No wonder Zcash's price has skyrocketed—it turns out this project really has some insane backing behind it . Got bored today and decided to learn more about Zcash's cryptographic details, so I dug up the earliest academic paper published on it. Then, in the acknowledgments section, I saw a string of jaw-dropping names, including the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, U.S. Navy Office, Israeli Research Center, and Israel Ministry of Science and Technology... So Zcash is a project that's simultaneously funded by the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Israel at a national level .