The privacy coin market has been highly volatile recently, with the price of Zcash (ZEC) surging from around $50 in mid-September to around $420, surpassing Monero to become the 21st largest token by market capitalization.
As the buzz surrounding Zcash grows, the core development team, Electric Coin Co. (ECC), has released its roadmap for the fourth quarter of 2025, outlining a strategy to further enhance privacy, improve the wallet experience, and safeguard developer funds.
Four major goals of the technology blueprint
According to the blueprint released by the ECC , the shielded supply of the Orchard protocol has exceeded 4.1 million, reflecting increased on-chain usage. The market anticipates that Zcash, with its combination of "optional privacy" and potential cross-chain interoperability, will gain an advantage in an increasingly stringent regulatory environment, boosting investor sentiment.
ECC has locked four milestones in the document:
- First, the NEAR Intents protocol enables instantaneous transparent addresses for ZEC exchanges, reducing the risk of sensitive data leakage.
- Second, the automatic rotation of transparent addresses further diminishes the traceability of transactions.
- Third, expand the compatibility of the Zashi wallet with the Keystone hardware wallet , reducing the barrier to entry for users.
- Fourth, Keystone's P2SH multi-signature support is introduced to provide layered security control for developer funds.
These measures form a protection chain from the protocol layer to the application layer, attempting to simultaneously improve privacy and usability.
Privacy security measures for Zashi Wallet
ECC has condensed this season's core mission into:
"Reduce technical debt, improve privacy and usability for Zashi users, and ensure the smooth management of developer funds."
Specifically, Zashi will add decentralized entry/exit channels and temporarily close the Coinbase entry channel to reduce reliance on a single centralized service. The blueprint proposes two features: "instantaneous addresses" and "transparent address rotation," which improve privacy by reducing address reuse and obfuscating transaction history, respectively.
However, renowned blockchain investigator ZachXBT also warned that the integration of Zashi with NEAR Intents still carries the risk of information leaks, reminding the market of the difficulty in balancing privacy and ease of use.
Ecological Expansion and Regulatory Challenges
The Orchard protocol brings greater scalability to Zcash and lays the foundation for compatibility with other chains. The roadmap hints at future interoperability with public chains such as Solana, expanding asset liquidity channels. ECC's "North Star Vision" includes a possible shift to PoS and the creation of an official flagship wallet to enhance user experience and network security.
However, with global regulators continuing to focus on privacy coins, while Zcash's "optional privacy" improves compliance flexibility, it remains to be seen whether it can completely eliminate policy risks.
