Zcash and Financial Privacy

Transcript

All right, look at me. That's like a photo from 15 years ago. I have far less hair. So, I'm Josh Sweheart, the CEO of Electric Coin Company. Um, we work on Zcash and um Zcash is unstoppable private money. We also developed a product uh called Zashi which is a world-class user experience for uh saves for storing and uh spending your shielded Zcash. Um I'm not Zuko. This is the same company that Zuko founded. Zuko is actually up next.

Um but really honored to have taken this role about a year and a half ago. Um I'm going to cheat a little bit with some of my slides because I changed my presentation. So, I was going to tell you about Zcash and how Zcash works, but I'm not going to. I'm going to tell you about the heart behind it and what we're actually trying to accomplish. So, I want to ask you a question. I want you to think, what if everything you did was observed? every action you took, the book that you bought that maybe you didn't want anybody to know about, the piece of sexy lingerie, the medical

procedure that was unapproved. What if everybody knew everything? What would that mean? The um and how would that change your behavior? Does that change your behavior? So, this last weekend, my son got married, my oldest boy. Thank you. It was It was awesome. And in celebrating, I wanted to take my daughter, my baby girl, out on the dance floor, and she wouldn't come. And I pulled and I prodded and she didn't want to get out there. And she didn't want to get out there because everybody was watching and she didn't want anybody to see how she moved.

That's not who she normally is. My little girl will dance with me in the living room and she always has and sing songs and laugh in our living room with the curtains closed. We act differently when people are watching. So this is why we built Zcash. We built seed cache actually for the kingdom of the sovereigns for people to be able to make decisions without everybody else being able to see what they do so that you can live freely and be true to who you are, your own

self. I saw this quote or this tweet actually from Paulo on Twitter this week and I've been thinking about it. Money is a mesh social network and it is. But this is not enough. We need the ability to be able to transact with selective disclosure to be able to choose what people are going to see and what people won't see. Because if we put all of our money and all of our f financial transactions on a public database on a public blockchain for everybody to see for all time,

it will change your behavior. It will change people's behavior. We're mo we're likely not to act the way that we would normally act and do the things that we would normally do because people are watching and they will be watching for all time. This is super important when we talk about privacy. Often we think about it in terms of um like people talk about privacy is only like if if you have something to hide.

But privacy is about a freedom of expression to be able to live fully to who I am and to engage the way that I want. It's about liberty, my ability to choose, my agency, to be able to do the things that um that I want because if it's not private, I will self-censor and I won't do those things and I will not be truly who I am. And it's about security. If somebody can see your balance, they can see your transaction history.

And guess what? They're aggregating that data with data that's spread all around the the web. I just disclosed that I have a son who's now married and I have a daughter. That information is now out there. We do that all the time with social media. We post our pictures, all the metadata associated with them. We do it even we don't even think about it and all of that data is being aggregated along with your financial graph on public blockchains.

It's a security problem. So that's why we built Zcash. We built Zcash to be unstoppable private money. fully decentralized, fully private, encrypted to protect your liberty, to protect your agency, to protect your security. We have a wide tent. Zcash itself is a political.

Sometimes privacy gets politically charged, but anybody is welcome into this tent. The things that are synchros are self- sovereignty and agency. It's decentralized. It's open source and we're working on building and making it more accessible uh to more people. So this is a product called Zashi. Zashi is a world-class user experience again for um storing and using shielded money.

This application that we just launched a feature called crossay. What crossay allows you to do is to pay anybody in their the currency that they want out of your shielded Zcash. So you want Bitcoin, you want USDC, you want Salana, great. I'll pay you, but you won't be able to see my transaction history and you won't be able to see my Zcash balance. So, try it out. Let me know what you think. Um, if you put your address out on X, Zcashers from all over the world will send you private encrypted messages directly into your Zashi app. Super fun.

Um, I hope you do take a look. So again, the Zcash network is the is this um the network state is the kingdom of the the sovereigns and this is what we're building a privacy preserving Zcash network state. Thank you.