“Understanding why Zcash is rising can make a lot of money for you and me. A lot of people think the move is purely a privacy trade. That is only the tip of the iceberg.”
The remarks came from a podcast featuring independent researcher and Zcash bull Taiki Maeda, released on Oct. 9 under the title How Zcash Flips Bitcoin and later compiled in Chinese by TechFlow. In the episode, Maeda laid out a full investment case for Zcash and said his personal target is $20,000 per ZEC before the current bull market ends.
A personal bet on Zcash flipping Bitcoin
Maeda said the starting point is the recurring “flippening” narrative that has shown up in every major crypto cycle since 2017. In his telling, each cycle produces an asset that rallies hard enough for the market to believe it can unseat the incumbent.
He pointed to Bitcoin Cash in 2017 during the block-size war, when many participants genuinely believed BCH could flip Bitcoin. He then cited Ethereum in 2020, when the DeFi supercycle fed the idea that ETH could overtake Bitcoin under the “ultrasound money” banner. For 2024, he pointed to Solana, which he said was seen by part of the market as a possible challenger to Ethereum during the meme-driven cycle.
For Maeda, the key question is not whether the flip actually happens. It is whether enough people believe it can happen. That belief alone can drive price action. He said excess returns come from identifying the incumbent under attack and then backing the challenger trying to take market share from it, a setup some investors describe as a late-mover advantage.
Dominating a niche first, then aiming at the endgame
To explain the framework behind that view, Maeda referenced Peter Thiel’s idea in Zero to One about becoming the last great innovator in a market rather than simply the first mover. He described first-mover advantage as a tactic, not the final objective. What matters, he said, is long-duration cash flow and the ability to own a market for years.
He also invoked chess grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca’s line about studying the endgame first. In crypto, Maeda said, two assets fit that structure of a narrow niche paired with a very large long-term destination.
The first is Hyperliquid. He said its niche is perpetual futures, while its long-range ambition is to become infrastructure that can carry all of finance. The second is Zcash, which he described as one of the most misunderstood assets in the market and the one with the most extreme asymmetry in his portfolio.
Maeda said many people instinctively reject the idea that Zcash could challenge Bitcoin. His answer is that Bitcoiners have actively chosen to make Bitcoin rigid.
Zcash’s niche is privacy, but Maeda says its endgame is electronic cash
Maeda argued that Zcash currently dominates the privacy-coin niche, yet the privacy trade is only the entry point. Its real endgame, he said, is to fulfill Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
“Zcash’s endgame is fulfilling Satoshi’s vision for Bitcoin: peer-to-peer electronic cash. Bitcoiners actively chose to ossify Bitcoin. The white paper says electronic cash, but they are satisfied with making no changes and turning it into digital gold,” he said.
He added that he still owns Bitcoin and still sees it as a valuable asset. Even so, he argued that every cycle produces assets that challenge the incumbent and try to pull away market share. In his view, the approach of quantum threats and changing consumer demand for privacy have opened a wedge for Zcash to compete for both market share and capital flows.
He said most of the market discussion around Zcash remains stuck on privacy, while the more important development is a protocol upgrade called Project Tachyon. Maeda described it as a candidate to become one of the most consequential upgrades in crypto history.
Project Tachyon ties scalability to quantum resistance
According to Maeda, Project Tachyon is meant to do two things at once. One is to add scalability and move Zcash toward throughput in the thousands and eventually tens of thousands of transactions per second. The other is to make the network quantum resistant.
He said those two goals cannot be separated. “You can’t solve quantum without solving scaling, because post-quantum signatures are 10 to 30 times larger than current signatures. If you only solve quantum, you create terrible chain bloat. That is why Tachyon matters. It does both.”
His point was straightforward: if post-quantum signatures are much larger, a chain that upgrades only for quantum resistance without a scaling plan would face severe data expansion. In his view, that is exactly why the two tracks have to be bundled.
On timing, Maeda said the lead developer working on this area had hoped to deliver within the year, based on an interview in April. That schedule slipped after the Orchard pool vulnerability and a potential infinite-mint bug surfaced in June. He said the more realistic target is now the first quarter of 2027.
Maeda also said he was recording the episode in Singapore and noted that a Zcash event was coming up within days. If Zooko were to present a concrete Tachyon roadmap there, he said, that alone could act as a short-term catalyst for ZEC.
Adaptability versus immutability
Maeda said the cleanest way to understand the difference between Bitcoin and Zcash is not privacy and not quantum. It is the fact that Zcash can change while Bitcoin largely cannot.
He cited a view from an analyst on X that the biggest distinction between the two networks is Zcash’s ability to evolve. In his framing, that is a trade-off. Bitcoin’s rigidity buys stronger immutability guarantees and fixed supply, while Zcash keeps more room to respond to new threats and changing user demand, including privacy and quantum risk.
He said that advantage extends beyond upgrade flexibility and into the question of security budget. Maeda said he does not have a convincing answer for what happens after all 21 million BTC are mined. He described the common responses in the market as either “deal with it later” or “steal Satoshi’s coins before quantum computers do and add them to tail emission.” His follow-up question was simple: what happens after that?
By contrast, he said the Zcash community is already discussing a “sustainable funding mechanism” for the network, which he compared to an EIP-1559-style approach where part of transaction fees is burned and redirected into issuance. At minimum, he said, that means the community is taking long-term sustainability seriously.
Maeda also brought in Jevons paradox. If Zcash becomes extremely cheap, extremely fast and capable of tens of thousands of TPS, he said, usage could rise enough to generate fee revenue that keeps miners economically engaged. That, in his view, is a missing piece for Bitcoin and one Zcash is trying to address.
A 2028 thought experiment
Maeda then asked listeners to imagine the world in 2028. In that scenario, Project Tachyon is live, Zcash is quantum resistant and the network is moving along a scaling roadmap that starts around 5,000 TPS, with lab targets of 10,000, 20,000 and 30,000 TPS.
At the same time, he imagined a Bitcoin community split around Q-Day. One side, in his scenario, becomes alarmed and argues that Bitcoin is no longer rising because of Q-Day, so Satoshi’s coins should be moved and the consequences dealt with later. The other side argues that such a move would destroy Bitcoin’s immaculate conception and must never happen.
Maeda said that kind of internal conflict could make large allocators less comfortable placing major value-storage positions in Bitcoin. He also tied the thought experiment to the fact that 2028 is a U.S. election year. He said the public has already seen Donald Trump launch a meme coin and “extract” from the market once, and suggested that a future cycle could bring more rhetoric around a given asset class or heavier taxes on the wealthy.
He did not present those outcomes as certainties. He presented them as a possible world investors should be willing to model. In that world, he said, high-net-worth holders may look for non-sovereign stores of value outside capital controls, and Zcash could be one candidate.
The 1.5% “flip probability” and the insurance trade
Maeda said the market is currently pricing Zcash’s probability of flipping Bitcoin at roughly 1.5%, because the ZEC/BTC ratio is around 1.5%. He argued that the number is too low and that the market is materially underpricing Zcash’s right tail.
He broke the move into stages. A rise from $400 or $500 to $1,000 or $1,200, he said, could happen simply because investors start caring more about privacy again, which would be enough to bring in crypto-native capital. The parabolic move, in his view, would come from something like Tachyon.
If Zooko were to present a credible roadmap in the coming weeks and say, for example, “in the second half of 2027 we reach X KTPS,” Maeda said he would not be surprised to see Zcash reprice sharply higher. At that point, he said, the market could start asking why Zcash should not be worth more if it offers privacy, a scaling roadmap and a quantum roadmap while Bitcoin does not.
He used a line attributed to Naval to frame the relationship: “Bitcoin is insurance against fiat. Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin.” In Maeda’s view, investors do not need to bet on a full flippening to act on that thesis. They could simply do what he said some Bitcoin whales are doing: sell 2% of their Bitcoin and buy Zcash as a hedge.
He pushed the point further. If people think Zcash can only ever reach 10% or 20% of Bitcoin’s market cap, he said, it will never get there, because no one will still be chasing it at 9.9%. For marginal buyers to keep stepping in once Zcash reaches a double-digit share of Bitcoin’s value, they have to believe a full flip is possible.
Maeda also said on-chain activity already shows older Bitcoin whales rotating from BTC into ZEC. He added that while Bitcoin maximalists rarely say publicly that they are selling Bitcoin for Zcash, some more rational maxis may still view a 2% allocation to ZEC as insurance.
Investing in the world 12, 24 and 36 months ahead
In the final section of the podcast, Maeda cited Stanley Druckenmiller’s investment philosophy: “Never, ever invest in the present. Imagine the world 12, 24, 36 months from now, and invest in that world, because most of what is happening today is already in the price.”
He said that in the AI era, excess returns come from first-principles thinking about what others are missing and then investing in that future. If the thesis is right, the payoff can be large. If it is wrong, the market punishes you.
Maeda said the episode was also a prediction for his future self. By the end of 2028, he said, he may be watching the video back with a cocktail in hand, either pleased that he called it correctly or laughing at how wrong he was if Bitcoin reaches $1 million and Zcash goes to zero.
Still, he said the second outcome looks highly unlikely to him. If Zcash were going to fail, he argued, it should have gone to zero after the Orchard-related FUD in June. Instead, it survived and remained close to all-time highs. In his view, the market is already signaling that “there is something here.”
He closed by saying Zcash is one of the most misunderstood assets in crypto. Many old-school OGs, major Bitcoin bulls and ETH holders, he said, are still operating on views formed two years ago. With Tachyon in the picture, he argued, Zcash is no longer the same asset they think it is.
Maeda also said Zcash has endured nine to 10 years of poor price performance and still carries proof-of-work issuance, yet remains one of the closest things to Bitcoin’s “immaculate conception.” As for his own position, he said he plans to sell into strength because Zcash makes up the majority of his net worth, and holding all the way to $20,000 would be irresponsible. Even so, he said, the simple idea that “Zcash can cancel Bitcoin” is enough to get people over the psychological hurdle.
