Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain said the firm’s recent investment in 
Zcash was driven by a convergence of stronger market traction, improving 
infrastructure and a broader return to crypto’s privacy roots. Speaking on the 
latest Bankless podcast released May 19, Jain argued that Zcash has moved from 
a “left for dead” asset into a credible private store-of-value contender. Jain 
said Multicoin had watched Zcash for years without being convinced. The asset, 
in his view, had long suffered from weak attention, poor usability and limited 
evidence that privacy demand could translate into durable market interest. 
That changed after Zcash rallied sharply, corrected, and still retained both 
community intensity and a higher market baseline than in prior years. 
Multicoin’s Zcash Thesis “When I see something like that, I always pause and 
wonder, is this some manufactured thing? Is it sustainable? Is there a real 
groundswell of support here?” Jain said. “And when you see the price do what 
it did last year and then what we saw was it pulled back very significantly. 
As I saw it pull back, what I saw was one, the people who were talking about 
it were still excited about it. Two, the place where it pulled back on the 
chart actually demonstrated much better attention and strength than where the 
thing was trading for years and years before that.” That, Jain said, helped 
get Multicoin “over the line.” The firm interpreted the correction not as a 
failed narrative, but as a stress test. Zcash, he argued, retained the “key 
people” supporting it and showed that interest in the asset was not merely a 
short-lived speculative burst. Related Reading: Zcash, Bitcoin, And 
Solana—Catalysts Ahead That Could Fuel Another Upswing Before May End The 
discussion, which also featured Helius Labs founder Mert Mumtaz, framed Zcash 
as a possible answer to what both guests described as crypto’s unfinished 
privacy problem. Mumtaz, who said he began looking more seriously at Zcash in 
early 2024 after reviewing its scaling plans, argued that privacy had become 
“the major thing that crypto has forgotten,” particularly as institutional 
adoption pushes more financial activity onto transparent rails. Jain’s core 
investment thesis is not that Zcash becomes a high-throughput payments 
network. He described the asset’s real market as the store-of-value sector, 
where social coordination, brand and perceived monetary properties matter as 
much as raw technical capacity. In that context, he argued, Zcash is beginning 
to form a Schelling point around private wealth storage. “The market that 
Zcash is competing for is the store of value market,” Jain said. “Like that’s 
the job that it does is it’s for storing value and it is far more scalable 
than Bitcoin and so enables more transactions and such. But the core value 
prop is store of value.” Jain compared that dynamic to Bitcoin’s early 
reflexivity: more people treating an asset as a store of value makes it a 
stronger candidate for that role. He said Zcash now has the potential to 
benefit from a similar feedback loop, particularly if it remains the leading 
privacy asset by market cap, volume, attention and other relevant metrics. 
Related Reading: Arthur Hayes Says Zcash Is His Largest Crypto Position 
Outside Bitcoin The guests also contrasted Zcash with Monero. Mumtaz argued 
that Monero’s ring-signature design relies on decoys, while Zcash’s shielded 
model offers a stronger cryptographic foundation. Jain emphasized a separate 
but related point: brand. In his telling, Zcash is positioned less as a tool 
for illicit use and more as “privacy for the normal person.” “Zcash is not for 
that,” Jain said, referring to Monero’s darker market associations. “Zcash is 
for the regular person who says, no, I care about my privacy, not because I’m 
doing anything illegal or I have anything to hide, but because I don’t need to 
reveal all of my financial transaction history to every single person with 
whom I interact.” That positioning, he argued, could make Zcash more legible 
to institutions and a broader group of users. The asset’s transparent mode may 
allow institutional exposure, while improved wallet infrastructure and 
decentralized access routes could push more activity into the shielded pool 
over time. The podcast also addressed the bear case directly: investors have 
repeatedly overestimated demand for privacy, and prior privacy narratives have 
often ended poorly. Jain acknowledged that Zcash had previously been “hugely 
inflationary,” difficult to use, weakly marketed and dependent on centralized 
exchanges for acquisition. But he said the last 18 months changed the setup, 
citing better wallet infrastructure, more attention, and a macro backdrop that 
has made private stores of value more salient. Mumtaz added that upcoming 
catalysts could matter for adoption, including Ledger support for shielded 
ZEC, a rising shielded pool share of roughly 31% to 32%, planned block-time 
reductions from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, and further work on quantum 
resistance. At press time, ZEC traded at $584.82. Featured image created with 
DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain said the firm’s recent investment in Zcash was driven by a convergence of stronger market traction, improving infrastructure and a broader return to crypto’s privacy roots. Speaking on the latest Bankless podcast released May 19, Jain argued that Zcash has moved from a “left for dead” asset into a credible &#8230;

Why Multicoin Is Betting Big On Zcash: Tushar Jain Lays Out The Bull Case

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Why Multicoin Is Betting Big On Zcash: Tushar Jain Lays Out The Bull Case

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