Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Makes a New Bet on Zcash and Privacy

ZCash Daily Price Chart. Source: CoinGeckoThe Privacy Push Is More Critical Than Ever

Buterin has warned that financial transparency without strong cryptographic privacy creates long-term risks, including surveillance, coercion, and systemic fragility.

He has increasingly praised systems that embed privacy at the protocol level rather than layering it on as an optional feature. Zcashs shielded transaction model aligns closely with that philosophy.

Sponsored

By backing Shielded Labs, Buterin is effectively endorsing privacy-preserving design paired with stronger settlement guarantees—two areas he sees as underinvested across the industry.

Fight Chat Control.

You cannot make society secure by making people insecure.

We all deserve privacy and security, without inevitably hackable backdoors, for our private communications.

A Signal to the Broader Crypto Ecosystem

The donation also lands at a moment when Ethereum itself is reassessing parts of its scaling and security roadmap.

While Buterin has criticized superficial innovation and “copy-paste” infrastructure elsewhere, his support for Zcash highlights what he sees as meaningful progress: protocol-level upgrades that improve safety, finality, and user protection.

In that sense, the move is less about Ethereum versus Zcash—and more about the kind of blockchain architecture Buterin believes will survive long term.