"Crypto Without Privacy Isn't Crypto" - The Zcash Bull Case | Tushar Jain & Mert Mumtaz

**David** (0:02)
Bankless Nation, we've got a pretty unique episode today. We are joined with Tushar Jain. He is the co-founder of Multicoin Capital. Tushar, welcome to the show.

**Tushar Jain** (0:09)
Hey, David, thanks for having me.

**David** (0:10)
We're also joined with Mert Mumtaz. Mert, also, first time on the podcast. Welcome to the show.

**Mert Mumtaz** (0:15)
Thanks for having me, boss.

**David** (0:16)
Interesting podcast, interesting group of people we have. This is, I think, gonna be pretty exciting.
I got piqued by Zcash, and I kind of went down the rabbit hole, and I realized that there's just a lot more substance there.
Mert, you have been talking a lot about Zcash for over a half of a year now, maybe even longer. Tushar, Multicoin just publicly announced that you guys made a big, seemingly sizable investment into Zcash. Tushar, maybe we can start here. What got you over the hurdle? What was the moment that was like, maybe we should really consider this and come into Zcash in size? What did it for you?

**Tushar Jain** (0:50)
There were a combination of factors for us.
First, I want to acknowledge that Mert was earlier to this than I was and has been talking about it for much longer.
I was watching that and I was watching the entire narrative around Zcash last year really start to build up. This is an asset that I've seen since it started and paid attention to. Mostly, it was just left for dead. People weren't really paying attention to it. And so, it kind of languished out there. And then I saw that there was this huge push for it. But when I see something like that, I always pause and wonder, is this some manufactured thing? Is it sustainable? Is there a real groundswell of support here? Or am I just seeing a handful of echo chambery things? And when you see the price do what it did last year, and then what we saw was it pulled back very significantly. And as I saw it pull back, what I saw was, one, the people who were talking about it were still excited about it. Two, the place where it pulled back on the chart actually demonstrated much better attention and strength than where the thing was trading for years and years before that. So of course, like all things in the market, things get overheated, people get really excited, they price that in first, then that implied leverage in the market has to get wiped out. That's what we saw last year. We also had a bunch of macro crypto bear things basically happening with 10-10 liquidations and so on and aftermath of that. But Zcash weathered that test, did not lose the key people who were supporting it. It retained a lot of the community support. It retained the price strength, which demonstrated to me that this was more sustainable.
That was one of the primary things that got us over the line.

**David** (2:59)
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