Unchained - How Zcash and NEAR Are Driving This Crypto Bull Run

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Zcash and NEAR are both ripping this week, and Illia Polosukhin and Mert Mumtaz say privacy is the reason why. Is this how the “Bitcoin DeFi” vision comes true? ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsor! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 1inch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to swap tokenized securities, crypto and more. Simple. Secure. Self-custodial. Whatever asset you’re buying - swap it at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 1inch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================================================== Quick favor: We're deciding what Unchained does next; new shows, stream times, what's worth paying for. Our listener survey takes five minutes, it's anonymous, and I read the write-in answers myself. Everyone who takes it can enter a drawing for a free year of Unchained Premium or Bits + Bips Premium. Open through Sunday, October 18. — Laura ======================================================== Zcash just cracked the top 10 on CoinGecko, up 32% in a week and near an all-time high. NEAR is up 69% over the same stretch, and both rallies trace back to the same catalyst: transactions nobody else can see. Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, and Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius, join Laura Shin to unpack why confidential transactions, not speculation, are driving the rally, and why the two networks now function as one privacy-preserving liquidity layer for real businesses and institutions, not just traders. They cover NEAR Intents' $260 million in TVL, the multi-party computation and secure enclaves behind NEAR's confidential balances versus Zcash's zero-knowledge shielded pool, the counterfeiting bug that forced Zcash's Ironwood migration, and NEAR's Shield system, which halted transactions mid-hack during a Litecoin exploit. Zcash's next upgrade, Project Tachyon, aims to make the network quantum-proof and scale it 100x, and Mert argues privacy will not stay a competitive edge for long. Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained Guest: ⁠Illia Polosukhin - Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol ⁠Mert Mumtaz - Cofounder and CEO of Helius Timestamps 🚀 01:39 Guest intros, plus why ZEC (+32%) and NEAR (+69%) are ripping this week 🌐 03:13 Illia and Mert on why NEAR and ZEC's price action is turning heads 🟠 08:34 Is Zcash and NEAR the Bitcoin DeFi dream, minus Bitcoin? 🕵️ 11:54 Why coffee-shop-level balance visibility is a real business risk ✈️ 15:06 Mert's travel hack: booking flights and hotels privately via NEAR Intents 🧠 18:12 Why privacy is a retention tool first, not just an onboarding one 📣 25:11 1inch Aqua: back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt 🔐 26:23 Privacy vs confidentiality: ZK proofs versus NEAR's MPC-and-enclave model 🛡️ 29:26 Inside NEAR's secure enclaves, and why store-of-value needs real privacy 🔄 33:59 How a NEAR Intents swap settles across chains, and its $206 million in TVL 🐛 39:09 The Zcash counterfeit bug, the Ironwood migration, and formal verification 🤖 45:49 How NEAR's Shield AI system and MPC guardrails manage solver risk ⚡ 51:33 Zcash's NU7 upgrade: faster blocks, quantum-proofing, and private voting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can initiate prep positions for your confidential balance. There's more and more features are coming, and we actually want to open it up to more and more developers to actually build different financial applications, really creating this confidential defy as a place where you can build, you know, indeed for the consumers that care about privacy and indeed for institutions who've been actually waiting for tap into defy and sitting on sidelines because they were not able to participate in on-chain

kind of traditional unchained economy. And so I think there is a huge opportunity to really leverage this kind of private conventional computer that we built without private shard, kind of all the near and dense economy that's built on top of it. Hi, everyone.

Looking to Unchained, you're at O'Hai Presource for All Things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream, and first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. This episode is brought to you by 1-inch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from 1-inch,

back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at 1inch.com slash aqua. Before we get started, I want to ask you for something. We're making a bunch of decisions right now about unchained. What we make next, when we go live, what we should be doing more of, and I'd rather hear from you before we make them than after. So we put together a survey.

It takes just a few minutes. It's anonymous. And there's a box where you can tell me what we could be doing better. I read all the responses. The link is in the show notes, or you can snap the QR code on screen, or go to unchained crypto.com slash survey. Thanks. Today's topic is privacy, confidentiality, and all things Zcash and Neer. Here to discuss are Ilya, Pola Sukin, co-founder of Neer Protocol, and Mertzumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius and Zcash influencer.

Welcome, Ilya and Mert. great to be here well and uh co-inventure of l l lm sporealia oh right we're right we can't forget that that's actually really really important um and i noticed that elia's wife today was just reminding herself that he um has that title um all right so let's get into it into it you guys so it's a very bullish market right now um bitcoin eth and saul did around 10% on the week but zika Cash and NIR are ripping. Zcash is up 32% over the week. It's near an all-time high, and it's now ranked number nine on Coin Gecko, which I'm super excited about. And NIR is up 69% in that time. It's now ranked 23, and I'm imagining both of you are super stoked. Zcash also has an upgrade

coming up. Neer announced a whole bunch of really cool new features recently, and both of these coins play super well with each other. So why don't you each side? start with like, you know, why it is that you think your coin is doing so well. And for, for Mert, it's his Z-Kash influencer role, not, not Salana that I'm asking about. So either one of you can start. Oh, yeah, I'll let you go. Yeah, I mean, for NIR, we've been effectively building for the past few years, this kind of technology that brings not just kind of near, because but all the ecosystem, but all the existing together.

And Zcash is one of the biggest kind of ecosystems, which we're working with very closely. But it works with Solana. It works with Ethereum. It works with Aligram, Tron, et cetera. And the idea is really

to remove the boundaries that kind of that three created. And at the end, really kind of deliver on this like unified liquidity, unified market idea that I think crypto always been promising, but it's always been really hard to experience. And as people started kind of

interfacing with it, trying our kind of first-party app, Neer.com, there's kind of more and more understanding that this is actually kind of how crypto should be working. And importantly, I think biggest unlock has been both Zcash and NIR, bringing at last privacy on chain. To me, it's It's always been kind of a biggest bottleneck to use day-to-day blockchain for anything. Because I have literally a spreadsheet of 100 addresses on Ethereum and kind of near before we had privacy. So I can track who did I send money, which address did I use, how much gas I left on that address. Like it's a nightmare of like accounting system to just keep track of, you know, to make sure

I don't link anything, you know, goes to sexes, you know, make sure I don't have timing attacks some like amounts, et cetera. And all of that, it gets solved now that we have the cash in near, really delivering kind of like, how do you have a private experience using blockchain? And so I think like all this things really coming together now as more and more people actually starting to use blockchain, right? Financial system is moving to blockchain kind of never before. And so at least that's my explanation why things are really, really starting to appreciate.

Mert, what do you think? Well, to go back to the question of, you know, why am I excited? The reality is I'm not that excited. I have sort of a mental problem where when things go well, I am not that enthused about them. But when they're meh or they're going bad, that's more exciting because that's sort of where the work is. For now, I would say, well, you know, if I'm to rationalize sort of the price action, obviously, people are more risk-on in general and so all of

crypto benefits and so you have to look at what outperforms the general market which Zek and NIR have done now there are many reasons because people buy tokens for different reasons and everybody has the same reason for Zcash I think

the similarity to Bitcoin but being encrypted in quantum secure is probably the easy one it's extremely easy to tell anybody that knows anything about crypto because they already know a Bitcoin And so if you just say it's encrypted Bitcoin, that's pretty much all you need. The privacy aspect, and same with Near as well. So it's interesting because obviously NIR benefited from Zcash going up,

but it's questionable that Zcash would have went up as much if it weren't for NIR in the first place, giving it utility on the wallets, for example, to be able to do actual usage of the coin instead of just literally holding it on exchange, right? And obviously, you know, there will always be people, probably the majority that hold down in exchange. But there are the diehard ones who generally are, let's say, much bigger holders who are actually the missionary types, who do benefit from using the actual benefits of the chain and in these systems that are built. Right. Otherwise, they would have just used something else by definition.

And so with Zcash, and we'll get to this later, but I don't think it's price. I think there will be this sort of temporary time period where privacy is sort of a distinguishing edge, but sooner or later more and more chains will start adding privacy. And so with Zcash, what matters is that if you start from first principles, you can't actually have the best version of a store of value without that asset having the ability for privacy. right? If you have a store of value by definition, you're expecting it to have a little surprise. And one of the things that goes into that is obviously privacy, right? Whether that surprise is regulatory or responsibility or whatever it might be.

And so I wouldn't say for Zcash is the privacy aspect specifically. It's just one of sort of the colors on the whole, you know, painting. It can't do it on its own because otherwise, for example, you would have Monero as well. doing the exact same price performance or something like this. But it's sort of the entire story of privacy, quantum proofing, store value, scale, et cetera. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Honestly, when I was looking at what was going on, the vibes I was getting was like, this is like the dream of Bitcoin defy actually coming true, just not on Bitcoin and not

a Bitcoin layer too, but with Zcash, does that make sense? I hope like Bitcoin people don't get mad of me, but I was just feeling like, so Zcash and Bitcoin are very similar, obviously, except of course Zcash has the ability to have these shielded transactions. And so if you look at it in that way, then Mir is what is like enabling people to kind of, you know, use Defi with with their Zcash, with their store of value. Yeah, what do you guys think of that analogy? Well, I would say, yeah, I think it's like, obviously analogies are always imperfect, but I think that's like roughly correct.

And that was sort of, for example, we led the listing of Zach on Solana, but via Near. Right. but perhaps you can just say it's different with different tradeoffs for different people. You can, I think, also make the same argument that NIR is sort of what Ethereum aimed at being. If you remember this the sharding roadmap, right, where Ethereum wished to scale via sharding, well, who actually did that? Okay, NIR did. And then what about sort of this being the hub where you connect different sort of chains?

Well, NIR is demonstrably doing that right now via NIR intense. And so there's kind of two parallels to both Bitcoin and Ethereum as far as I can see. Elia, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think our goal always have been, I go at non-zero sum. How do we actually enable all of the amazing innovation that's happening to really get to the user and become really interesting experience? And I think, as you mentioned, Bitcoin kind of been trying to do that over a pretty long time, but it always kind of stayed in this pre-locked-in ecosystem. And I think part of it is, part of it is like a privacy.

Part of it is like seen as more of star value. There's like less of less the demand to create kind of interconnect with other ecosystems. I think Zcash, by virtue of being private, people want to spend it. People want to kind of participate in economy around the world. And at the same time, you know, people on different chains now that, you know, we're in pretty different world than when Bitcoin was kind of been growing up, right? Want to have access to it and want to participate in it. And so there's kind of this both demands from both sides to really participate. as you said, and kind of broader defy for it. And so NIR is, as I said, like kind of this universal

liquidity layer that really connect all those things. Yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense. I mean, especially if I think about, you know, whales in the industry. Not going to lie. Like for me as a journalist, I don't love the idea of that activity being more private because it makes things harder if I want to look into something. But obviously, if I'm the person transacting, then of course, that's what I would want to do. And especially in this kind of situation where I am engaging in activity that could potentially multiply my money or, you know, maybe I take some kind of gamble and I lose money. And, you know, you just wouldn't want people to see that.

You know, like we have all those accounts that will tweet about, oh, so-and-so, you know, you know, they bought this coin at this price and then they lost, you know, whatever, $50 million like three months later when they sold or, you know, whatever. So, all right, so let's just talk a little bit. Oh, uh-huh. No, I just want to double click on that. I think obviously the speculation has been the biggest use case of blockchain those far. I think what's also happening, at least like from what I'm seeing over the past, you know,

year, year and a half, that we're actually getting people starting to use this for real businesses, And this is both, you know, kind of globally banks and Tentex adopting blockchain as well as for agents that is the interface, right? That is the easiest, right? Cloud players adding agetic payments that are going to be on blockchain. We see this kind of across all of the different stack of services, right, one way or another, they're adding different options. And the thing is like, while you were speculating, yes, the visibility of the trades were, you know, was a problem. problem, but it is like kind of, you know, people were okay with that for the most part. When you're starting to actually use it for real business, like, or, you know, if you're paying,

like if I'm paying for coffee, like, if it's, if the coffee, you know, uh, is there coffee shop sees my, you know, balance my net worse during that transaction. If anyone else in the world, right, can observe that I spend money in this coffee shop, like that's a massive, security issue. And for businesses, it's massive business operations issue, right? Because everybody sees who they paid, you know, what is their like cost of goods, how much they sold. Like, that becomes a massive business operations. And so I think privacy is really, you know, people ask like, oh, nobody cared about privacy. Like Zcash existed right for a long time. Nobody cared about it. Nobody cared about privacy will happen. And I think there is a different, the change that,

game is like people actually starting to use it for day-to-day stuff, started to use it for running businesses. The kind of global financial system is starting to get integrated. And so privacy becomes really enabler for this to be like not an massive opsack issue, not a massive kind of business operations issue. So I do feel there's like a transition that's happened as well. And kind of Zcash and me are both are really delivering on that, on that value problem. One anecdote I'll give also is I use it pretty aggressively, pretty frequently when I'm traveling. So a lot of people take obviously currencies usually tron honestly, which is sort of fascinating, but a lot of tron usage. But when you're booking flight tickets or hotels or whatever, concierge stuff, it's actually very helpful to be able to use near intense via Zach and sort of tighten up your office.

Opsack, especially if you're going to like a France or something where I believe it's 80% of all crypto kidnappings or some shit. And so being able to actually use it for that, I religiously use it for that. It's been very helpful. And actually, explain that a little bit because, so first of all, it's a two-part question. So did you literally mean that people are taking TRX or did you mean a stable coin on? You did you on John. You did you on Trump. Oh, okay.

Okay. And then, but then how, so how many merchants out there are accepting? So I don't know. So you use your ZEC with near intense. So then what does the merchant see? So, I mean, ideally they accept Zcash directly, but obviously that's a pretty big ask. Because most of the folks who deal in crypto,

for whatever reason, they already take USDT on Tron. Maybe it's more of an Eastern thing. But, you know, as soon as you find one or two of them, then that's pretty much all your needs anyway, assuming, like, depending on what you're doing, right? Like, if you're doing travel, the travel people will take care of pretty much anything related to travel, ranging from flights to taxis to booking things, whatever it might be, hotels. And so you can. So you're using a travel agent. You're not paying for the hotel directly. Like, you're not paying the hotel directly.

Well, I mean, I guess you could, but yeah, in this case, you're not. You're doing sort of a private concierge, so to speak. And you can just do that via because obviously for something to be like a store of value, you need to hold value in it. But then you need to also be able to do things with it to an extent, like things backs by it. And so I think like the most underrated thing that I'm upset that like not everybody uses it, but I think a good enough amount of people use it such that it does make a difference is sort of like if you use the e-cash wallet, they all have the pay feature,

which innovates near intense, which then lets you pay on any chain, right? So you can also, I also do Salon of USC with this, for example, or you can do Ethereum or you can brush to Robin Hood, whatever, and it's just super convenient. And like, it's not like a regular bridge where you can just go back and be like, oh, it came from this other address. Okay, now my private concierge knows I'm someone. much money I make and therefore now they're going to upsell me on all these sort of different

shit. Yeah, yeah. This is something that I think about because let's just say I've had some weird experiences when buying things with my name and it has made me realize like, oh man, I probably need to figure out a way to like buy things more privately. And I know that there are credit cards and I have done that occasionally, but it's a hassle, you know, like, so I love what you are saying here. So let's actually talk a little bit more about this privacy thing because, like, obviously, you know, we've said for a long time, like just

crypto people generally have said that privacy is essential for adoption. And what's kind of interesting is like, so I definitely agree with that. You know, I've long said that I've never been that person who, you know, broadcasts all of my Venmo transactions. But at the same time, like, so many people, you know, in surveys, they'll say they care about privacy. And then when it comes down to the actual actions, they don't care. They would rather have convenience. So, you know, I'm just curious to hear you talk about, like, whether or not you really think that, like, privacy and confidentiality will be big drivers in this next adoption cycle. and how you square that with this behavior where, like, by and large,

a lot of people will give up privacy for convenience. Yeah, I mean, I would say, yeah, I would say that generally people prefer convenience and then for any kind of privacy product, the idea is we need to build a better product. that's always, I mean, it's always been true even for that three in general, right? I think we're being like, oh, why are people not adopting that three the past 10 years? And the answer was always like, well, you need to actually have a better product across the board, right? Not just, you know, in theoretical way that if you, you know, if you know what you're doing, you can sign an ROP, you know, transaction. You can read, you know, X encoded address, make sure that, you know, you understand a lot of, you know,

just four digits in the beginning and end of the address. Like that's not a good product, right? That's not, you know, how LEMO works, it's not how, you know, some of your normal banks work. So we kind of need to build a better product and then deliver privacy as a kind of powerful add-on for people to leverage. And then it becomes, it's not an onboarding tool,

it's a retention tool in the way. Now that you are private, it's actually really hard to go back. that because privacy actually brings, I call it like a psychological safety. There's like a level of kind of, I don't know, like anxiety that just goes away when you know that the product you use is private. Like you know that nobody can go and like back down or see what you're doing, et cetera. And I think that this is true about, you know, financial. It's about true about AI.

It's true about everything. Like as soon as you know that like you're at your home and nobody's looking at. can't you, you know, you give us your money and nobody can stop it. Nobody can take it away. Nobody looks at it. You have like reduced level of anxiety. So that's why I call the retention in a way people will stay with this if they're bored. So there's, as far as I can tell, I think there's two things here. One is there are certainly cases where privacy actually makes the product more convenient and it improves the product itself, right? The dichotomy is, of, well, if you have privacy, then it's the worst experience, is not necessarily a true one.

It's more of an implementation shortcoming from past, let's the attempts. But in the case of, for example, Zcash, why would you not want your store of value, the thing where you're storing value to be private, right? Like, what is, why would you not want that, right? And assuming you can get it in a technologically feasible way. And obviously when ZK first sort of went to market, the tech was pretty, obviously it was, I mean, Zcash was the first implementation of a snark in the planets, especially for money. And so it took many years to actually get to a point where the latency is sort of bearable to be able to use on a mobile setting, for example, right, where your phone can actually do the ZK proof. And so all things equal, then why would you not?

Because privacy is just optionality, it's choice, right? If I have a thought in my mind, it's private by default, but I can wish to publish it on the internet. If I take a picture, I can share it on socials, or I can keep it on my phone, right? And so with money, or store value, is sort of the same thing. I wanted the optionality, because I want choice,

but then I also can do whatever I want with it. I don't have to make it private. It's just up to me. So, because if you don't have optionality, then you have coercion in some sense. In this case, it's implicit coercion because it's not like somebody's forcing you to do it, but that's how this game forces you to play, sort of speak. Now, the other aspect of this is, I'll actually take the other side.

Ilya is right that it's a retention tool, but it's also an onboarding tool. And so you may look at something like the minority rule here, right, which is to say there are, it's a necessary but insufficient condition for onboarding, right, which is to say there's always going to be people who have the limitation that they cannot come on chain unless they have some sort of private option. So institutions come to mind, which is the ironic part, because a lot of the institutions actually have this as a hard requirement due to how they're regulated. They cannot disclose certain information, certainly not customer information.

And so it's a literal requirement, right? It's a bit like when I say the minority rule, I mean something like a peanut butter allergy, right? which is to say if a certain amount of people literally cannot do something because of a blocker, well then the system has to basically mold such that it can allow for those people to onboard. But then once those people do onboard, then you don't lose anything by having that optionality, right? Because let's say like the set of users who, the set of eaters who must have peanut butter is much smaller than the set of users who don't care and just want to eat food. And it's sort of the same thing with privacy.

Okay, that's super interesting, and that makes a lot of sense. All right, so in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about the specifics of what's going on with Zcash and NIR. But first, we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. $540 million. That's how much concentrated liquidity sat idle in a given week in the first half of this year. About 30% of the DefiTVL, if you're wondering. That's according to Dune Research commissioned by One-inch. But there's a solution.

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Remember that providing liquidity carries risk and fees aren't guaranteed. Back to my conversation with Ilya and Mert. So as we have been talking about both NIR and Zcash are taking off, and it looks like, you know, we have this kind of stirrings of this bull market when you look at the broader crypto market. But it sort of seems, at least at this point, that privacy and confidentiality are going to be themes of this upcoming bull market, if that is what we're, what we're seeing. So just talk a little bit about the difference between privacy and confidentiality and which one is important to have when. Well, actually, I'm not sure exactly, Ilya, maybe you can start because confidentiality

has different sort of references depending on. Yeah. So I think there's like a few different levels of privacy or sorts of privacy technically. And we've been using word confidential as a way to kind of show the difference. So Zcash is kind of, as Mert mentioned, is based on zero knowledge proofs. And specifically, it's a zero knowledge proof that the user generates and submits to the network where effectively only user knows their balance, only they can decrypted and they can submit effectively prove that they send some funds to somebody else, which means there's no shared state. There's no way. to effectively compute our shared state,

which also means you cannot do a lot of kind of smart contract and kind of more traditional things that you do on the blockchain beyond just, you know, sending money and kind of few other simple operations. We took a different approach because we want to deliver effectively a fully programmable privacy, right? And kind of as we're trying to build this like programmable private defy, you need more than just, you know, zero-knowledge user-generated proofs, you need a way to

have a shared kind of private computer. And so we're leveraging a combination of multi-party computation, secure enclaves, and zero-noultge proofs, definitely create this environment. And we call it confidential because, indeed, it's different from kind of more user-facing privacy that Z-Cash is offering. So that's kind of our, I guess, terminology that we used. And so as part of this, you know, you can have payments, you can have trading, you can have, you know, earn. We just launched you can actually put money to work directly from your confidential balance on NIR. And we just add that confidential perks. We can initiate perp positions for your confidential balance. There's more and more features are coming and we actually want to open it up to more

and more developers to actually build different financial applications, really creating this confidential defy as a place where you can build, you know, indeed for the consumers that care about privacy and indeed for institutions who've been actually waiting for tap into defy and sitting on sidelines because they were not able to participate in on-chain kind of traditional launch an economy. And so I think there is a huge opportunity to really leverage this kind of private conventional computer that we built without private shard and kind of all the near and dense economy that's built on top of it. And wait, there's one thing that I maybe didn't fully understand. So some of that because it is hardware, does that mean that some of it is literally tied to the

device or no, if you lose your device, you'll still have asked? No, no. So we're running a, we're running a effectively a whole set of near nodes, but the near nodes running inside secure enclaves. So instead of running kind of quote-unquote in plaintext, how all the other blockchain nodes are running, they themselves running into secure enclave, meaning even if you have physical access to the machine, you cannot actually see what's going on there. And then all the communication to it has been encrypted by the multi-party computation, and then kind of the proofs that are being submitted it out as zero knowledge proofs. People don't, you know, they know something happened and this is, you know, you can prove

to anyone this specific outcome, but you just have a proof that was constructed inside secure enclave. So nobody was purviewed to the shared computation that happened inside. Okay. Okay. I understand. And Mert, so did you want to talk about the other part of my question? Like, I was also asking if, or maybe.

it doesn't even matter. I don't know. But I was wondering if it's more important to have one type of, you know, privacy versus confidentiality for different, either types of activities or, you know, in different circumstances. Yes. Well, you sort of had to work backwards from the user need, or at least the user need that you anticipate. But with a store of value asset, it's pretty clear. You just need max security, right? Again, it goes back to minimizing the amount of surprises. And so you need full anonymity, full security, quantum proofing, all these different things, such that you have this confidence that, okay, within five to 10 years, similar to gold, nobody's going to be able to hack it or they don't have information or they won't be able to do anything to me,

right? Whatever you do on chain can will be used against you can't happen to me. And so, however, obviously, if you want to go the full extreme privacy route, and by extreme, I mean like, you know, encrypting network traffic, using, you know, using onion routing and all these different sorts of things. That is obviously useful for that one use case. However, it is, it comes with tradeoffs. One of them is, like, obviously you can't run an order book on Zcash, right? Like, that would just not be feasible.

And so when you have different needs like that, right, if you're, when you're going from a store value to something more like, let's say, programable finance. in that case, you need to architect the solution differently. And like Ilya mentioned, being able to do computations over shared state, which simply just means being able to do defy or just being able to do more complex things other than just holding and doing payments. In that case, you'll obviously need to change your architecture. And also, like, you'll need to, because your customers as a smart contract, platform are different, right?

With a store of value asset, they're just investors and holders and people who want to use it as money. With a smart contract platform, they could be startups, institutions, you know, ETFs, whatever it might be. There's many different ranges. And so you need to do something that can flex specifically depending on their needs, right? And that can't be completely extreme, like, you know, tour routing, for example. And so that's really the difference. I mean, fundamentally, I don't think you need extreme anonymity. Like, I mean, some people will, and there's certainly ways to do that with NIR.

But for the most part, confidence, and it's also a regulatory thing, right? Like on Solana, for example, like confidentiality means something very specific, which is that the two and from are not encrypted. but the asset and the balances are encrypted. So you can see sort of where the money went, but you can't see how much of it of what token went anywhere, which is specifically useful for like individual teams, for example, not necessarily blockchains, because then you'll get Roman stormed, so to speak, right,

where the feds will just come after you. All right. So now let's dig into some of the details around the New Intense Connect, which we have been alluding to, but we haven't really dug into the details. So, Ilya, do you want to walk us through what one of those transactions look like? Like, so let's say that I'm a user. I show up.

I want to swap, you know, some asset, let's say on Solana for some asset on Ethereum. Explain like what happens on the back end. Like, what does the user experience feel like to me? You know, how is it kept confidential? Explain all those things. Yeah, so there's actually a few things here. I think Connect is actually. a little bit, one step further.

So, yes, first you have like a regular swap where you go from one asset to another and it doesn't matter which chain it's on. And so the way kind of, in the simplest case, it works, you effectively say, hey, my intent is to get, you know, let's say some Bitcoin or something Zcash and I'm willing to get to part ways with, you know, Solana. Right? And so you effectively broadcast it to solvers. Solvers then bid on this and say, hey, I will, you know, get you one Zcash for, you know, this number of Solana. And user can select out of those quotes.

There's some matching that's happening. There's like multipath. There's like all kinds of kind of smarter ways to do this. But at the end, user effect is to like the best quote for them. Signs on that. and now you have so-called kind of signed intent where you have effectively two sides saying, cool, I'm willing to part my ways with this,

I'm going to part my ways with this. So that goes to a settlement system. Now there's an important aspect, which is because all of these things live on different chains, NIR has this multi-party computation network, which is part of the near kind of VALBatorSAT that is able to sign transactions on different chains, which means there's effectively addressed

that are controlled by near smart contract itself across all chains that it supports. And if you deposit to that address, near smart contract knows that it effectively received money on Salana or Ethereum on Zcash, et cetera. So that is kind of what enables this experience to be so smooth, is that we can effectively, like what normally things, centralized exchanges

or even custodians do, they actually put that on chain. and we made it programmable. And so now you can build applications as if you were building a centralized exchange, but in a fully decentralized smart contract way. And so that enables this experience to do. And is that called the verifier contract?

Yeah, so, well, the verified contract is what sits in the middle on NIR and now in the private chart on the year that actually tracks, effectively, it's a ledger of all, you know, who has how much, who deposited, how much, and it verifies this signed intent and effectively updates the balances. So let's say, you know, I'm, you know, whatever.

To Solana for Zcash, you know, Solver signed on that, I signed on that. That goes to verify a contract. And then that settles whenever I deposit funds into a near controlled Solana address and in turn releases the funds to either my near balance or directly already on Zcash. And it can release it directly into Zcash shielded address, right? So I can give it a shielded address directly. So you effectively kind of near facilitates all of those transactions, kind of, and that smart contract is what decides on updates of the balances.

Okay, yeah. I think, like, people are obviously quite excited about this. Like I was noticing, so Near Intense has $190 million worth of TBL. And from Zec alone, it's 71 million. I got the use numbers from DeFlema. Does that sound right to you? So I think they're missing the confidential. So like we have right, we still have non-confidential and confidential because we got

all this launch with non-confidential added confidential. And DeFilema right now missing the confidential balance. All together, the TVL is now over 200, $206 million. And then I, yeah, I mean, I think Zcash, like, cross both of them is, yes, 70 million. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, then, yeah, I actually think if you're saying 260, then the 71 million is on top of the 190 that I mentioned. So, well, I did want to then ask, you know, because when you have privacy, there's not as much visibility. So obviously we saw in June, I guess it

was that that can create some really freaky vulnerabilities that pop up all of a sudden out of nowhere that have been around for a long time, nobody noticed. And it sort of opens the door to exploits that could happen without anybody being aware. And of course, here I'm referring to what happened with Zcash, where there was a vulnerability that was discovered that could have allowed somebody to just mint a whole bunch of counterfeit Zcash. based on the way events played out, it sort of seems like nobody actually did exploit that. But, you know, yeah, I don't know if we can be 100% sure yet.

But, you know, I wonder, like, how you think about that. How do you think that users who want to engage with this should, like, what best practices should people follow to ensure that when they are transacting privately, that they are doing so in a secure manner? Well, there's a lot of actual nuances in there. But for example, with Zcash, the counterfeit vulnerability was confined to one pool. And the reason that's a problem is because you can mint coins within the pool, given the protocol, right? Which is to say, anyway, so that's, hopefully that's clear enough, which is to say the orchard pool itself, since it's a fundamental pool or was a fundamental pool in Zcash,

you could print new coins in there, but then since it's not like a system where you don't necessarily know what went in or what went out because it can be born within, that's a unique problem. And the solution to that problem or one of the solutions is a turnstile

where you just add a simple system that says what goes out can't be more than what went in to prove that you don't actually mint undocumented amounts within the pool. And so, I mean, now we're pretty, we're, I mean, you can never say 100% sure, but you can, I can say 99.99% sure, because we migrated it, right? And so ironwood or orchard was migrated to ironwood.

The vast majority of funds, I don't remember what it was, but over 90% migrated, but then also there's a forced migration there, where if you were to do a transaction on Orchard, it would trigger the migration to Ironwood. And then on top of that, it was formally verified three times over with also a new proof that shows that undetectable counterfeit bugs mathematically cannot exist. And so you can be about as close to certainty as you can get, keeping in mind that all math is math and all math is probabilistic to some degree in the age of AI. and so that specific part is absolutely no more. Now, but that's a very Zcash unique problem in the sense that, for example,

for like a smart contract platform on a different chain, you can usually see the amount like the high level, top level stats of a token, and you can have controls over that token. And certainly you can have, you know, in the case of MPC, it's a much, or like the specific problem is if it's fully anonymous, then it's hard to even patch the issue after the issue has happened. But if you have ways of mitigating that, which I think most protocols would, other than like a Zcash, then you can at least retroactively patch it in so it wouldn't be fatal to the network. Right. So that's sort of the difference. But that's like a very specific problem to like an extremely anonymous protocol.

Yeah, I agree. I think there's the whole level of things here to discuss. But indeed, Zcache, because it's on a further spectrum of there's nobody who has, like there's no computer that has a full state of what's going on. Meaning, indeed, if there is an issue, nobody even knows that there is an issue. There's no computer that can actually detect the issue. And so that is indeed very specific to Zcash and kind of the approach of every client producing the proofs.

Our approach is kind of in the middle where we do have effectively set nodes that are computing the state of the kind of private shard. Days themselves are private, but they inside can effectively do all the checks, do monitoring, and including alerting and actually kind of reach out back. and say, hey, guys, something is wrong. Let's investigate. So there's like a different level of kind of monitoring that's impossible for these types of scenarios.

On top of this, as Merge said, we're moving to a new paradigm, the paradigm where before code was secure if some smart people looked at it and wrote a PDF about it, is kind of starting to disappear, right? Because the smart people look at it, it doesn't really qualify that there's no bugs, right? It's just that they, they,

these specific people didn't find it. And now with AI, everybody can effectively send, you know, a high IQ, impure scientist to review any code. So for verification becoming a must for any kind of critical software that's been built right now. And I mean, we've been working on a bunch of this we actually also published some of our results on some of the more traditional benchmarks

showing that we can do 250 times cheaper formalification than what's right now in the market with kind of traditional like open AI systems. So generally formification becoming accessible and can be run directly while you're developing now and you can verify critical properties that indeed there's no money spent, there's no double spent, there's no kind of ways to extract money in some malicious way, and that, if it's done correctly, can cover the whole host of bugs that we've seen in DFI over the past year where, you know, there was all kinds of issues that people have been exploited. So I think that's kind of more fundamental that in general, this is not about privacy per se, this is more in general we need to take security seriously.

and there is tools now, and they are AHA-driven, but they combine formification and mathematics to do that. Yeah, and Ilya, I also wanted to ask you, like, if you could walk through some of those back-end points that we discussed earlier to help people understand, you know, so when they want to engage with near-intents, like what are some of the, you know, points where there's either certain risks or just for them to even understand how you're addressing security?

Because, you know, I kind of try to ask, this before about the verifier contract. Like I'm assuming there's maybe like an upgrade key or just just talk to you like yeah, maybe the solvers like you know, I don't know if there's risks there. Just, yeah, walk us through each of the ones. So people kind of have full awareness if they're going to engage with that, like what they're dealing with. For sure, yeah. So and then we have documentation for that for you can you can send your agents to do research. That generally is the best approach now.

But yeah, high level is at the core there's a multi-party computation, right? So this is the distributed set of nodes that live across jurisdictions, geographies, that are together can sign transactions, right? They sign transactions when some smart contracts issue a command. So this is, this verify a contract can say, hey, you know, send the Bitcoin transaction and, you know, send some Bitcoin to this address or send the Salana transaction and send, you know,

UTC on Salana to this address. So that's kind of the core risk system for most of the asset holding that are on near intense across the next system. So that's the biggest important piece. This is effectively, you know, to compare with what a traditional custodians are using,

right, but they're running it all themselves internally. we have it fully decentralized with high quality kind of operators. Some of them are financial institutions who are actually running the system. And then you can program it on top. Then indeed you have a verifier kind of contract. You know, again, think of it as the internal ledger of the system where it tracks who has how much balance of different addresses, of different assets. Indeed, there is upgradability for that.

There's time log, there's multi-sig, there's Dow, there's kind of all the traditional infrastructure to prevent kind of things happening that are not supposed to. And that kind of carries the kind of internal balance. There is additional guardrails, alerting. There's a lot of systems that kind of run around that to make sure that there's nothing happening there. we've been running like Rainbow Bridge was kind of the first version of this as we launched in 2021.

And so we've been running this kind of systems for a while now without losing any money. Now, the important part, if you're just using, for example, Zcash wallet, right, and you're sending money to Tron or Savannah, you actually only taking risk while, like in any of this component of the system, while your funds are moving. So effectively, as soon as they arrive to the destination address, right, you effectively done. And so for a lot of the use cases where people are integrating near intents into their own applications, into their own wallets, you're actually taking minimal risk and effectively only engaging with this. At the same time, if you do want full privacy for your assets across all chains, you can actually integrate the full near confidential.

and then you get balances, transfers, payments, perps, et cetera, altogether, but indeed then you're taking kind of risk of this MPC stack and smart code upgradeability. So those are indeed, you know, there and kind of very similar to traditional DFI with some of the additional inspection tooling that we have because I think like the important piece that's different with ETHDEMD-Fi when something happens to the Tidium-D-Fi to late, right?

Conduction already went out and, you know, money's gone, right? It's usually atomic. Because in 10, to have this like request for quote process, like this actual interaction, there's a lot more AI we can run actually to analyze the situation. And

we have this system called shield which runs both detection and prevention and even pauses some of the transactions when it thinks something is really outside of the normal. And so it's effectively kind of our AI-driven system that is trying to monitor the whole infrastructure, transactions, quotes, and determine if something is off. So, for example, when Lightcoin had a fork, a malicious fork, because somebody deduced their nodes and exploited a mimble-limble pool,

their privacy pool and did double spend. We had like some part of money went through, but then our system detected that something is wrong and effectively disconnected to that network and said like, hey, we're not going to be accepting any transactions for now until a system stabilizes. So that's also additional system where building that is more proactive in security

than just kind of hoping, because like we're sitting cross follows as blockchains, right? there's kind of issues across all of them that we need to determine. Yeah, yeah, that definitely sounds really tricky. So we're up on time, but I actually just, before we go, want to ask one last question because Zcash is looking at another upgrade soon, and I imagine that some of this news is maybe also why the price is pumping. So, Mert, do you want to talk a little bit about what is in, is it New 7 or NU7?

I don't know how to pronounce it, but yeah, yeah, there is an upgrade that people seem to be excited about. So do you want to talk about that? Sure. Well, I mean, there's quite a, there's a few, obviously they're not all in this release, but just long term, directionally speaking, but not that long term. So within the year, let's say. Obviously, one of the big ones is the speeding up of block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, which will actually also help with near interoperability as well, because it'll sort of help get more confidence that the transaction was correct in lesser time. And so this idea of being able to use the actual thing

enabled by privacy in NIRNZ Cash, it becomes much more real. Obviously the one I'm most people are the most excited about, which obviously has to take sort of a delayed approach given the new Ironwood pool, is Project Hackeon. And that one is undoubtedly the most important, the most exciting one, because it, let's say it solves a problem that paves the road for Zcash's scale 100x, but it also makes it fully quantum proof.

So today is quantum recoverable, meaning if something were to happen, you can recover. But quantum proof means you're completely secure as in like you can actually just keep doing things. You don't have to go through some recovery process. So on top of scale and quantum proofing, there's also going to be a new shielded pool. that new shielded pool is going to be in simple terms a simpler ZK circuits. So ZK circuits are basically just a bunch of math. And the more complex they are, the more possibility of, let's say, errors and obviously higher risk. And so the simpler you can get the circuit, the less moving parts, the lower the risk, they'll higher the security.

Right. And so it's also going to do that. And so more security, more scale, and quantum proofing. are coming. But also, you know, there's discussions on, for example, governance and all these sorts of things, which I'm not going to talk about too much. But I think they're heading towards a better direction in terms of like coinholders can actually privately vote, which, by the way, is not a primitive that exists many places, private voting,

for sort of, you know, signaling what should happen on the network, which I think. it's pretty cool because it's like super cypherpunk oriented where like you can privately express your opinion with skin in the game on like pretty interesting things. So those are the things I'm excited about. There's more things in that update, but honestly there's too much stuff going on for me to keep full track of. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we didn't even get to all my questions, but you know, I'm sure a lot of people are using this to trade on hyperliquid because obviously that's one of the, yeah, one And that's, you know, just those three words put together, Zcash, near intense, and hyperliquid perps. That's definitely, uh, 2026 buzzwords.

I guess you could say crypto buzzwords. Um, you guys, this was super fun. Um, this is like such an exciting area of crypto right now. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

And my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit UnchainedCripto.com.