The crypto community on X has been dominated by prominent figures advocating for the adoption of Zcash as privacy becomes increasingly threatened by governments and regulators.
While the Winklevoss twins, Naval Ravikant, and Balaji Srinivasan back the adoption of Zcash (ZEC), its success could spur the Bitcoin ecosystem to push for more privacy features by revisiting the reactivation of OP_CAT, according to Eli Ben-Sasson, founder of StarkWare and a renowned mathematician who helped pioneer zero-knowledge proofs.
Zcash was inspired by Bitcoin
In 2014, Ben-Sasson and his co-authors published “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin.”
The white paper was the culmination of six years of theoretical work. From 2008, Ben-Sasson and his collaborators had been working on general-purpose zero-knowledge proof technology. While they didn’t have a use case, they knew the technology was incredibly powerful.
Zcash has been trending on Crypto Twitter for months.
Not many know the backstory behind the biggest cryptocurrency in the privacy space.
We’re chatting to @EliBenSasson about the history of @Zcash and the ZK tech behind it.
Join me and @rkbaggs live!https://t.co/ZRh96OzBD7
— Gareth Jenkinson (@gazza_jenks) November 10, 2025
“We knew zero-knowledge proofs solve two problems: scalability and privacy. They offer integrity. They basically can convince you that the right thing has been done, even when you’re not watching and even when you don’t actually see all the details,” Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction liveshow on X.
Everything changed in 2013 when Ben-Sasson gave a talk on ZK at one of the earliest editions of the Bitcoin conference.
“I got off the podium and a bunch of very influential Bitcoin OGs, like Greg Maxwell and Mike Hearn, came up and said, ‘OK, where’s the tech? When can we use the code?’ And I asked them, ‘Why do you need it?’”
Related: Truth behind comeback of privacy-focused protocol Zcash in 2025
These early Bitcoin (BTC) developers and advocates outlined several ways that Bitcoin could benefit from the new methodology. Suddenly, ZK-proofs had…
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