let you in on is that there are Zcashers inside every crypto company who believe in this vision and who hold the Zcashcoin. I told you I'd tell you a little bit about Zcash's technological innovation. Zcash is a global decentralized ledger uh through which you can send money to anyone. Uh there are no smart contracts in Zcash. It's just money, unstoppable private money.

There's a hard limit of that there will only ever be 21 million Zcash coins. And in order to provide strong privacy for our users, we had to bring zero knowledge proofs into the world. The Zcashers uh created the first um production implementation of zero knowledge proofs and we advanced the state-of-the-art of the technology multiple times uh such that uh every project and company that uses zero knowledge proofs today has copied much of it out of Zcash. And we did all that in order to provide cryptographic strength privacy that is is solely in the hands of the end user. It's solely up to you as a user what you choose to disclose.

Privacy is one of the two properties required for this civilizational foundation of unstoppable private money. uh because without privacy there is no freedom. If someone who is more powerful than you can monitor your every action, you will not be able to take effective action. But even beyond that, beyond effective action, you cannot even authentically think for yourself. If someone else who has more power, if they have their AI monitoring you, you cannot authentically even be yourself.

So Zcash has solved privacy. You can use it today. And unlike anything else you can use today and like the money that we used when I was a kid, the actions you take with it are solely between you and the person you're interacting with and anyone that you choose to disclose. But the choice is always up to you. But there's two properties required for this kind of civilizational foundation.

It's privacy and scalability. And just now in this year, a Zcasher out there has discovered a breakthrough in computer science that completely solves the scalability problem while preserving the user's privacy 100%. It's based on zero knowledge proofs and it actually replaces the blockchain with zero knowledge proofs. Uh zero knowledge proofs which do not need to be aggregated and um replicated globally the way a blockchain does. So it's insane.

It blew my mind with this guy came up with this. and it promises to make it possible for any number of people to use Zcash cheaply and instantly simultaneously. Uh that's called Project Tachion. Uh coming soon. Um unstoppable private money.

It's coming soon to your mobile phone. Um you can use the current version. It's not scalable, but you get complete privacy on your mobile phone today. So Zcash puts the knowledge and the control of your personal financial actions into your hands. And there will always be people who tell you that they need to take that out of your hands because you are flawed.

And I've got news for you. They're flawed, too. Um, I would like to invite each and every one of you to do something to take part in this new world. You can buy and hold Zcash. There will only ever be 21 million Zcash coins.

And if you buy and hold some of those for yourself, you're holding on to your own privacy. And you're also becoming one of us, one of the builders of the foundation for an enduring and flourishing human civilization. That's all. Thank you for listening.