🕳️hydratedGoose🪿

Arthur Hayes: "AI will know everything about us. that's why Zcash is my second biggest bag." the voices sharpest on AI risk are quietly on the same trade. the real stakes aren't about hiding criminal money. the stakes are who owns the dossier when every public ledger becomes an AI training set. Zcash shielded supply hit 29% of total issuance this month. that's not retail chasing. that's capital front-running the moment surveillance becomes default. privacy isn't a sector pick anymore. it's the only non-permissioned exit from a fully observable system. the full Hayes framing is in the clip.

Steven McClurg says privacy tokens are probably the second biggest thing for the market, and he named his two favorites. "Monero has issues in the US, which makes it not quite investable." "The two cryptocurrencies I like the best are Zcash and Litecoin." "I do believe the market's going to wake up and realize that privacy coins is where it's at." @stevenmcclurg @canaryfunds zcash:native litecoin:native

A private dollar nobody can trace or freeze, and a yield paid from every block. That's Zephyr Protocol. ❯❯ Meet ZephDash: The whole system explained with live chain data, interactive 3D and a simulator for any scenario. Watch, then explore ↓

🚨UPDATE: @ABABankers isn’t happy with the @USOCC’s final GENIUS Act rule, saying it “will preserve the status quo for crypto platforms” after the regulator dropped its proposed restrictions on stablecoin yield. “Attempting to address deposit flight and economic harm after it has occurred is the wrong approach,” ABA CEO @BankersPrez says.

TETHER CAN DELETE YOUR BALANCE. IT'S WRITTEN INTO THE CODE. Not freeze it. Delete it. The USDT contract has a function called destroyBlackFunds. It has been there since the 2017 Ethereum deployment. Here is what it does, in order. It checks that your address is already blacklisted. It reads your balance into a variable the developers named "dirtyFunds". It sets your balance to zero. It subtracts that amount from total supply. Then it logs the event. No function can reverse it. Once it runs, that balance is gone forever. The blacklist function names the address it targets "_evilUser". That is how the code sees you before anyone has proven anything. Only Tether's owner multisig can call it, on Ethereum and on Tron. A court can't. A regulator can't. When a government wants your money, Tether is the one that executes. Then comes step two. Tether mints the same amount fresh to whoever it chooses: a victim, a court address, a government address. Net supply change is zero. Your money just changed owners. The DOJ described this exact process in a forfeiture case filed in Massachusetts in March 2025, over roughly $9,016,612 in USDT. Burn, then reissue. USDC can block a wallet but can't burn the balance. Tether built the eraser in from the start. They keep promising you there will be no CBDC. It already exists. It runs on Tron and Ethereum, and it has an owner. Bitcoin doesn't. Exit with Bitcoin.

❯❯ Privacy is gaining fresh attention_ On Zephyr, $ZSD is a private-by-default stablecoin, and over-collateralized. Convert it into $ZYS for variable yield in ZSD, funded by PoW block rewards. 📈 97.6% total return (Oct 2024 launch). ❯❯ Privacy pays_ $ZEPH $XMR

$ZEC is just the beginning. The real opportunity might be much bigger than one coin. I mapped out 26 top projects across 9 categories with massive potential. The Privacy Landscape 👇 $XMR - @monero $ZANO - @zano_project $FIRO - @firoorg solana:5u83eeMKS5drqAdchhJQeUpt7x4DNaU7ZBnaMZjUpump - @PirateChain $PIVX - @_PIVX Optional Privacy & Payments: $DASH - @Dashpay $LTC - @litecoin decred:native - @decredproject $XVG - @vergecurrency Private Stablecoins: $ZEPH - @zephyr_org Private DeFi: $RAIL - @RAILGUN_Project Privacy Payments & Tools: solana:BBKPiLM9KjdJW7oQSKt99RVWcZdhF6sEHRKnwqeBGHST - @GhostWareOS Confidential Blockchains: oasis-network:native - @OasisProtocol aleo:native - @AleoHQ dusk-network:native - @DuskFoundation midnight-3:native - @MidnightNtwrk base:0xf43eb8de897fbc7f2502483b2bef7bb9ea179229 - @horizenglobal $XEL - @xelis_project Encrypted Computation: ethereum:0xa12cc123ba206d4031d1c7f6223d1c2ec249f4f3 - @zama $ARX - @Arcium ethereum:0x7cf9a80db3b29ee8efe3710aadb7b95270572d47 - @nillion ethereum:0xddb3422497e61e13543bea06989c0789117555c5 - @COTInetwork Network Privacy: $ANYONE - @AnyoneFDN ZK Infrastructure: $MINA - @MinaProtocol base:0x9b5e262cf9bb04869ab40b19af91d2dc85761722 - @nockchain Bookmark this! The privacy narrative is worth keeping an eye on.

My thoughts about zcash:native's price action: I'm still sceptical of ZEC as private money, most of the interest in ZEC seems to come from perps traders rather than actual spot holders/transactors of the coin. There is only 1 main wallet as well, Zodl which is a mobile wallet and there doesn't seem to be a good wallet extension or a PC wallet alternative. Wallet software on a mobile phone is extremely suspicious to use, desktop platforms are far safer in every aspect, don't think it's needed for me to elaborate on that further. ZEC's lack of default privacy makes it quite easy for on-chain sleuths to identify specific users due to entrances and exits. Think of the shielded system as one big Tornado Cash pool, even though the activity inside can be hidden, there will be clues left with amounts and timing, don't underestimate how sophisticated these detectives can be. The privacy aspect with the shielded pool in general can be questioned even if we don't consider the entrance/exit fingerprinting. if 1 wallet holds the majority of all ZEC in circulation, with the data being held by its very same app creators who run the ZEC team (Zcash Open Development Lab = ZODL) then who says it's truly private? Despite all this, ZEC is in a better position that it was a year ago. Around $7.5b is shielded in its pool so the anonymity there is a lot better than before, with over 5000 daily users. Even Tornado Cash users are very easily identified these days due to how low usage it gets, so if the ZEC shielded pool keeps increasing in users + TVL it could become a viable alternative privacy coin. Personally I still wouldn't put ZEC in the same category as XMR's mandatory privacy. I see ZEC as an additional privacy tool, you could do routes like: Swap ETH into ZEC -> shield ZEC -> swap shielded ZEC into XMR. Or the other way around when selling XMR to add another privacy layer. I could see ZEC complementing XMR but shielding can't hide what identifiable entry/exit amounts as well as the data/logs a suspicious wallet software can reveal. Overall I'm glad to see the price go up. The main reason XMR has gone up alongside it is because XMR turned into a beta play so the Monero community has a lot to thank the ZEC speculators for by bringing attention to privacy.