The Third Pillar of Digital Gold
Outside of ZK, I only hold three large positions: ETH, BTC, and ZEC. In that order.
These assets form the pillars of digital gold: the category I believe will outlive every narrative in crypto.
All three have a mission. All three have a soul.
Bitcoin represents sovereignty
Bitcoin is sovereign money in its purest form. Several things at once make it unique and essentially unreplicable: a mysterious leaderless origin story, a religious-level cult, and a network powerful enough to rival nation-states in power consumption. It is the closest humanity has come to a neutral, permissionless reserve asset that no state, corporation, or committee can bend. This is why I believe BTC has the highest probability of remaining the monetary base layer of the Internet.
Ethereum represents programmability
Ethereum went beyond sovereign money. It is a civilization-level trust-automation engine.
It does not merely help eliminate economic intermediaries, it eliminates the bottleneck of trust itself. Every prior monetary system, from gold ledgers to central banks to SWIFT, was constrained by high cost of verification by trusted humans. Ethereum removes that limit.
ETH is somewhat a contrarian bet for me. I’ve argued for a long time that ETH is misclassified. It’s not “digital oil” and it’s not a classical capital asset. Ethereum is the emerging Internet of Value, and within the security perimeter of its ecosystem ETH behaves more like an upgraded form of digital gold: a bearer instrument with the strongest ownership rights enforced onchain. Even though I don’t see it as the most likely outcome, ETH has a real shot at flipping BTC over a long enough horizon.
I own more ETH than BTC because I believe this potential remains deeply underpriced. The market still treats ETH as fuel rather than the native monetary asset of the programmable finance.
But there has always been a missing pillar: privacy
Privacy is the third critical monetary property that became fully visible once sovereignty and programmability matured.
The importance of privacy has been obvious to us at ZKsync from day one. It’s codified in ZK Credo, our north star manifesto from 2023. We were fighting for it long before it was fashionable.
The missing piece was a flagship monetary asset that could carry privacy as a civilizational idea. Tornado Cash enabled true cypherpunk privacy for Ethereum. ZKsync Prividiums now enable incorruptible private financial infrastructure for institutions. But these are tools, not banners. Store of value is not just about product attributes of money. It is about socio-economic memetic momentum:
the capacity of an idea to accumulate holders, advocates, builders, and institutions until it becomes politically irreversible.
Bitcoin did this for sovereignty: as adoption compounded, it moved beyond ideology and became a constituency officially recognized by world’s superpowers. Ethereum did it for programmability: its execution layer is now too embedded in global financial system to unwind. Privacy had no monetary standard with enough gravitational pull to do the same.
Now it does, and we might just have reached the escape velocity.
Zcash is unique in many ways. It’s the only major asset with mathematically perfect privacy. It’s created by some of the most ingenious minds in the field, and the entire modern ZK world stands on their shoulders: Sonic, Halo, and other ideas pushed forward by @zooko, @ebfull, @rel_zeta_tech, and the rest of the team ignited the Cambrian explosion of ZK innovation. Ethereum’s first ZK rollup prototype, Ignis (you know it as ZKsync Lite), was built on top of Zcash’s bellman code seven years ago. Tachyon continues that tradition brilliantly.
@Naval expressed the ZCash thesis best:
Bitcoin is insurance against fiat. ZCash is insurance against Bitcoin.
If ZEC becomes the rallying point for private money, it doesn’t just elevate the symbol of privacy, it activates a self-reinforcing incentive mechanism around it, something that can spread virally and push the idea forward even through harsh political resistance. It would lead to more privacy not just in finance, but across the digital world in general, reinforcing and reigniting the original cypherpunk ideals. And this, in turn, is critical for the shared deep mission of all our projects, Bitcoin, Ethereum, ZCash and ZKsync alike: advancing freedom for the world. Freedom drives Progress and Prosperity.
Sovreignty and programmability are already priced in. I might be wrong, but privacy is not, which is why it can still be the last 100x-1000x in crypto. And if that’s true, the risk asymmetry is brutal: the cost of a misplaced bet is minor, the cost of being wrong while not taking the bet is huge.