Swihart's pitch was that Bitcoin no longer holds up as the cypherpunk-grade money it was meant to be. The asset works as an ETF wrapper and a store of value, he said, but as a peer-to-peer private payment system "it's just fundamentally broken."
Visible balances on a transparent ledger let governments seize what they can see, he argued, the same wealth-visibility critique Multicoin's Tushar Jain leaned on this week when disclosing the fund's purchases.
The user-side traction is running through the Electric Coin Company's mobile wallet after an October integration with Near Intents opened cross-chain swaps from assets like BTC, SOL and $USDC directly into shielded $ZEC.
Near Intents lets a user state what they want, like turning $USDC into $ZEC, while specialized routers handle the multi-step trade across different blockchains in the background.
Roughly $600 million to $700 million has flowed through that route since launch, mostly to and from USD and $USDC, Swihart said. Near's broader intent-based system has processed close to $800 million in volume over the past 30 days alone, per Near Protocol data, with Ethereum, Solana and Zcash dominating the chain side.
A separate proposal to cut Zcash's target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds is in active discussion on the project's community forum, with bridges to Solana and Hyperliquid already live, Mumtaz noted.
Token-holder voting through Zashi is also slated, Swihart said, less as formal governance and more as an opinion layer feeding the project's existing rough-consensus model.
For traders, the cleanest near-term test is whether quantum recoverability actually ships within Swihart's stated month. The fail-safe is the shielded pool, which now sits at roughly 30% of circulating $ZEC, an all-time high. If it keeps growing alongside price, the rally is being underwritten by adoption rather than speculation
coindesk.com
