As organized violent crime increasingly exploits the opportunities provided by transparent blockchains and the widespread application of outdated KYC practices, the team at BitcoinVN expects a strong shift towards more privacy-preserving technologies and services that help keep the risks of you or your family being targeted at a more moderate level.
As such, our team remains committed to providing you with access to the tools, services, and guidance that help you on this journey to the best of our abilities.
With this foreword done, let’s review what has actually changed in regard to Zcash, the second most popular cryptocurrency designed with preserving user privacy as its primary objective and reason for being, after global leader Monero.
BitcoinVN – Zcash infrastructure upgrade May 2025
What has changed? What is new?
Team BitcoinVN has promoted Zcash to one of the cryptocurrencies for which we operate in-house infrastructure—something we are doing for all the major cryptocurrencies we deal with and interact with.
As such, we’ve been able to provide two dramatic improvements that positively affect our users:
- Swaps involving ZEC will now be executed within seconds, rather than minutes (or longer).
- The individual swap size limit has been raised from $1,000 to up to $50,000 per swap.
What has not changed is that no sign-up is required to use the BitcoinVN platform unless you deposit VND via bank wire with us.
Pure crypto swaps and the offramp side of things remain accessible without the need to open a BitcoinVN account.
Zcash – Market Outlook
First of all, none of this constitutes investment advice.
When asked, a majority of our team members will likely tell you that for your savings, just buying (& securing) Bitcoin is the way to go – “there is no second best” and all that.
It should also be said that the following observations are meant to be pure, objective market commentary. We view all privacy-preserving technologies first and foremost as a tool (with various trade-offs in different circumstances), designed to solve a problem for the user, rather than a cult where “there can only be one.”
Transacting in e.g. ZEC =/= saving in ZEC.
And if you simply don’t like ZEC – cool, use the tool that fits your preference.
With that said, we also understand that there are a fair number of people – for one reason or another – looking to allocate a part of their capital reserves to “altcoins.”
Just remember:
Just because something might be useful doesn’t make it a good “store of value” – or a good investment (= preserving / enhancing your purchasing power), for that matter.
Mistaking one for the other has wrecked more family fortunes than one could count.
While Zcash has, for many years – similar to Bitcoin’s “Number-go-up” technology – been seen as having built-in “Number-go-down” technology…
… it seems that in more recent times, after some foundational shake-ups in the Zcash ecosystem, the bleeding was finally stopped, and ZEC has stabilized in Bitcoin…
…as well as USD terms
“Zcash has always been the superior privacy tech as the “zero knowledge” approach is a secrecy guarantee rather than the obfuscation probabilities provided with the ring signature approach. With the new scalability innovation discovered with project Tachyon and the move to proof of stake, shielded ZEC is the premier form of private sound money. I expect that once the world fully understands the need for sound money, they will very quickly understand why they also need privacy to achieve complete freedom. The recent Coinbase hacks only further demonstrate the lethality of connecting personal addresses to transparent ledgers.”
– Tom Howard, Head of Financial Products and Regulatory Affairs at Coinlist
Zcash Emission & Funding Changes
As of May 2025, Zcash miners are rewarded with 1.5625 ZEC per block, with a block time of approximately 75 seconds. This reward is part of Zcash’s ongoing emission schedule, which follows a Bitcoin-like halving model. The last halving occurred in November 2024, reducing the block reward to 1.5625 ZEC from previous 3.125 ZEC per block.
As of November 2024, the Zcash network implemented a new funding model following Network Upgrade 6 (NU6). Previously, 20% of each block reward was allocated to the Development Fund, which was distributed among the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the Zcash Foundation (ZF), and the Zcash Community Grants (ZCG).
Under the new model, the Development Fund has been replaced with a 12% allocation to a “lockbox”, a reserve fund that will accumulate until the community reaches consensus on a decentralized disbursement mechanism. The ZCG continues to receive an 8% allocation for an additional year to fund community initiatives through grants.
This restructuring means that the proportion of newly minted ZEC allocated to ecosystem development has been reduced from 20% to 8% (with the remaining 12% held in reserve), while miners continue to receive 80% of the block rewards.
Zcash – Technology
Late 2024 saw disruption across the wider ecosystem, as the latest network fork in December 2024 caused significant challenges for various major ecosystem participants, including Binance and Ledger. These companies struggled to adjust to the new changes, leading them to disable withdrawals from their services and devices for several months. While these issues have now been resolved, they undoubtedly created a major speed bump for the further development and adoption of the Zcash ecosystem.
Despite these setbacks, the Zcash community and its developers have continued pushing forward.
In late 2024, the Zcash ecosystem began transitioning from the zcashd node software to a more modular infrastructure, moving to the Zebrad node and the Zallet CLI wallet. While this aims to improve the system in the long run, it has created some short-term issues for users.
The deprecation of zcashd has led to the removal of key features, like z_sendmany and generate, which impacts wallet functionalities. As a result, users may experience limited wallet capabilities during this transition. The Zcash Foundation and Electric Coin Company are working to address these issues, but some features are still under development, meaning users may encounter temporary disruptions or a reduced experience compared to the previous setup.
According to Jason McGee, Executive Director of Shielded Labs, “Zcash is entering an exciting phase with several important developments that promise to drive its growth and adoption. The transition to a hybrid PoW/PoS consensus with Crosslink will enable users to easily participate in securing the network and earn rewards through staking. At the same time, Tachyon is paving the way for significant scalability improvements, leveraging advanced cryptographic techniques to enhance performance without compromising user privacy. Also, the increasing use of coinholder voting, including in governance decisions and grant funding, shows how Zcash is evolving towards a more participatory and decentralized governance model that gives coinholders a voice in shaping its future.”
Shielded vs unshielded Zcash transactions
Zcash transactions can occur on two types of addresses: transparent (t-addresses) and shielded (z-addresses).
Transactions on t-addresses are similar to Bitcoin, where the sender, recipient, and transaction amount are visible on the blockchain.
In contrast z-addresses on Zcash provides privacy by hiding your transaction details – such as the sender, recipient, and amount – from anyone looking at the blockchain. This makes it ideal for users who want to protect their financial privacy, especially to avoid unwanted attention, like from criminals or hackers.
On the other hand, t-addresses are transparent, meaning anyone can see your transaction details, which might be useful for interacting with other platforms or when transparency is required. If privacy is your top priority, especially for safeguarding your financial information, z-addresses are the way to go.
Currently, BitcoinVN supports only t-addresses. However, we are actively exploring the addition of z-addresses to our services and will provide updates as soon as there is progress to share.
How to keep my ZEC (Zcash) safe?
Both of the most common cryptocurrency hardware manufacturers – Trezor and Ledger – do generally support Zcash (ZEC) via their Trezor Suite or respective Ledger Live software.
However, it needs to be disclosed that, in respect to ZEC, Trezor managed the situation better than Ledger. While the late 2024 network transition went smoothly on Trezor devices, Ledger users found themselves unable to send their ZEC holdings via the Ledger software. They were forced to either wait for the software upgrade (which fixed the issue in March 2025) or insert their seed phrase in another wallet that supports ZEC to make their ZEC accessible in the meantime.
Please note that currently, both Trezor and Ledger only support the usage of transparent (t-addresses). To make use of shielded transactions, you would still need to run your own node and/or use more Zcash-specific wallet software, recommendations for which can be found on the ZEC Foundation website.
BitcoinVN serves as an authorized supplier of both Trezor and Ledger hardware wallets in Vietnam, with direct delivery from our warehouse in Saigon to your doorstep in less than 24 hours (domestic shipping available within 1-3 days).
Earn Yield on Zcash?
While Zcash does not have any “natural” way to earn yield on your ZEC holdings, you can go further out on the risk curve and earn yield on your ZEC exposure by providing liquidity to BitcoinVN through the ZEC staking vault service:
Please be aware that the BitcoinVN staking vault is a fully custodial service – you are giving up control of your coins and trust BitcoinVN not to abscond with them or lose them otherwise!
As such this service should only be used by sophisticated investors who “can afford to lose the money” in case things go wrong.
Do not become greedy – especially if you can not afford the risk.
For the common user, the best place for your coins is still your own wallet (such as, for example, a Trezor device), with the private keys remaining separate from any internet-connected device.
But if you can afford the risk and are looking to juice up the returns on your existing ZEC exposure, as of the time of writing, the ZEC vault fetches about ~8% APR, with a visible increase in recent weeks.
With the aforementioned upgrades in the BitcoinVN infrastructure, which will provide for a vastly improved user experience, we would expect the APR numbers on the ZEC vault to see a further “bullish continuation.”
In response to the upgraded swap limits on ZEC, we have also increased the max vault size to 5,000 ZEC to provide sufficient liquidity for the expected higher volume swap activity.
So, if you can afford to take the risk, why might you consider putting a couple of ZEC at risk in the BitcoinVN staking vault?
- You mostly care about financial returns, which you expect to keep up with or exceed the purchasing power erosion faced by other common assets such as fiat currencies
- You’d like to support the growth of the ZEC ecosystem and are happy to put a few ZEC at risk to help provide a smoother operation of (hopefully) useful tools within that ecosystem
In case any of these – or other personal reasons – are attractive to you, you can start to begin staking ZEC with BitcoinVN here.
Further reading material:
Monero versus Bitcoin & Lightning – a view from privacy maximalist “Digital Ghost”
