Josh Swihart, founder and CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab, used a June 1 appearance on the Bankless podcast to argue that crypto’s privacy debate is no longer theoretical. Speaking with Bankless host David Hoffman, Swihart framed private digital money as a prerequisite for internet-native finance, not a niche feature for a subset of users.
Zcash Developer Says Privacy Fight Is Already Here
Swihart said the industry is already in the middle of a political and technical fight over financial privacy, even if that fight has not always been visible to much of the crypto market. Zcash, launched in 2016 as a Bitcoin code fork with zero-knowledge cryptography, has long positioned itself around shielded transactions, but Swihart argued that the need for private money has become more urgent as more financial activity moves on-chain and as AI systems make data aggregation easier.
“As a society, if we don’t have privacy or private money on the web, we’ll enter dystopia,” Swihart said. “If crypto is really going to be used as money on the internet, as internet money, we have to have privacy for agency, to be who we truly are, for security and even for censorship resistance. You can’t have censorship resistance without privacy.”
Swihart also described years of engagement with policymakers, regulators and law enforcement in Washington, D.C. He said some officials recognized that publicly exposed financial data could become a national security problem, while still preferring systems that preserved government visibility. Recounting one unnamed agency conversation, Swihart said: “They told me, we recognize this is a massive national security problem. If all of our citizens’ data is exposed to foreign adversaries for everybody to see for all time, we just don’t intend for crypto to go mainstream.”
Josh Swihart Warns Crypto Needs Private Money
The Zcash Open Development Lab is the new home for what had been the core engineering and product team at Electric Coin Company, where Swihart previously served as CEO. On Bankless, he described the Zcash ecosystem as having gone through governance changes, open-source releases and a product push centered on Zashi, the flagship wallet now associated with ZODL. He said the wallet’s focus on easier shielded use helped drive growth in Zcash’s shielded pool, which he described as moving from roughly 11% of ZEC supply in early 2024 to north of 30%.
Swihart emphasized that shielded adoption is the metric he watches most closely. “It’s the most important KPI in my mind,” he said. “Price is great, and wallet downloads are great, but if you look at the shielded pool, the shielded pool is generally up and to the right.” He added that when ZEC moves from exchanges into self-custody and shielded addresses, it can indicate actual privacy use rather than only speculative exposure.
He also discussed ZODL’s recently raised $25 million funding round, naming Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, the Winklevoss twins and Chapter One among backers. Swihart said the company was selective about its cap table because it wanted investors aligned with Zcash’s privacy mission, not just capital providers. “It’s not about the check,” he said. “The check is important, but we need to build a coalition of people that believe in what we are trying to accomplish and that are in positions of power to help us do that.”
Swihart’s message was that privacy cannot be bolted onto crypto after mass adoption; it has to be built into the systems people actually use. For Zcash, that means scaling to more users, improving wallet usability, pursuing post-quantum security work, and making shielded self-custody accessible enough that private money becomes ordinary rather than exceptional.
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.