Cypherpunk Owns $500M of Zcash and 18% of Its Hashrate | CIO Will McEvoy

Cypherpunk Technologies aims to accumulate 5% of Zcash’s total supply and invest in the wider privacy ecosystem. CIO Will McEvoy said it holds roughly 325,000–326,000 ZEC, worth just under $500 million, and controls about 18% of Zcash’s hashrate, making it the network’s largest miner. The company’s three pillars are holding ZEC, mining it and investing in privacy. It has retained all the ZEC it has mined and is comfortable maintaining roughly 18%–20% of hashrate, which McEvoy considers profitable and significant without being an excessive concentration of network power.

McEvoy sees AI-enabled loss of privacy as a major reason interest in Zcash is returning. AI can combine Bitcoin’s transparent ledger with leaked personal information to link wallets to their owners, and he expects the same capabilities to make hacks and exploits in the digital economy easier. Bitcoin holders, he said, are starting to recognize that their assets may not be effectively pseudonymous; he estimated AI capabilities in 2023 were about 5% of today’s level. Zcash’s shielded addresses and zero-knowledge proofs offer a different model from Web 2 services, where information may be hidden from the public but remains accessible to employees or through subpoenas. McEvoy also cited global instability and fears of wealth being taken as drivers of demand for private digital money.

McEvoy characterized Zcash mining economics at roughly $1,000 per megawatt-hour, versus about $130 for Bitcoin mining and $240–$250 for AI co-location. He attributed the gap partly to constrained equipment supply: Bitmain is the only identified Zcash-miner manufacturer, producing an estimated low thousands of machines monthly, and new orders could take seven or eight months or longer to deploy. Cypherpunk has not announced new miner orders and relies on its Bitmain relationships and broader equipment-industry connections. The host’s “envelope math” compared Zcash at about $50 and 7 gigasoles per second 13 months earlier with about $1,500 and 25 gigasoles per second today, implying an 8.5-fold rise in mining profitability. McEvoy likened the market to Bitcoin mining in 2016–17, saying Zcash mining now earns more than twice the roughly $300–$400 per megawatt-hour he recalled for Bitcoin then. More Zcash machines could eventually reduce returns, but competing ASIC development would require major design investment and access to fabrication capacity also sought by AI companies.

McEvoy said an mNAV comparison no longer captures Cypherpunk’s value because it owns both ZEC and a mining business, and prefers a sum-of-the-parts approach. Including outstanding warrants, the company was described as having about a $1 billion enterprise value; McEvoy estimated the market was valuing its ZEC holdings and mining business at roughly $500 million each. Cypherpunk remains open to raising capital for ZEC purchases, equipment and privacy investments. Its initial outside-investor round raised about $60 million, which it used to start buying ZEC when the price was in the low hundreds. McEvoy said the company seeks short-term outperformance of ZEC through accumulation and mining, alongside longer-term public-market exposure to privacy technologies.

The company is an investor in Zottle, which McEvoy described as the most widely used Zcash wallet, and he cited application teams including Zodl and Visor. He recommends buying ZEC directly, moving it to a wallet and shielding it, arguing that additions to the shielded pool improve privacy for other users. He also praised Zcash’s cryptographers, security researchers and engineers as ideologically aligned and quick to ship, naming people at Valour, Takiion, Zodl and the Visor wallet team. Cypherpunk bought ZEC during the price drop associated with the Orchard bug. McEvoy said the bug could potentially have allowed unlimited ZEC to be minted in the shielded pool, so it is impossible to know with certainty whether it was exploited. Available indicators suggest it was not: the bug remained undiscovered for years, and price action showed no apparent minting and selling before discovery. A security researcher found it within hours of developers receiving Opus 4.8; developers moved quickly to patch it and seek stronger verification that no ZEC had been created through the bug.

McEvoy described Cypherpunk as an ultra-long-term holder that has issued no price targets. He considers ZEC reaching 10% of Bitcoin’s value—roughly $10,000 per ZEC—an intermediate-term level at which to reassess, not necessarily sell. He argued that Zcash could become a private store of value and potentially capture value from gold and offshore wealth, which he described as markets worth tens of trillions of dollars. The interviewer said there were indications, of unclear extent, that the Lazarus Group uses Zcash’s shielded pool, presenting this both as evidence of the product’s quality and as a troubling development. The discussion also raised the risk that governments might oppose Zcash as capital controls increase. One speaker argued that privacy is foundational to US freedoms, including free speech, and especially important in China; McEvoy’s response to the prospect of government opposition was not completed.