The new overlord of privacy coins》Zcash announces Q4 development blueprint focusing on four major goals, ZEC market value surpasses Monero XMR

With the strong rise of the privacy coin Zcash, the core development team ECC announced the Q4 blueprint, from strengthening privacy to expanding the ecosystem, the market is paying attention to whether it can stay ahead of regulatory and technical challenges.
(Preliminary information: Privacy coins welcome the general rise! A single sentence from Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant caused Zcash to soar 200% in ten days)
(Background supplement: The privacy coin $ZEC soared 6 times in a month. What drove this carnival?)

Contents of this article

The privacy coin market has been volatile recently, and the price of Zcash (ZEC) has been around 50 since mid-September. The U.S. dollar surged to around $420, surpassing Monero in market capitalization Monero is currently ranked as the 21st largest coin.

As the popularity heats up, Zcash core development team Electric Coin Co. (ECC) released its development blueprint for the fourth quarter of 2025, announcing the direction of further strengthening privacy, improving wallet experience, and protecting developer funds.

Four major goals of the technical blueprint

According to the blueprint released by ECC, Orchard The protocol’s shielded supply has exceeded 4.1 million, reflecting increased on-chain usage. The market expects Zcash to have both "optional privacy" and potential cross-chain interoperability, which will gain advantages in an increasingly regulatory environment and boost investor sentiment.

ECC locked four milestones in the document:

• First, realize instantaneous transparent addresses for ZEC exchange through the NEAR Intents protocol to reduce the risk of sensitive data leakage
• Second, automatically rotate transparent addresses to further dilute transaction traceability
• Third, expand the compatibility of Zashi wallets with Keystone hardware wallets and ease the use threshold
• Fourth, introduce Keystone's P2SH multi-signature support provides layered security control for developer funds.

These measures form a protection chain from the protocol layer to the application layer, trying to simultaneously improve privacy and usability.

Privacy Attack and Defense of Zashi Wallet

ECC has condensed the core tasks of this season into:

"Reduce technical debt, improve the privacy and usability of Zashi users, and ensure the smooth management of developer funds."

Specifically, Zashi will add decentralized entry/exit channels and temporarily close the Coinbase entry channel to reduce reliance on a single centralized service. The two functions proposed by the blueprint, "instantaneous address" and "transparent address rotation", respectively improve privacy by reducing address reuse and obfuscating transaction history.

However, well-known blockchain investigator ZachXBT also warned that there is still the possibility of information leakage in the integration of Zashi and NEAR Intents, reminding the market of the difficulty of choosing between privacy and ease of use.

Ecological expansion and regulatory test

The Orchard protocol brings better scalability to Zcash and also lays the foundation for compatibility with other chains. The blueprint hints that it may be interconnected with public chains such as Solana in the future to expand asset flow channels. The “North Star Vision” proposed by ECC includes the possibility of moving to PoS and building an official flagship wallet to consolidate user experience and network security.

However, global regulation continues to focus on privacy coins. Although Zcash’s “optional privacy” improves compliance flexibility, it remains to be seen whether it can completely eliminate policy risks.