You are reading the last entry of the Z|ECC Summit Prague 2025. You can read the previous entry here
The last day of Z|ECC summit has arrived. At least for those who aren’t part of ECC. ZK Av Club already has people queuing up to give their testimony of the summit. Some fragments of the footage has already been published through the Zashi social media accounts. Not only these ZK AV geeks make the effort to document the summit but they are also donating their footage to ECC, the organizing organization. Make sure you subscribe to their YouTube channel and help vitalize their material.
What do you see when you see the community?
This was the opener question of the day. Coffee was still kicking in and people were slowly talking in a round-fashion accross a U-shaped meeting setup. But Memes always do their trick and laughter took the place by assault.
This was more or less the common denominator of the concepts verted by Z|ECC attendants:
- Fun —> fundamentals
- Obsessed with privacy
- Very knowledgeable
- Interested
- Intrinsically motivated
- “Too nice”
- Not interested in price
- Not fun
- Risk averse
- Hope
Some of these may contradict each other. Just consider that they are the subjective point of view of the summit attendants. What do you see in the community? Leave your comment!
The important thing is the follow up question
What do we want the community to reflect in us?
- Unity without confrontation
- Anti-authoritarian
- Purpose / meaning
- “Price appreciation is the single biggest impact can have” (this one was hard to summarize)
- Hope
- Pride
- Not Zero Sum
- Collaborative
- Here for the long run
- Honesty
- Resilience
- Pioneering
There was a clear alignment on unity without confrontation (e.g: lower the amount of drama in the Zcash leadership), being anti-authoritarian and true to cypherpunk values, having purpose and meaning so that translates into Zcash’s value proposition and the most important: Hope that Zcash will prevail.
As someone said, price is the biggest single impact we can have. Zcash mooning would indeed vanish most of the problems that the Zcash development ecosystem is facing in terms of resource constraints, teams being spread thin and a very concerning bus factor. But is price worth more than all of the items mentioned above?
I went back to my previous Z|ECC summit entries from this year and the first day of the Cancún summit started with the “how it started / how it’s going” meme of Bitcoin and how it is being captured by big economy and powers that be that once motivated the creation of Bitcoin to exit a rigged economy.
Zcash has been historically living in truth. Zcash not only pioneered deploying Zero-knowledge proofs at high-scale. It also did a fair launch when every other project was pre-mining and steering price action by controlling liquidity. On a retrospective, that had consequences on price action that were not foreseen and ZEC has not been able to recover from. Someone during an off-site conversation said a clarifying thing:
Being early is as bad as being late. The market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent
That resounded strongly in the light of what was being discussed. ZK as an industry seems to be entering a bull market but not specifically the privacy aspects that ZK brings. Can Zcash afford to wait for the market to turn rational? What are the actions that the development ecosystem can do to foster a price action? Is it liquidity? Is it UX? Is it integration with DeFi or all of the above? How to do all this with a handful of developers in comparison with other ecosystems such as Ethereum or Bitcoin?
Some of these questions may find possible answers in the following sessions of the day
Zashi Q2 retro
The Zashi team went through their past quarter of the year. Zashi 2.0 and app redesign, DEX integration research, tor integration and NEAR Swaps. Their most important highlight is that they correlate Zashi’s laugh with the current spikes on the Orchard pool size which has reached 3 million ZEC at the time of the summit. They also correlated how events organized by Zcash Brasil peaked on Zashi installs during those days. Shout out to Zcash Brasil folks who are actually killing it out there with their meet ups, conference presence and continuous amplification of what’s going on in the Zcash ecosystem. The Zashi team will continue to focus on integrations. After NEAR Swaps and payments they will focus on MAYA DEX integration.
We had a sneak peak of NEAR Swaps and it was great. We could also hear from on of the most important contributors to the NEAR ecosystem: Aurora
An outsider’s look on Zcash (Aurora - NEAR)
The person behind NEAR’s integration with Zcash gave a somewhat controversial and shaking point of view of Zcash. Which was great food of thought. From its point of view, altcoins are in a bear market, BTC dominates and Zcash shines with a lot of potential in terms of narrative, mindshare, memetic value and positive sentiment for long term investment. Although this person also brought up some shades of grey. Protocol is getting more decentralized but hash rate is going the opposite side with high percentage of of mining power concentrated in a handful of mining pools.
“Technology superiority is not guaranteed success”
The case of VHS vs Betamax (interesting forum post (here)[https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/betamax-vs-vhs/51438]) being a famous precedent. While Zcash has the best privacy tech it still depends on trusting the Lightwalletd server for most of its most accessible use cases. Zaino is going to fix that, but still the idea remains. A lot of tooling is missing from the Zcash DX (Developer Experience) in order to make our developer ecosystem bigger.
According to our NEAR friend, privacy has a market close to 9 billion USD although investors look at that market with a bearish look because as of now, pseudonymity is acceptable for 99% of crypto’s user base. The other setback the Zcash has is that its value proposition is too reliant on tech, while people don’t care about tech at all. People care about what works. Zcash has to meet them where they are, like Apple does.
Coming back to the Betamax and VHS case, how to home video industry leaned towards VHS was a decisive factor for this product of undeniably worse technology so surpass Betamax. A particular industry fully dedicated to films that are only meant to be watched privately 😉had the leading use case for VHS. This is true also for things that is available for purchase on the internet that’s only meant to be be acquired privately and which payments are currently causing heated moments when it comes to credit card bills in the household.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could buy that expensive but still beautiful wedding ring privately with by borrowing ZEC from a lending DeFi protocol and paying it via the orchard pool?
What NEAR has to offer now in production
- Proof-of-Authority bridge for deposits and withdrawals of ZEC
- Solver/Market makers
- Zero percent fee trading pool
- Incentivized lending protocol
What’s in the works
- Light client based bridge (w/ support of shielded ZEC)
- Escrow swaps
- Streaming swaps that let bigger trades with less slippage
- DEX aggregation for more liquidity
There’s no doubt that the NEAR folks are actually heavily invested in Zcash and it was great to hear them out.
ECC’s vision on next steps in the Zcash Ecosystem
The next block of sessions would be Zashi’s next steps, current status of Zallet, and a collaborating on a roadmap towards Zcashd deprecation
Zashi has been surveying its users for a while and they have been noticing an improvement on net promoter scores on Zashi and Zcash UX in general. Their goal is to be a “Venmo for private payments” which Zcash is far from but that’s the horizon that Zashi product owners are looking forward to.
Things that the ECC is juggling for 2026
- ZSAs
- ZSA Swaps
- Tachyon
- Coinholder Voting
- Multisig support
- Sign in with zashi
- Ledger support
- Private key management
- Staking and delegation
- Coin inheritance and management of legacy
- Quantum resilience
Zallet is going Alpha
ECC’s full node wallet is shaping up and is about to reach its MVP (minimum viable product) milestone. This comprises basically of a basic Zcashd migration and example configuration guide, wallet encryption, mnemonic phrase generation and import, zcashd’s wallet.dat key migration, RPC server, RPC client and that is usable as a wallet. The goal of this to get early hands on feedback from users of the Zcashd wallet and keep iterating on Zallet. ECC is planning to include breaking changes early and fix them as a product of addressing that feedback from breakage at this alpha stage.
The Roadmap
The room gathered representatives from all orgs involved in Zcashd deprecation and NU7: ECC, ZF, Zingo, Shielded Labs and QEDIT. The perfect storm to agree on a short term roadmap for Zcash. The whiteboard was turned into a squiggly-lined grid and we started to estimate in which of the following quarters each milestone could land and different tracks for the organizations responsible for them
The outcome is this roadmap blogpost from ECC. We have seen other posts like this one but this last one in particular has the ATH in collaboration seal stamped on it.
The next day of the summit would be ECC only as is has always been in previous editions.
There was high consensus that this summit was very productive and that it will advance the collective efforts of the ecosystem actors forward.
These chronicles were possible thanks to ZCG's funding and ECC's invitation. I'd like to thank the committee and FPF for their continuous support on my work.
I hope that these lines of text help you be a little bit closer.
Onward!