"ZODL is to Zcash What Coinbase Was to Bitcoin" | Josh Swihart on ZEC’s Awakening

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Technology, Tech News, News

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

What happens when every payment, wallet, and onchain interaction becomes searchable by governments, companies, adversaries, and AI? Josh Swihart, founder and CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab, joins David to explain why Zcash is having a major privacy comeback, how ZODL and the Zashi wallet helped unlock real shielded adoption, why the shielded pool may be the most important ZEC metric, and what it will take for private money to become too big to kill. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:17 Privacy in the AI Era 6:19 Crypto’s Missing Privacy Layer 9:49 The Political Fight for Privacy 14:42 Can Crypto Retain Privacy? 16:47 From Zashi to ZODL 19:48 The Zcash Reawakening 21:41 Balaji, Funding, and the Mission 24:49 Product Market Fit for Shielded ZEC 27:51 ZODL's Role in the Zcash Stack 29:36 The Zcash Roadmap 32:56 What Is ZEC and is it Undervalued? 36:56 The Shielded Pool Explained 45:12 The $25M ZODL Raise 47:16 Compliance and Shielded ZEC 51:25 Institutions vs Cypherpunk Values 53:58 Personal Privacy in an AI World --- RESOURCES Josh Swihart https://x.com/jswihart ZODL https://x.com/zodl_app --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	As a society, if we don't have privacy or private money on the web, we'll enter dystopia.
0:06.6	I think Bologi is set it very succinctly.
0:09.4	Somewhere else, it's Zcash or it's communism.
0:12.8	I believe that same thing.
0:14.1	And so if crypto is really going to be used as money on the internet, as internet money,
0:19.5	we have to have privacy for agency
0:22.5	to be who we truly are, for security,
0:26.1	and even for censorship resistors.
0:27.9	You can't have censorship resistors.
0:29.6	Without privacy.
0:34.2	Bankless Nation, I'm joined by Josh Swihart.
0:36.8	He is the founder and CEO of the Zcash Open Development Lab,
0:40.7	otherwise called Zadl, which is the new home for what used to be the core engineering product team at the electric coin company,
0:46.5	which is kind of like the Ethereum Foundation for Zcash, where he was previously CEO.
0:52.0	Josh, welcome to Bankless.
0:53.9	Thank you for having me on.
0:55.6	Josh, why work on Zcash?
0:58.6	What motivates you?
0:59.5	I found Zcash in 2016.
1:01.2	I was looking for privacy solutions.
1:04.2	Zcash hadn't launched yet.
1:05.8	And so somebody else in a crypto ecosystem
	...

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