Zcash’s sudden resurgence is not just another rotation, argues Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz; it is a re-centering of crypto on first principles of cryptography and user choice. In a wide-ranging conversation on Messari’s “Fully Diluted” (Oct. 23) with host Dylan Bane and Messari researchers, Mumtaz framed Zcash as “secret Bitcoin”—a full-stack, zero-leakage design for money that Bitcoin’s earliest architects wanted but could not ship with 2010-era tooling.
Zcash Proves Satoshi Right
“The simplest conceptual way to understand this is that it’s a secret Bitcoin. It’s an encrypted Bitcoin,” Mumtaz said, invoking early forum posts from Satoshi and Hal Finney. “You have forum posts of Satoshi and Hal [Finney] saying things like, ‘If we knew how to add ZK proofs to Bitcoin, it would make it a better Bitcoin.’ But this is 2010 and they didn’t have the tech. And since then, the tech has been made.” In his telling, that lineage matters: Zcash inherits Bitcoin’s monetary template while replacing probabilistic obfuscation with “pure encryption.”
if you want to understand why certain Bitcoin maxis are violently coping and lashing out about a small 3B coin
they are threatened and have lost the plot
Satoshi in 2010: if we could add ZK to Bitcoin, a much better BiTC would be possible. Sadly, I don’t know how. pic.twitter.com/2c4Y5SIhT6
— mert | helius.dev (@0xMert_) October 21, 2025
Mumtaz’s critique of “bolt-on” privacy was unambiguous. Privacy, he argued, is not a feature toggle; it is a system property that must be designed from the ground up to minimize information leakage across the entire stack—wallets, RPCs, mempools, validators, bridges, and application UX. “Privacy is not, in my view, something that can be bolted on,” he said.
“You have t
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Author: Jake Simmons
