💡 Fact of the Week
Zcash Coinholder Voting preserves privacy by keeping individual votes and ZEC balances hidden. Votes are submitted privately, and only the combined results are revealed, allowing ZEC holders to participate without exposing how they voted.
📩 In today’s edition
⚡ Cypherpunk Launches the World’s Largest Zcash Mining Fleet
• Cypherpunk launched a 4.2 GSol/s U.S.-based mining fleet through a $33.33 million deal with Winklevoss Capital, representing roughly 18% of Zcash network hashrate at launch.
🗳️ Zodl 3.10.0 Brings Coinholder Polling to Ironwood
• Zodl brought Coinholder Polling back to iOS and Android, allowing eligible Ironwood ZEC holders to participate privately in the upcoming NU7 poll.
🏛️ ZCG Reviews New Grants | August 17, 2026
• ZCG approved $95,000 for ELLIPAL Ironwood support, reviewed new infrastructure and community proposals, and discussed a broader approach to funding decentralized light-client infrastructure.
⚙️ Zakura Speeds Up Ironwood Wallet Scanning
• Zakura introduced new cryptographic optimizations aimed at making Ironwood wallet scanning faster, continuing its work on improving Zcash performance.
🛡️ Pretty Good Policy for Zcash Becomes an Independent Organization
• PGPZ became an independent organization focused on public policy and advocacy around financial privacy and Zcash.
🛒 ZecBuy Launches Shielded ZEC Commerce
• ZecBuy launched with Mullvad VPN subscriptions and eSIMs, letting users buy products directly with shielded Ironwood ZEC without creating an account.
🌲 Genius Loci: A Zcash Update
• Josh reflected on Zcash’s cypherpunk roots, culture, and “meritocracy of ideas,” alongside updates to Zodl Wallet, Coinholder Polling, security, and Zcash Core.
Cypherpunk Launches the World’s Largest Zcash Mining Fleet
Cypherpunk Technologies launched Cypherpunk Mining through a $33.33 million deal with Winklevoss Capital, creating what it says is the world’s largest active Zcash mining fleet.
The operation is already online across the U.S. with approximately 4.2 GSol/s, representing around 18% of Zcash’s total network hashrate at the time of the announcement.
Cypherpunk@cypherpunk
Cypherpunk holds ZEC. Now Cypherpunk mines ZEC. Onward.
9:02 AM · Aug 18, 2026 · 178K Views
43 Replies · 95 Reposts · 502 Likes
The move expands Cypherpunk’s Zcash strategy beyond its 323,394 ZEC treasury and investment in ZODL, adding direct exposure to ZEC mining. Kevin Zhang, who previously helped build Foundry’s Bitcoin mining operations, has joined as Head of Mining.
Zodl 3.10.0 Brings Coinholder Polling to Ironwood
Zodl 3.10.0 shipped on iOS and Android, bringing Coinholder Polling back for the upcoming NU7 poll. The release also updates the voting infrastructure across both platforms, allowing eligible Ironwood ZEC holders to participate privately through the app.
After an issue was found on iOS that could prevent a submission from completing if interrupted, Zodl 3.10.2 was released with a fix. iOS users can now update and resume coinholder polling.
Users who previously encountered the “wallet already registered” error should not retry yet. ZODL is working on recovery for affected users in v3.10.3
ZCG Reviews New Grants | August 17, 2026
The main approval was $95,000 for ELLIPAL to bring Ironwood shielded transactions to its TITAN air-gapped hardware wallet and mobile app, including shielding, deshielding and fully shielded transfers.
Two proposals for independent light-client infrastructure in Asia were declined. However, committee members supported the broader goal and discussed developing a more scalable ecosystem-wide framework instead of funding individual servers separately.
ZECsy’s $588,000 community-building proposal remains open, with members suggesting a stronger focus on its higher-impact activities, including adult-industry events, Zcash-focused events and workshops.
Several other proposals were declined, including Zcash Arabia, Zcash Belgium, Shielded Compliance Bridge, Apple Silicon ZK acceleration and zk-CosmWasmVM. Proposals for a Zebra test audit, ZEC-to-mobile-money integration and Zcash WalletConnect remain too early for a vote, while the $10,000 constant-time cryptography hardening proposal remains open.
Zakura speeds up Ironwood wallet scanning
Zakura is working on faster Ironwood wallet scanning. By taking advantage of the fact that wallets repeatedly use the same viewing key while scanning many different outputs, a new batch-processing approach combines affine arithmetic, GLV, and Eisenstein integer recoding to reduce expensive sequential operations.
In end-to-end benchmarks, it made batch trial decryption 16–20% faster for batches of 64–200 outputs.
Pretty Good Policy for Zcash becomes an independent organization
Pretty Good Policy for Zcash (PGPZ), a policy initiative fostered by Paul Brigner and supported by ZODL, has launched as an independent 501(c)(4) focused on policy education, coordination, and advocacy for the Zcash ecosystem.
PGPZ is requesting $750,000 from Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) to fund its first 12 months. The organization plans to engage policymakers and regulators, produce policy briefs, host educational events, develop concrete legislative or regulatory language, and provide policy updates to the Zcash community.
Led by Executive Director Divij Pandya, PGPZ will initially focus on the United States, with priorities including financial privacy, digital-asset market structure, protections for developers and noncustodial infrastructure, illicit-finance policy, sanctions, and taxation.
ZecBuy Launches Shielded ZEC Commerce
ZecBuy is now live, allowing users to purchase products directly with shielded Ironwood ZEC, without creating an account or using transparent ZEC.
The platform launches with Mullvad VPN subscriptions and eSIMs, with direct support for shielded transactions. For Mullvad purchases, ZecBuy uses TEE-based blind delivery, designed so account details are only known to the buyer, while recovery links provide persistence and a way to recover purchases without requiring an account.
The initial catalog is intentionally small while the team focuses on the core purchasing experience. ZecBuy plans to expand over time, with the broader goal of making it possible to buy everyday products and services directly with shielded ZEC.
Genius Loci. A Zcash Update
This week, Josh shared what has kept him connected to Zcash since 2016: its cypherpunk roots, mission, and the culture built around it.
After a recent conversation with Sean Bowe, Josh described Zcash engineering as a “meritocracy of ideas”: people may disagree, but the goal is to find the right answer. As new people and projects join the ecosystem, Zcash remains rooted in a shared belief in human dignity and agency.
Recent releases (besides Coinholder Polling) also added the Orchard-to-Ironwood migration and fixes for Keystone and transaction resubmission.
ZODL also completed fixes from an external security audit, while Zallet closed its remaining audit findings and received further improvements to the zcashd wallet migration process.