The money trail in Zcash: an uncomfortable hypothesis

Read the news about the surge in shielded usage and the 2025 Dev Fund debate, then follow this thread.

This analysis uses my L3 Protocol – The Three Layers of Analysis (I recently published the method in an article on Medium).

Zcash was born as the most advanced experiment in privacy.

But privacy needs funding, and that’s where the problem begins: who pays for privacy… and with what intention?

For years, 20% of the block reward went to fund the ecosystem: ECC, Zcash Foundation, and Community Grants.

In other words: users subsidize the institutions maintaining the code.

In 2025, that fund expires.

And the question is simple but powerful: who takes control when the money stops flowing automatically?

If the Dev Fund is renewed, the centralized structure remains.

If not, miners get all the power.

If a “coinholder-driven” model is approved, power shifts again—but not widely. It concentrates in large holders.

The money trail reveals the power trail.

Original investors (Pantera, DCG, Winklevoss, Ravikant, Ver…) already made their bet.

Today, the real investor is ZEC’s monetary policy itself: the protocol decides who lives and who fades.

The surge in shielded activity and the 2025 rally aren’t coincidences—they’re narrative oxygen to keep funding alive.

Privacy, this time, is also marketing.

But if the governance of those funds doesn’t change, the risk is clear:

a cryptocurrency defending privacy while depending on internal power structures as opaque as those it criticizes.

The talk is “decentralization”; the practice is “guaranteed budget.”

Zcash faces its paradox: without centralized funding, it dies; with it, it stops being sovereign.

In the money trail, there are no mysteries, only priorities.

The question isn’t whether Zcash protects your privacy, but whose incentives its own system protects.