Mert

Mert argues Zcash’s developer-exodus narrative was false, amplified when “Grok summarize[d] it falsely.” The people actually shipping Zcash—including Josh, the engineers, and the Zashi team—remained in a renamed, startup-style structure: “Nobody quit. They just changed the structure of the team.” The price recovered, though not fully.

The restructuring moves Zcash’s main shipping team from nonprofit constraints toward a capital-raising technology company. Mert calls the change “anything from 10 to 11x” better because the team can hire, fund development, and judge itself against product and wallet usage instead of navigating a bureaucratic board.

Zcash development remains decentralized across several organizations rather than controlled by one canonical team. ECC does some core development and maintains the Zashi wallet; Shielded Labs conducts research; independent contributors remain active; and Sean Bowe’s Tachyon team is pursuing state-growth removal, scaling, and quantum-proof privacy. Mert’s blunt assessment is that the Zcash Foundation is “basically non-existent” operationally.

The new company can monetize products while still seeking tokenholder-approved development funding. Zashi users pay a small fee when swapping assets through NEAR Intents, while what critics call a “dev tax” is, according to Mert, an approximately 8%-12% share of mining rewards held in a lockbox and allocated to teams through tokenholder votes.

Mert rejects the idea that organizational drama damages Zcash’s monetary thesis because “nothing about the chain itself has changed.” Thread Guy frames the broader mission as “encrypting money at planetary scale” and putting “a Swiss vault in your pocket,” which requires “missionaries, not mercenaries” who have stayed through years of downturns and whose cryptography has worked at scale.

The conversation broadens into Mert’s claim that Opus 4.5 represents a step-function improvement in AI coding and could reshape venture formation over five years. Programming becomes instructing computers in English, but specificity still separates useful engineering from bad prompting. After building a prediction-market app in roughly one part-time week, he expects cheaper MVPs, more founders, faster traction, less need to sell the company, fiercer software competition, and more incentive to pursue genuinely ambitious projects.