Editor's Note: As artificial intelligence accelerates, discussions around AI in the crypto market are extending from computing infrastructure, decentralized computing, and the data economy to the privacy costs brought by technological progress. In the past, AI was mostly viewed as a technological force that boosts productivity and creates new demand; but as data analysis and identity recognition capabilities continue to strengthen, a more fundamental question begins to emerge: if public information becomes increasingly easy to track, correlate, and identify, will financial privacy gradually shift from a basic right to a scarce resource that needs to be repriced?

On October 20, Gemini co-founder and early Zcash investor the Winklevoss brothers, in an interview with Maxime Desalle, once again expressed their bullish view on privacy cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC). Cameron Winklevoss suggested that if the market were willing to assign Zcash a market cap equivalent to 10% of Bitcoin's, its price could reach over $5,000 per coin, with the long-term potential to move toward $10,000. More noteworthy than the specific price prediction is the valuation logic they proposed: as artificial intelligence continues to advance, financial privacy may become an increasingly scarce resource.

This judgment differs from traditional cryptocurrency investment frameworks. In the past, the market narrative for Bitcoin and other proof-of-work (PoW) crypto assets often revolved around fixed supply, halving cycles, and institutional adoption. But the Winklevoss brothers believe that Zcash's value may depend more on another set of variables: AI's ability to analyze public blockchains, the degree of exposure of personal financial information, and users' actual demand for private transactions.

The two did not only recently begin paying attention to Zcash. They invested in Bitcoin in 2012, participated in Zcash's early financing in 2016, and in recent years have expanded ZEC holdings and mining operations through Cypherpunk Technologies. In August 2026, Cypherpunk announced that it had acquired a batch of Zcash mining equipment through a transaction valued at $33.33 million, and according to the announcement at the time, its computing power accounted for about 18% of the entire network. Therefore, their views reflect both long-term investment philosophy and are closely related to their existing commercial interests.

The question truly worth discussing in this interview is not whether Zcash can reach a certain price target, but whether, as AI makes public information increasingly easy to analyze, the market will begin to reassess the economic value of privacy, and whether this demand can ultimately translate into actual adoption of Zcash.

The following is the original content (edited for easier reading):

From Digital Gold to Privacy Coin: What Is Bitcoin Missing?

When the Winklevoss twins first invested in Bitcoin in 2012, their core investment thesis was "digital gold."

Cameron recalled that they compared Bitcoin to gold at the time and found that Bitcoin had advantages in supply, portability, and divisibility.

Although gold is scarce, its supply is not fixed—new gold mines can still be discovered and mined. Bitcoin, by contrast, caps its total supply at 21 million coins, and that ceiling will not change no matter how much future demand grows.

Bitcoin is also easier to transport and divide. Cameron used the movie Die Hard as an analogy: even if someone successfully robbed an institution storing large amounts of gold, they would still need trucks to haul the gold away, whereas Bitcoin does not have the same physical transportation problem.

However, the two later realized that Bitcoin is inferior to gold in one important attribute: privacy.

Cameron pointed out that if a person holds gold bars, others may not necessarily know their asset situation. But with Bitcoin, all transaction records are stored on a public blockchain, and anyone can query and analyze them.

"Bitcoin is actually a very poor place to engage in illegal activity, because all transactions can be audited and are permanently recorded," Cameron said.

Tyler emphasized that Bitcoin's significance lies not only in creating a scarce asset, but also in being the first currency truly designed for the internet.

Bitcoin is both a protocol and an asset that runs on top of the protocol. Unlike traditional bank wire transfers or ACH automated clearing house transfers, it does not need to rely on the existing bank payment network.

"We realized at the time that this was the internet of money. Money itself is the greatest social network ever created," Tyler said.

But if Bitcoin's goal is to become an internet-native currency, should it also have the privacy attributes of physical cash? This was an important reason the Winklevoss brothers later turned to Zcash.

In 2016, the two participated in Zcash's seed round financing. Cameron said their judgment at the time was not much different from today: financial privacy is very important, and Bitcoin is even worse than the traditional financial system in this regard.

For example, in ordinary bank transfers, both parties and the relevant banks can access transaction information, but the public cannot directly view these fund flows. When using physical cash, the parties involved typically do not need to disclose payment amounts and transaction records to the outside world.

In contrast, Bitcoin's transaction data is open to everyone.

Cameron believes that if Zero-Knowledge Proof technology had been mature enough when Bitcoin was created, Satoshi Nakamoto would likely have incorporated privacy protection into the original protocol.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs allow one party to prove to another that a statement is true without disclosing the underlying information. Zcash uses related cryptographic techniques to provide users with Shielded Transactions that hide transaction addresses, amounts, and other information.

Cameron points out that the Bitcoin whitepaper describes it as a form of "electronic cash," but because transactions are public and transparent, Bitcoin does not fully possess the characteristics of traditional cash. In his view, Zcash is precisely attempting to solve this problem.

Tyler further elevates the distinction between the two to the level of monetary systems. He believes that Bitcoin has achieved the separation of money from the state, ending the government's absolute monopoly over money. But if governments can still observe and analyze all transactions, then this separation is not complete.

"Privacy is a boundary that marks where state power ends and where individual freedom and personal sovereignty begin." Cameron summarizes this evolution into three stages: traditional cash can protect privacy but relies on centralized issuance; Bitcoin created decentralized money but transactions are public; Zcash attempts to achieve both decentralization and financial privacy simultaneously.

The Stronger AI Becomes, the Scarcer Financial Privacy May Be

If financial privacy was the Winklevoss brothers' original reason for investing in Zcash, then the development of artificial intelligence has further reinforced their judgment.

Tyler believes that advances in AI have made the privacy problem of public blockchains more prominent.

Although Bitcoin addresses typically do not directly contain users' real names, on-chain transaction records remain publicly available over the long term. When this data is combined with exchange identity information, network activity, and other public data, analytics firms may be able to infer relationships between specific addresses and even identify the actual controllers behind some addresses.

AI can further improve the efficiency and scale of such analysis. This means that blockchain transparency is no longer merely a technical feature but may also become an important variable affecting personal asset security and financial privacy.

Based on this, Cameron offered the core judgment of the entire interview: "If you're bullish on AI, you have to be bullish on Zcash, even if you haven't realized it yet."

According to his explanation, if AI's analytical capabilities continue to improve, public financial data may become increasingly easy to identify, correlate, and exploit. Correspondingly, technologies that can protect sensitive information while verifying transaction validity may command higher market value.

Tyler called Zcash "the other side of the AI coin." "The more AI development shows parabolic, explosive growth, the more scarce privacy becomes as an asset."

In their view, Zcash can be seen not only as a privacy payment tool but also as an asset for investors to hedge against the financial privacy risks brought by AI. This logic differs from traditional AI investing.

Investors typically gain AI growth exposure through chips, cloud computing, data centers, and software companies. But the Winklevoss brothers propose that AI development may also produce new negative externalities, such as information exposure and enhanced surveillance capabilities, which could drive demand for privacy technology.

However, this remains an investment hypothesis rather than a validated market relationship. Improved AI capabilities do not necessarily lead to Zcash price increases, and whether privacy demand can translate into sustained use and holding of ZEC still depends on product experience, liquidity, the regulatory environment, and competition among other privacy solutions.

Beyond AI, the two also view quantum computing as a potential catalyst.

Tyler noted that some of the elliptic curve cryptography mechanisms used by Bitcoin may face challenges from sufficiently powerful quantum computers running Shor's algorithm in the future. He believes Zcash's shielded transaction mechanism can reduce sensitive information exposure to some extent, thereby providing additional protection.

But it is important to distinguish that privacy protection capability is not equivalent to full quantum resistance.

Some of Zcash's current cryptographic components still rely on mathematical assumptions that may be threatened by Shor's algorithm. Its co-founder Zooko Wilcox has previously stated explicitly that current Zcash cannot be directly called a quantum-resistant cryptocurrency. Therefore, the statements in the interview about Zcash's quantum-resistant advantages are better understood as a discussion of specific privacy mechanisms rather than the entire protocol having completed a quantum-resistant upgrade.

Zcash May Decouple From Bitcoin's Four-Year Cycle and Form Its Own Pricing Logic

The Winklevoss brothers further argue that AI development could change Zcash's market cycle.

In the past, Bitcoin market discussions often revolved around the quadrennial block reward halving. Halving reduces the rate of new Bitcoin issuance, and investors try to judge market cycles by combining supply changes, liquidity, and market demand.

Zcash also adopts a fixed supply cap and periodic halving mechanism, but Cameron believes its future market performance may not replicate Bitcoin's.

He recalled the 2013 Cyprus banking crisis. At the time, some bank deposits faced haircut arrangements, making the public more intuitively aware of the risks in the traditional banking system and helping Bitcoin gain more attention.

In Cameron's view, Zcash may also experience a similar cognitive turning point in the future: an event that suddenly makes the importance of financial privacy more concrete, thereby driving the public to re-recognize the value of privacy coins.

But such a turning point may not occur near the halving cycle. "Compared with the four-year issuance cycle and block reward halving, major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and advances in AI models may become more important influencing factors."

Tyler also believes that directly applying Bitcoin's historical price charts to predict Zcash may be a mistake. He pointed out that during Bitcoin's early development from 2012 to 2014, there was no generative AI technology backdrop like today's, nor was there an equivalent level of quantum computing discussion.

At the same time, AI is driving a new round of infrastructure investment.

In the interview, Tyler mentioned that frontier AI labs plan to invest about $1 trillion over the next few years to build data centers. Cameron believes this round of investment could become one of the largest technology infrastructure construction waves in U.S. history, even exceeding the early internet fiber-optic network and telecommunications infrastructure expansion.

In their view, if AI capability improvements do continue to push up demand for financial privacy, then AI infrastructure investment could become an indirect catalyst for Zcash's long-term development.

This connection does not mean that data center capital expenditure will flow directly into Zcash, but rather that long-term improvements in AI capabilities may change the market's demand for privacy protection. Therefore, rather than simply focusing on halving timing, the Winklevoss brothers are more focused on whether AI technology breakthroughs can continue to strengthen the utility value of privacy coins.

How Much Is Privacy Worth? Winklevoss Offers $5,000 to $10,000 Valuation Scenario

Beyond discussing technology and market cycles, Cameron also laid out a relatively straightforward Zcash valuation framework. In the interview, he said that based on estimates at the time, Zcash's market cap was approximately $25 billion, equivalent to roughly 2% of Bitcoin's market cap.

From this, he raised a question: if financial privacy is a valuable monetary property, how high a valuation should the market assign to it? "We really like Bitcoin, and I don't think it's going away. But I think the value of privacy is likely worth more than 2% of Bitcoin's market cap."

Cameron hypothesized that if Zcash's relative market cap rose from 2% to 10% of Bitcoin's, then assuming Bitcoin's market cap remained unchanged, Zcash would theoretically have roughly five times of upside. Based on this assumption, he believes ZEC's price could exceed $5,000 per coin, and could even move toward $10,000.

It should be emphasized that this is not a valuation model built on cash flow, profitability, or confirmed market demand, but rather a relative market cap scenario analysis. Its premises include not only the market's willingness to assign a higher price to financial privacy, but also variables such as Bitcoin's future market cap, ZEC's circulating supply, and market capital allocation.

Tyler, meanwhile, explained from a technical origin perspective why they chose Bitcoin as a reference. He noted that Zcash originated from Bitcoin's codebase and carried over important designs such as a fixed supply cap and the halving mechanism. "It wasn't built from scratch—it stands on the shoulders of giants." In Tyler's view, Zcash can be understood as Bitcoin with privacy protection features added.

However, this does not mean Zcash is bound to replace Bitcoin. Cameron believes that publicly verifiable transaction records have value in certain scenarios. For example, some institutions may want to make their Bitcoin addresses public so that outsiders can directly verify their asset balances.

At the same time, for many investors, holding an asset with a fixed supply and long-term store-of-value properties may already be sufficient. But in payment and everyday transaction scenarios, users may prefer assets with privacy features. Cameron envisions that in the future, users may hold Bitcoin as a store of value, convert it into Zcash when they need to make payments, and then convert back into Bitcoin as needed after completing transactions.

This means that in the two brothers' investment framework, Bitcoin and Zcash are not fully substitutes, but may respectively serve different functions such as transparent store of value and private payments.

For gold, the Winklevoss brothers also extended the comparative logic from their early Bitcoin investments. They argue that while gold is relatively scarce on Earth, it does not necessarily possess the same scarcity when viewed across the entire universe. With the development of space exploration and potential asteroid mining technologies, gold's long-term supply could change.

By contrast, the 21 million supply cap of Bitcoin and Zcash is dictated by protocol rules. However, the potential impact of space mining on the gold market remains long-term speculation and cannot be used to conclude that gold's existing scarcity has already changed.

From ZEC holdings to mining, Winklevoss extends privacy investments to public companies

The Winklevoss brothers' support for Zcash is not limited to publicly expressing investment views. They have also extended this investment logic to public capital markets through Cypherpunk Technologies.

Cameron said Gemini listed Zcash as early as 2018, and the two have supported its development ever since. But some investors cannot directly hold crypto assets due to account, compliance, or investment regime restrictions. Therefore, they hope to provide more investors with Zcash exposure through traditional capital market instruments such as stocks.

Cypherpunk Technologies is an important vehicle for this approach. It should be noted that the company is not a traditional enterprise founded from scratch by the two a year before the interview. According to public U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the listed company formerly known as Leap Therapeutics announced in November 2025 that it would rename itself Cypherpunk Technologies after obtaining financing led by Winklevoss Capital, and shift to a digital asset treasury strategy centered on Zcash.

In the initial stage, the company focused on buying and holding ZEC. Since then, its business has gradually expanded to mining and other privacy technology investments. In August 2026, Cypherpunk announced that through a $33.33 million equity transaction related to Winklevoss Capital, it acquired approximately 4.2 GSol/s of Zcash mining hash rate, which based on data at the time of the announcement accounted for about 18% of Zcash's total network hash rate.

This means the company no longer relies solely on holding ZEC for price exposure, but has also begun directly participating in the operation of Zcash network infrastructure.

Tyler stated that in the long run, Cypherpunk's goal is not to become a digital asset treasury company that simply holds ZEC. They hope to further invest in and support technologies that can promote financial privacy, individual sovereignty, and related freedoms. "We started with Zcash, then expanded into Zcash mining. But in reality, any privacy-preserving technology is within our scope of consideration."

This positioning also explains why the two view Zcash not only in terms of crypto asset prices but also in terms of the broader privacy technology market. However, Cypherpunk's financial performance is closely tied to ZEC prices, mining economics, and capital market financing conditions, and whether its business expansion can be sustained remains to be seen.

Will privacy technology face regulatory crackdowns? Winklevoss compares Zcash to HTTPS

Although both are optimistic about the development of privacy technology, they also acknowledge that regulation could become a major challenge to this investment thesis.

When asked whether the government might impose restrictive measures on privacy technology as it did in the past with cryptocurrencies, Cameron said: "The question is not whether this war will happen, but when it will happen."

Tyler believes that restrictions on privacy already exist in more subtle forms. Citing the Flock camera surveillance system in the United States as an example, he pointed out that the public easily conflates large-scale vehicle surveillance with traditional traffic violation cameras. In his view, traditional speed cameras typically target specific traffic behaviors, while continuously operating vehicle recognition systems may collect large amounts of driving data without any clear violation. When this information is further aggregated into centralized databases and analyzed with AI for correlation, individual movement patterns may become easier to track.

The two believe this involves not only government surveillance authority but also data security. Large-scale personal information stored in a centralized manner could become a target for cyberattacks.

Regarding encryption technology itself, Tyler drew on the history of the internet's evolution from HTTP to HTTPS. He compared Bitcoin to HTTP and Zcash to HTTPS. In unencrypted HTTP connections, sensitive information may be transmitted in plaintext; HTTPS protects communication content through encryption mechanisms. Tyler believes that what Zcash means for public blockchains is similar to what HTTPS meant for the early internet: adding privacy protection while retaining basic functionality.

He further noted that governments once restricted the export of encryption technology, classifying some encryption tools as military or strategic items, but later gradually accepted the necessity of encryption technology for internet security.

Today, encrypted communication has become a fundamental component of the modern internet. Therefore, he believes that privacy cryptocurrencies may undergo a similar process: facing regulatory resistance initially, followed by gradually gaining broader acceptance. However, this analogy does not mean that Zcash will necessarily receive the same regulatory treatment as HTTPS. Communication encryption and anonymity-enhanced financial transactions involve different regulatory objectives, particularly anti-money laundering, sanctions enforcement, and transaction monitoring.

Regarding the security value of financial privacy, Cameron also mentioned the "Wrench Attack" in the cryptocurrency space. This term refers to attackers who do not attempt to break cryptographic systems, but instead use physical threats, kidnapping, or violent coercion to force crypto asset holders to transfer assets or hand over private keys.

Cameron believes that publicly exposing on-chain asset balances may increase security risks for some holders, while privacy protection helps reduce the exposure of sensitive financial information. In his judgment, governments may eventually realize that excessive disclosure of personal financial information is not necessarily more conducive to citizen safety.

However, whether and when this policy shift will occur remains highly uncertain.

More important than protecting wealth is the value of privacy for freedom of thought

At the end of the interview, the Winklevoss brothers extended the discussion from financial privacy to freedom of thought.

In response to the common view that "I have nothing to hide, so I don't need privacy," Cameron countered with the example of Satoshi Nakamoto. "Why didn't Satoshi Nakamoto put his real name on the Bitcoin whitepaper?" In his view, Satoshi's choice of anonymity may be related to the challenge Bitcoin poses to traditional financial power structures. If Satoshi had publicly revealed his identity, he might have faced additional personal safety risks.

Tyler further pointed out that the value of privacy is not only reflected in whether an individual needs to hide certain information, but more importantly in whether it can provide room for new ideas to grow. He cited Einstein as an example, arguing that Einstein's early work at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, rather than within the university system, to some extent reduced the constraints of academic hierarchy and professional politics, giving him greater freedom of thought.

The two believe that privacy can help researchers, intellectuals, and ordinary people reduce the risk of expressing non-mainstream views and lessen self-censorship. Even if a person does not frequently exercise freedom of speech, they may still benefit from others' free expression, research discoveries, and technological innovation.

Tyler also proposed that anonymity allows discussions to focus more on the ideas themselves rather than on the people proposing them. Taking Satoshi Nakamoto as an example, since the public does not know his real identity, outsiders tend to discuss Bitcoin's source code, technical design, and economic mechanisms rather than evaluating his views based on personal background.

"You can only discuss the idea itself, debating its content, factual basis, and its own value." In their view, privacy is not only a technical means of protecting financial transactions but also a fundamental condition for maintaining personal autonomy and the free exchange of ideas.

Returning to Zcash, this is also one of the core reasons the two have long supported privacy technology. However, from a market perspective, financial privacy has social value, which does not directly equate to any particular privacy asset being able to continuously appreciate.

The long-term investment logic proposed by the Winklevoss brothers still needs to be validated through several specific variables: whether AI continues to improve the analyzability of public financial data; whether users therefore increase actual demand for shielded transactions; whether Zcash can expand payment and holding scenarios under regulatory restrictions; and whether advances in privacy technology can ultimately translate into sustained use of ZEC.

If these conditions gradually materialize, Zcash may form a new demand narrative distinct from Bitcoin's halving cycle.

But if privacy demand does not translate into actual adoption, or if other technical solutions provide similar protection at lower cost, then the rapid development of AI may not necessarily support Zcash in achieving a higher long-term valuation.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia