Zcash2026-10-14 02:31:04Taiki Maeda says he remains bullish on ZEC, calling it “quantum insurance” for BitcoinIndependent researcher and Zcash bull Taiki Maeda used a podcast released on Oct. 9 to lay out an unusually aggressive case for Zcash, saying his personal target for ZEC is $20,000 before the current bull market ends. His argument goes well beyond the usual privacy narrative. Maeda framed Zcash as a challenger asset in the recurring “flippening” trade that has appeared in past crypto cycles, citing BCH in 2017, ETH in 2020 and Solana in 2024 as earlier examples of markets rallying around a contender that could take share from an incumbent. He said Zcash’s niche is privacy coins, but its long-term destination is much larger: fulfilling Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash. In his view, Bitcoin has been intentionally hardened into digital gold, while Zcash has kept the ability to adapt. That adaptability, he argued, matters most in Project Tachyon, a proposed upgrade that combines scalability and quantum resistance. Maeda said the two must be built together because post-quantum signatures are estimated to be 10 to 30 times larger than current signatures. He also said the market is pricing Zcash’s “flip Bitcoin” odds at roughly 1.5%, based on the ZEC/BTC ratio, and argued that this right-tail outcome is being materially underestimated.430
Zcash2026-07-21 07:53:56Zcash launches Zakura full node client, with new Ironwood funds set to be quantum-recoverable by defaultZcash has rolled out Zakura, a new full node client developed jointly by Project Tachyon and Valar Group, adding a new piece to the network’s upcoming Ironwood upgrade path. In official testing, Zakura took about 4 hours and 20 minutes to sync the mainnet, a roughly fivefold improvement over Zebra. A pruned snapshot of around 11 GB cut node startup time to about 1 minute and 50 seconds. The client is designed to work alongside Project Tachyon’s recursive proof system and Valar Group’s private information retrieval technology as part of a three-layer scaling architecture. The long-term target for that stack is more than 50,000 transactions per second. Zakura will support the Ironwood upgrade, under which newly generated Ironwood funds will implement ZIP 2005 by default. That setup is intended to leave a recovery path for funds if future quantum computing systems threaten current cryptography. Ironwood will also use the Turnstile mechanism to restore verifiability of the ZEC circulating supply cap, while ZIP 318 is meant to reduce migration linkage risk through standard denominations and delayed broadcasting. Foresight News previously reported that Ironwood is expected to activate around July 28.1940
