Balaji Srinivasan has distilled 15 years of crypto experimentation down to a stark claim: after Bitcoin, only two core protocol breakthroughs truly matter—Ethereum for programmability and Zcash for privacy.
Srinivasan breaks crypto’s history into three arcs. First, Bitcoin simply had to prove that non-sovereign, cryptographic money could work at all. Then, Ethereum generalized that into a programmable platform with smart contracts, stablecoins, NFTs, DEXs and on-chain capital markets.
The next phase, he says, is privacy by design. “Now the next eight years… privacy,” Srinivasan said. “Taking everything we just did and encrypting it using ZK.” That includes ZK-based KYC (“ZKYC”), privacy-preserving DEXs, and smart contracts that reveal only the minimum necessary information. He pointed to industry work showing how traditional KYC could be replicated with zero-knowledge proofs: “If you nail ZK then you can replace the entire [compliance] system.”
Srinivasan pushed back hard on the idea that crypto is now primarily a speculative or commercial arena. “Crypto isn’t just about the commercial part,” he said. “It’s about the ideological part. It’s about the fact that the banks have failed. It’s about the fact the political system has failed. It’s about the fact that we need an exit. It’s about the fact that we need self-sovereignty. And the missing part of that is privacy.”
At press time, ZCash traded at $501.59.
