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Zcash Revival Sparks Debate on Bringing Privacy Back to Bitcoin - news.adtechsolutions Zcash Revival Sparks Debate on Bringing Privacy Back to Bitcoin - news.adtechsolutions

Zcash Revival Sparks Debate on Bringing Privacy Back to Bitcoin



The cryptographic community in X has been dominated by prominent figures who favor the adoption of Zcash as privacy becomes increasingly threatened by governments and regulators.

While the Winklevoss twins, Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan support 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 proofing.

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. Since 2008, Ben-Sasson and his collaborators had been working on zero-purpose general knowledge testing technology. While they didn’t have a use case, they knew the technology was incredibly powerful.

“We knew that zero-knowledge proofs solve two problems: scalability and privacy. They offer integrity. They can basically convince you that the right thing has been done, even when you’re not watching and even when you don’t really see all the details,” Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction liveshow on X.

Everything changed in 2013 when Ben-Sasson gave a speech about ZK in one of the first editions of the Bitcoin conference.

“I’m from the podium and a bunch of very influential Bitcoin OGs, like Greg Maxwell and Mike Hearn, came up and said, ‘OK, where’s the technology?’ When can we use the code?” And I asked him, “Why do you need it?”

Related: The truth behind the return of the privacy-focused Zcash protocol in 2025

These first Bitcoin (BTC) developers and advocates outline several ways that Bitcoin could benefit from the new methodology. Suddenly, ZK-proofs had found their killer use case.

“So we worked very diligently to publish something that shows how this technology can solve one of the most important problems of blockchains, which is the fact that when you make a Bitcoin transaction, everyone can see the amount, can almost understand who paid who and how much.”

This transparency, while by design, means that there is an inevitable element of transparency when using Bitcoin. ZK-proofs offers a solution, but the Bitcoin code does not allow its inclusion due to a decision made by Satoshi Nakamoto several years ago.

Why OP_CAT holds the key to privacy in Bitcoin

Ben-Sasson said Bitcoin can still have native privacy and infinite scalability if developers can agree to reinstate OP_CAT, a Satoshi-era OP_Code that Bitcoin’s creator disabled in 2010.

He also noted that the resurrection of Zcash in 2025 could serve as a potential catalyst for Bitcoin’s push for privacy.

“I hope that one consequence of this would be that the Bitcoin community becomes more open to things like OP_CAT and OP_STARK so that we can have post-quantum security, privacy, scale and programmability for this beautiful hard business that is Bitcoin,” said Ben-Sasson.

“The technology is ready. All you need is a soft fork that adds new lines of code, which Satoshi actually introduced. It’s called OP_CAT. It’s very, very easy. If there’s a will, there’s a way. In this case, it’s a very simple way to give all that good to Bitcoin itself.”

Related: Leap Therapeutics rises 170% after $50M Zcash buy with Winklevoss support

Prominent Bitcoiners on social media have largely distanced themselves from the Zcash narrative, and there is still no real conversation about ways to improve privacy when using Bitcoin for payments.

Cointelegraph also spoke exclusively to Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss at Bitcoin Amsterdam, who explained their belief in Zcash’s potential to complement Bitcoin.

The twins made headlines after announcing the launch of Cypherpunk Technologies, a ZEC-based treasury company, following their acquisition and rebranding of Nasdaq-listed Leap Therapeutics in November.

Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash and more