Half of my portfolio is now ZEC.
That's not a hedge. That's not a trade I'm planning to exit. That's a conviction bet, and I want to walk through how I got here, because the path mattered more than the destination.
I started with a little bit. I bought some, told myself it was exposure. Then I started learning more.
How a "Little Bit" Turned into 50%
I felt like the technology was a lot more deep than it appeared on the surface.
All the times I heard about Zcash over the years, I never really gave it a real look. Not until we integrated it into LeoDex. That's the thing about walking the factory floor. You can't see what's actually there until you're inside building.
Once I started working with my team on Zcash and ZEC, I started learning about everything Zcash offered. Transparent cash you can spend onchain. Shielded cash. Private digital onchain money.
The privacy narrative never excited me a whole lot to begin with. I love privacy as much as the next guy, but onchain capital was what I had more of an interest in. Learning about ZEC opened my eyes to a very different view about what "private onchain money" truly means. More on that later.
The flow of moving between transparent and private money. Actually spendable, actually usable in the real world is what really started to excite me.
shielding ZEC inside the LeoDex Desktop Wallet
The shielding flow led me down a deep rabbit hole on what Zcash could offer both now and in the future. I saw technology, updates, and community spirit behind Zcash that I had never seen before.
Once we started adding it to LeoDex and tweeting about it and talking about it, we started getting a lot of people involved. They started telling me more about Zcash.
I started making friends in the community. Learning more. That's how the sizing decision grew from a little bit into 50%.
It wasn't a single moment. It was a thousand small ones that compounded.
The 180 on Privacy I Never Saw Coming
I have to admit my entire perspective did a 180.
Two years ago, I was as guilty as everyone else. Thinking the use cases for privacy didn't go much beyond the anecdotal dogmas about privacy coins just being used to hide transactions.
I thought of the communities behind privacy coins as undigestible to the rest of the world. I figured privacy coins would never really take off. So I focused more on Bitcoin.
I still have a lot of Bitcoin. I still believe in Bitcoin very fervently.
But my narrative around my portfolio has shifted. Bitcoin is the gold standard, the gold bar I put in my vault, and Zcash is onchain private digital cash I can spend at any time, for anything, anywhere, and I can use features that let me instantly pay and settle in other cryptos but use shielded ZEC when I want to pay for them.
Inb4 people say "well if its spendable cash, why own it and not just buy it to use it when you need it?" Betting on the technology growing is another aspect of holding ZEC and that's why many of us buy it and HODL it instead of just spending all the ZEC we have. There's two sides to this framing.
Spending ZEC is effectively the same as using physical cash in the real world.
Sometimes you just want to use physical cash to pay for something. Simple, clean, private. Easy!!
The Zcash ecosystem and community do something really well. They make Zcash extremely friendly. Private digital onchain money, not about hiding activities, but maintaining the level of privacy you'd have in the real world spending physical cash.
That reframe is the major 180 right there. It's something that institutional investors, companies and hedge funds (potentially even banks, one day) can get behind. It's less about "hiding" and more about "natural free rights".
Then AI showed up and changed my perspective even more.
AI agents tend to prefer quickly settling onchain money that also has privacy. If an agent is working on a project, they don't necessarily want to be public, but they need to pay for API or inference or other things. They'd rather use a form of cash that can't be linked directly to what they're working on.
That's just one niche use case.
Expand it outward. You don't want your health insurance company knowing you went and bought donuts yesterday, because they might raise your insurance costs.
Ten years ago that sounded dystopian. Today it sounds like a Q3 product roadmap.
You use your iPhone, you have a conversation with a friend about local burrito shops, and suddenly you're getting all these ads for local burrito shops.
We're already in an era of rampant oversight. The leap from where we are now to companies using our spending habits to negatively impact us is not a big leap, and it's probably already happening in some parts of the world.
That's what's going to change how people view things like Zcash.
Walking the Factory Floor on Zcash
The privacy wallet we're building on LeoDex isn't a clone of what already exists.
What we're going for is an intensely normalized user experience. Really focused on the average user's ability to actually use Zcash, but still extremely technically capable. More technically capable than any other Zcash wallet out there.
The LeoDex team does this really well. We hide the hard parts of UI behind permission gates. A user can easily do the surface-level things, and as they want to get deeper, they follow a nice progression into deeper features.
We've learned this over basically ten years in the crypto space.
That's the unique thing we bring. Usability. User-friendliness. Clean UX and UI.
The reason nobody else is building it isn't really a technical or regulatory wall. It's that the bigger players don't have the design DNA to make a privacy product feel approachable, and the existing privacy communities have been content to build for crypto-natives, not for the average person.
That gap is wide open and LeoDex intends to fill it.
Why ZEC Sits in the Middle, and Why that Matters
Here's the part that took me longest to see.
Zcash actually lives right in the middle. Somewhere between the digital-gold narrative and Monero. That's really important to grasp.
Zcash is very digestible. Something like Monero is harder to digest, especially the community around it.
I'm not a Monero hater. Monero has an important place in the marketplace. It's just different than Zcash.
Zec has reached this Bitcoin level of pureness, and that purity is what's going to take Zcash into the number-two spot in terms of being one of the largest cryptos in the world and utilized heavily on a day-to-day basis by the average person.
Zec has a lot more overlap with something like Bitcoin, but acting more as cash versus Bitcoin acting like gold.
The reason the market has been pricing ZEC wrong for years is exactly this. Everyone, including me until recently, fit Zcash into either the digital-gold bucket (where Bitcoin currently sits) or the hardcore-privacy bucket (where Monero currently sits).
Realizing it doesn't belong in either bucket but creates a category of its own is the real mindset shift.
It's the digestible, spendable, AI-era cash layer that sits between them. That's the critical narrative.
People ask, why Zcash in particular?
Zcash has a uniquely positioned institutional acceptedness because it can be both transparent and shielded. A lot of people point at that as a flaw, but it's actually a feature. You can have both.
What needs to happen on regulation and macro is pretty much the status quo just needs to keep happening. Winklevoss Twins x Gemini adopted it heavily. Naval and other top VC investors got in the trenches. Now Grayscale wants a ZEC ETF. Tomorrow, Ray Dalio may start buying and propagandizing ZEC.
The natural progression of AI. The natural progression of onchain settlement. The natural progression of people getting tired of surveillance capitalism. That's the tailwind.
The proof point is the price of Zcash going up is directly correlated with all these factors combining at this critical moment.
AI taking a large hold in society. Onchain private money handling that. Zcash uniquely positioned in branding, community, ecosystem, and technology.
I'm not waiting for permission from the market to be right.
Half my stack is in ZEC because the next five years of crypto don't belong to whoever has the loudest narrative. They belong to whoever has the most usable answer to a question every human is about to start asking.
Stop fitting ZEC into the wrong bucket and start paying attention.
When you're ready to start taking ZEC seriously, my team and I are actively building in the crosschain space. We were the first DEX Interface to launch Zcash DEX trading for Maya Protocol and Near Intents. We're now building an entire privacy-centric wallet that lives on your device and lets you hold, buy, swap and pay using Shielded ZEC. We're calling our payment rails "AnyPay" where you can pay shielded ZEC and the receiver gets any crypto as the output. Private onchain digital cash is now a reality.
You can support my work by using the app I founded https://leodex.io for all your ZEC buying needs! We support every Zcash route (Near Intents + Maya Protocol and others) and do it with:
- No KYC
- Low Fees
- Maximal Privacy