Why Multicoin Is Betting Big On Zcash: Tushar Jain Lays Out The Bull Case

Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain said the firm’s recent investment in Zcash was driven by a convergence of stronger market traction, improving infrastructure and a broader return to crypto’s privacy roots. Speaking on the latest Bankless podcast released May 19, Jain argued that Zcash has moved from a “left for dead” asset into a credible private store-of-value contender.

Jain said Multicoin had watched Zcash for years without being convinced. The asset, in his view, had long suffered from weak attention, poor usability and limited evidence that privacy demand could translate into durable market interest. That changed after Zcash rallied sharply, corrected, and still retained both community intensity and a higher market baseline than in prior years.

Multicoin’s Zcash Thesis

“When I see something like that, I always pause and wonder, is this some manufactured thing? Is it sustainable? Is there a real groundswell of support here?” Jain said. “And when you see the price do what it did last year and then what we saw was it pulled back very significantly. As I saw it pull back, what I saw was one, the people who were talking about it were still excited about it. Two, the place where it pulled back on the chart actually demonstrated much better attention and strength than where the thing was trading for years and years before that.”

That, Jain said, helped get Multicoin “over the line.” The firm interpreted the correction not as a failed narrative, but as a stress test. Zcash, he argued, retained the “key people” supporting it and showed that interest in the asset was not merely a short-lived speculative burst.

The discussion, which also featured Helius Labs founder Mert Mumtaz, framed Zcash as a possible answer to what both guests described as crypto’s unfinished privacy problem. Mumtaz, who said he began looking more seriously at Zcash in early 2024 after reviewing its scaling plans, argued that privacy had become “the major thing that crypto has forgotten,” particularly as institutional adoption pushes more financial activity onto transparent rails.

Jain’s core investment thesis is not that Zcash becomes a high-throughput payments network. He described the asset’s real market as the store-of-value sector, where social coordination, brand and perceived monetary properties matter as much as raw technical capacity. In that context, he argued, Zcash is beginning to form a Schelling point around private wealth storage.

“The market that Zcash is competing for is the store of value market,” Jain said. “Like that’s the job that it does is it’s for storing value and it is far more scalable than Bitcoin and so enables more transactions and such. But the core value prop is store of value.”