Zcash's shielded pool went from 11% to 30% of total supply in a single year. This is more growth than the previous eight years combined. Users are actively moving coins into the shielded pool and keeping them there. Shielded ZEC tends to be stickier, acting as a supply sink that removes coins from circulation. Three things changed in the last two years: the cryptography no longer requires any trust assumptions, mobile wallets actually work, and Near Intents gave users a non-custodial way to rotate into ZEC from any chain. In the last 30 days alone, ZEC has done $285M in volume on Near Intents versus $348M for BTC. That adoption is built on real cryptographic guarantees. The privacy is information-theoretically hidden. Sender, receiver, and amount are all encrypted in a way that makes transactions mathematically indistinguishable from one another. Every shielded transaction cryptographically proves no coins were counterfeited without revealing any transaction details. There's no information for a quantum computer to extract. The next phase is scaling. Orchard eliminated the trusted setup entirely and became the default shielded pool. Tachyon comes next, reworking how transactions are validated and batched to push throughput toward the levels needed for real economic activity. Now the privacy needs to work at scale.(Delphi Digital)