Privacy Coin Zcash Makes Its Ethereum 'Wrapped' Debut With Tokensoft and Anchorage

Oct 21, 2020 at 16:05 UTCUpdated Oct 21, 2020 at 17:15 UTC.Remember when crypto exchanges were strong-armed into delisting privacy coins like zcash in order to protect their brittle banking covenants?

Crypto keeps moving, and today ZEC is making its debut within the bustling decentralized exchange ecosystem in the form of wrapped zcash.

In a similar fashion, wrapped zcash is a 1:1 representation of zcash on Ethereum held in custody by Anchorage.

"I'm thrilled that there is such interest, and that people can, and do, innovate and deploy extensions on top of Zcash without the Electric Coin Company's knowledge or approval," Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, Zcash founder and Electric Coin Company CEO, told CoinDesk in a direct message.

The wrapped version of zcash on Ethereum "Really brings the best of both worlds," said Mason Borda, CEO of Tokensoft.

"Obviously Zcash enables shielded transactions, so now holders of zcash can have assets in a shielded pool and wrap a portion of these assets to use on Ethereum, maintaining their privacy," said Borda.

Wrapping zcash on the Tokensoft platform for use on Ethereum also makes the shielded version of the coins more palatable to regulators, Borda believes.

"So it's a big deal. It's going to open up zcash to every other market out there that is currently concerned about enhanced privacy and shielded transactions."

"The goal with zcash was never to shield from authorities, regulators or your financial providers," said Diogo Monica, co-founder and president of Anchorage.

"The shielding of zcash came as a response to the fact that bitcoin is pseudonymous. So who you're shielding from is the public at large and the internet at large. And so the fact that we're using ERC-1404 standard allows us to guarantee on-chain that we have the advantages of regulation with the advantages of zcash on-chain anonymity."