How Zcash and NEAR Are Driving This Crypto Bull Run

Illia Polosukhin (0:00)

You can initiate prep positions for your financial balance. There's more and more features coming, and we actually want to open it up to more and more developers to actually build different financial applications, really creating this Continental DeFi as a place where you can build, indeed, for the consumers that care about privacy and indeed for institutions who've been actually waiting for tap-in to DeFi and sitting on sidelines because they were not able to participate in the traditional Unchained economy. So I think there is a huge opportunity to really leverage this private conventional computer that we built with our private shard, all the NEAR Intents economy that's built on top of it.

Laura Shin (0:43)

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your Dohey Presource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this livestream. At first, we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Oneinch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from Oneinch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance, and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at oneinch.com/aqua.

Before we get started, I want to ask you for something. We're making a bunch of decisions right now about Unchained. What we make next, when we go live, what we should be doing more of, and I'd rather hear from you before we make them than after. So we put together a survey. It takes just a few minutes, it's anonymous, and there's a box where you can tell me what we could be doing better. I read all the responses. The link is in the show notes, or you can snap the QR code on screen, or go to unchainedcrypto.com/survey. Thanks.

Today's topic is privacy, confidentiality, and all things Zcash and NEAR. Here to discuss are Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, and Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius, and Zcash Influencer. Welcome, Illia and Mert.

Illia Polosukhin (2:00)

Good to be here.

Mert Mumtaz (2:00)

Well, and co-inventor of LLM Sparilla.

Laura Shin (2:05)

Right. We can't forget that. That's actually really important.

I noticed that Illia's wife today was just reminding herself that he has that title.

Let's get into it, you guys. It's a very bullish market right now. Bitcoin Ethan Saul did around 10% on the week, but Zcash and NEAR are ripping. Zcash is up 32% over the week. It's NEAR in all time high, and it's now ranked number nine on CoinGecko, which I'm super excited about. And NEAR is up 69% in that time. It's now ranked 23 And I'm imagining both of you are super stoked. Zcash also has an upgrade coming up. NEAR announced a whole bunch of really cool new features recently, and both of these coins play super well with each other. So why don't you each start with like, you know, why it is that you think your coin is doing so well? And for Mert, it's his Zcash influencer role, not Solana, that I'm asking about. So either one of you can start.

Mert Mumtaz (3:14)

Illia, I'll let you go.

Illia Polosukhin (3:17)

Yeah, I mean, for NEAR, we've been effectively building for the past few years this kind of technology that brings not just a NEAR ecosystem, but all the ecosystem together. And Zcash is one of the biggest kind of ecosystems that we're working with very closely, but it works with Solana, it works with Ethereum, it works with Aligram, Tron, et cetera, right? And the idea is really to remove the boundaries that kind of that's recreated.

And at the end really kind of deliver on this like unified liquidity, unified market idea that I think crypto always been promising, but it's always been really hard to experience. And as people started kind of interfacing with it, trying our kind of first-party app, neon.com, there is kind of more and more understanding that this is actually kind of how crypto should be working.

And importantly, I think biggest unlock has been both Zcash and NEAR bringing at last privacy on chain. To me, it's always been kind of a biggest bottleneck to use day-to-day blockchain for anything, because I have literally a spreadsheet of 100 addresses on Ethereum and kind of NEAR before we had privacy, so I can track who did I send money, which address did I use, how much gas I left on that address. It's a nightmare of accounting system to just keep track of, to make sure I don't link anything, go through success, make sure I don't have timing attacks on amounts, etc. And all of that it gets solved now that we have Zcash and NEAR, we are delivering kind of like, how do you have a private experience using blockchain? So I think like all these things really coming together now, as more and more people actually starting to use blockchain, financial system is moving to blockchain, and if never before, and so at least that's my explanation why things are really starting to appreciate.