True blockchain privacy is rare, still

Recorded remotely.

Hodl Up: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Hodl Up. Most of you have probably seen the craze that has been the privacy meta in crypto over the past couple of months, and to discuss it and go into the details, we have Quinten van Welzen, head of growth and marketing at Zano, with us today. Quinten, thank you for joining us, man.

Quinten: Thank you for having me on your show. How's it going, guys?

Hodl Up: Going well. Going perfectly. So without further ado, I want to dive right into it. In your eyes, why do you think the privacy meta started this late into the cycle? It started in mid or late 2025, I think, and the cycle was basically over by then.

Quinten: From the eyes of someone who's in marketing and working for one of the privacy projects in crypto, it's hard to pinpoint one specific reason. But crypto was always meant to be private. If you go back to the early days, crypto was meant as a safe alternative outside of the banking system. Even in the Bitcoin white paper itself, there is a section that talks specifically about privacy. Satoshi Nakamoto talked about a concept that basically describes ring signatures, which is what Zano and Monero use today, but at that time it didn't exist yet. So privacy has always been a very important aspect of crypto.

But of course, like the entire industry, it's still very early, and with the fast growth it attracts all kinds of growing pains. I think memecoins are a good example of that, or pump.fun type things, where it's super easy to launch some kind of low-quality token. NFTs were a good example too, with all the images like the Bored Apes that were worth millions of dollars, which made little to no sense at all. But the technology itself, if you look at NFTs for tokenizing things like real-world assets, is a super interesting use of NFTs. Now I think people are starting to realize that a bit. People have played enough with crypto, had enough fun, and are starting to realize that crypto can actually lead to great things, and privacy is a key component of that, especially when it comes to finance.

Banks shield your bank account. I cannot peek into your bank account and see how much money you have there or the transactions you did. So if we are ever going to use blockchain as an alternative to the banking system, why would we settle for a transparent system that is simply super dangerous, both for the end user and for businesses?

Businesses don't want their competitors to see where their money flows. Employees don't want others to see what salary they get or what they spend it on. For those reasons we need privacy.

As for why now, I think CBDCs, tightened government regulations, and digital IDs are probably also valid concerns for people. So people are overall starting to understand that they probably want some privacy in their lives, or at the very least some exposure to privacy coins as a hedge against everything that's going on.

Hodl Up: Speaking of regulation, we've seen a lot of centralized exchanges aggressively delist privacy coins. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Monero. How does the privacy sector survive and maintain healthy liquidity? And to add to that, how difficult is it to market projects like Zano, since you're head of marketing, given that the entire theme right now seems to be more compliance and more surveillance? We've seen it with taxes, with CARF, the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, and so on.

Quinten: If you ask me, it's not hard to market at all. I just explained the case for why we need privacy for your finances: it's key for both businesses and individuals. So it's not hard to market, especially during these times when people are concerned about all these topics. That makes the case for privacy coins.

Also, when it comes to exchanges delisting Monero and other privacy coins, I think that worked the opposite way of what they had hoped. We saw a temporary dip in the Monero price when that happened, but after that it recovered very well and even went to new highs. The liquidity is also fine. You can still find a lot of liquidity on the dark markets or on decentralized exchanges, the alternatives to centralized exchanges.

It does make things harder, at least when you want to bring something like Zano, to mention Zano in particular, to people. It makes it harder to acquire, because most regular Joes trade on Binance, Coinbase, or Bybit, and those exchanges are very compliant, so they don't have privacy coins. So bringing it to those particular people is a bit harder. If you want privacy, you have to do a little bit more work. But there are still plenty of people out there who want to go the extra mile to get their hands on privacy coins, because they understand the value proposition.

Hodl Up: From what I've seen on my Twitter feed, most of the people who promote and use privacy coins on a daily basis are mainly people who have been in the space for quite a while, and they still hold on to the privacy values that crypto was intended to have in the first place. Whereas what I've seen from other cryptocurrencies, the ones that don't necessarily put privacy on a pedestal, is that they try to onboard normies and make the user experience seamless. So do you find it more difficult to onboard normies, or is your current objective mainly to get existing crypto users to shift into privacy? If that made sense.

Quinten: It's definitely more of a challenge. Privacy tech is just way more complex, also for the developers. You need way more audits to make sure everything works as intended, so it's also more resource-heavy for that reason, and making a seamless product is much harder. But that's a challenge we like to take on at Zano. If you look at our wallets, for example, or the way things work in the Zano ecosystem, I think we've done a great job at making privacy as easy and accessible as possible for everyone.

For example, we have a lot of wallets where it's super easy to use and send your Zano around. Zano has Confidential Assets, which are privacy tokens. From within the Zano mobile wallet and the desktop wallet, we have a user interface where any user could mint their own privacy token. It will take you less than a minute and only cost you about 0.01 Zano. So it's super accessible, and this technology is super powerful because people use it to build on Zano. There's a privacy stablecoin in the Zano ecosystem. We have private NFTs. You can turn your Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, you name it, into private assets on Zano by wrapping them onto the Zano blockchain. It's all super powerful, and the way to interact with it is made as easy and seamless as possible. So it's definitely harder, but not impossible if you spend enough time and resources on it.

Hodl Up: You just mentioned that you rolled out Confidential Assets, which allow people to issue their own private tokens. Apart from that, what do you think is the most interesting thing you've done or are doing for the normal user? What could be the best thing to acquire users?

Quinten: Well, we're building an entire ecosystem. We're basically building the infrastructure and the tools for people to build on and build with. It's basically like any other layer one, like Ethereum for example, but with privacy enforced at the protocol level by default. Basically anything in finance needs privacy. You don't need it just for payments, but also for all these other things, like DeFi, or tokenizing gold or other existing assets like Bitcoin itself. And I think the privacy stablecoin is something crypto very much needs right now. I think that is one of the most interesting aspects of Zano right now.

And these are not things that we develop ourselves. Confidential Assets is the tokenization mechanism that people can use to create tokens on top of Zano. It's the same way people launch tokens and assets on top of Ethereum, but the Ethereum Foundation obviously doesn't have anything to do with those assets launched on top.

Hodl Up: We also saw Starknet launching strkBTC, and from what I saw, it includes third-party viewing keys, which is not necessarily complete privacy. So how hard is it to educate the average user on the dangers of optional privacy? And do you worry that in the long term the market will accept these compliant, backdoored viewing keys as good enough, which would leave true default-privacy networks isolated?

Quinten: It's really good that you mentioned this, by the way, because we have also spoken about Starknet in the past. This is actually way more dangerous. Everyone now knows about the dangers of using transparent blockchains. We've seen it with the wrench attacks in the news; I don't have to explain that. But something like what Starknet launched is really dangerous in my opinion, because users assume they are completely private by using something like strkBTC, because that's how it's marketed. But it's actually not. If you look into the details of the documentation, they specifically mention an auditor view key, which is basically a back door. They talk about the fact that if an authorized party knocks on the door of the Starknet team, they can basically decrypt particular transactions if the government wants that.

That's super dangerous, because it's not censorship-resistant anymore. And even if you think the government will not do anything bad with it, which could very well be the case, what if that view key gets leaked, or someone hacks it? You could decrypt all those "private" transactions. So it's not private. That's why we also called it out, because on Zano nothing like that exists. There is no back door. The code is completely open source and everyone can verify it. What is private is truly private, and that's the way it should be. Only you as the end user can selectively disclose transactions or reveal data about yourself. We believe the user, and only the user, should be in control of their own financial data. Nobody else: not a government, not a project team.

Hodl Up: Now I also want to talk about DePIN projects that handle massive amounts of data, for example Helium or other IoT and DePIN projects. In your opinion, should the industry set the standard across every sector in crypto and focus on privacy there as well? I hope my question made sense, because I kind of beat around the bush here.

Quinten: Sorry, actually it does not. Maybe you can rephrase it a little bit, and then I can give you an answer.

Hodl Up: I wanted to talk about DePIN projects like Helium and others...

Quinten: Oh, that is not my area of expertise, so it will be hard for me to comment on that.

Hodl Up: All right. Let me dive into something else entirely, and let's go to marketing. Crypto Twitter is dying, we all know that. Nikita said they're going to kill crypto Twitter, and he's actually killing it. What do you think is going to be the next frontier of crypto marketing? I think crypto Twitter will survive no matter what Nikita or Elon do, because that's what people want. But do you think crypto marketers will try to find a new way of communicating with their communities?

Quinten: Of course, and I'm not worried about that at all. There are plenty of projects building interesting stuff out there. I believe the Dash team, who we are very well connected with, is building their own social platform that looks very much like X, but works with crypto donations and so on. So there are plenty of alternatives out there. The crypto market will always adapt. If one thing disappears, something else will appear and the community will shift there. But I highly doubt that crypto X will disappear. For X itself, I think a very big portion of their user base is crypto. So if they tried to ban that completely, they would be shooting themselves in the foot.

What I do think is good is that they're cutting down on InfoFi on X, where you can get rewarded for engaging with specific tweets. I think that is actually a good thing, because nowadays it's very hard to see whose followers or engagement are real and authentic and whose are not.

Hodl Up: The death of InfoFi is the only funeral we went out celebrating. But as long as it doesn't turn into LinkedIn, we're happy, because LinkedIn is basically absolute garbage. Which brings me to my next point, because I did actually see a good post on LinkedIn recently. It explained how in the future no one is going to use a particular application, because Claude is making it so easy for everyone to make their own applications that they don't have to rely on any third parties. They can build their own application in a matter of minutes and tailor it to their needs.

At the same time, we're seeing institutions such as Robinhood building their own siloed, proprietary chains because they want confidentiality for tokenized real-world assets. So my question is: why would an institutional player bridge their assets over to Zano using the Confidential Layer when they have the capital to build their own compliant and isolated ecosystem? How does Zano win the liquidity war against these massive corporations in the long term?

Quinten: Although it has become very easy to code things with Claude these days, you cannot code a blockchain with Claude. And especially not one that stays competitive, with all the audits and so on. That's all very time-consuming and resource-heavy. It's also all about track record. Zano has existed since 2019, and its predecessor project, Boolberry, since 2014, and it has always worked without any major flaws or bugs. I think that is very important in crypto, and that will never change. It's not like someone could create their own Zano in a week with Claude. That's definitely not the case here.

Hodl Up: I want to direct the conversation to something that's super trending right now, and that's prediction markets. I'm asking every guest something related to prediction markets, because I really want to explore how they can evolve in the near future. When it comes to Zano, do you think we will have a fully private-by-default prediction market, back end and everything, by, let's say, 2027?

Quinten: What if I told you that it already exists right now, right here on Zano? You can go to zanox.io, which once again is not made by us. This is people building on top of Zano. You can do sports betting there (not financial advice, by the way), you can buy gift cards with your Zano and fUSD, and they have a lottery. They also have a prediction market. Where did it go? Maybe it's still in beta, that could be it. I know for a fact the builder showed me how to bet on specific things happening in the near future. It looks like it's not live, so I have to take my words back, but it's in beta, because I've literally used it with the guy building it, and he showed me how it works. So I think it will probably go live in a matter of a couple of months on zanox.io, and you'll be able to bet on everything I just mentioned, plus prediction markets, with your Zano but also with Freedom Dollar, the privacy stablecoin built on Zano. So those things already exist today.

The way assets are managed is non-custodial. You just send them there, and if you win, they get sent back. It's not that you have an account within ZanoX that you have to top up, with them functioning like a centralized exchange that has custody of your funds. That's not the case here. It works via Zano aliases. Zano aliases are like usernames on the Zano blockchain. It's basically your identity online without being connected to your real identity. You just connect to the ZanoX website via the Zano Chrome extension, and then you can participate in sports betting, prediction markets, you name it.

Hodl Up: I did assume someone was already building that, because it's just too good an idea to pass up.

Quinten: Absolutely.

Hodl Up: You mentioned fUSD earlier, the stablecoin on Zano. We're seeing, for example, that the US government is spending a lot of energy on regulating fiat-backed stablecoins, because they're outshining banks in terms of the yield they provide. Most people who hold stablecoins, people who don't necessarily use them every day, hold them because they get some sort of yield in return. So how do we onboard people to hold private stablecoins rather than some stablecoin that offers a very high APY but is fully centralized? To my understanding, fUSD behaves like cash in a way. You cannot tell how much someone has spent or who that person is. So besides the obvious utility that a private stablecoin has, how else do we convince people to hold fUSD rather than USDC, for example?

Quinten: It all comes down to one thing, and that's education. Education, education, education. We have to make people aware of the dangers that come with using USDT, USD1, USDC, you name it. The US government, for example, is very fond of creating their own stablecoins because of the control they can have over them. They can just mint more basically for free and use it the way they want. It's not much better than a CBDC. It's basically a pilot program for CBDCs, because it's already programmable money.

Let's take USDT, for example. The Freedom Dollar website has a really nice tool for this, by the way. Let me open it: freedomdollar.com. There's fUSD versus USDT, and they have a USDT blacklist dashboard. You can see that nearly 4 billion dollars in USDT has been frozen over all those years. Millions of dollars get frozen every day for the most bizarre reasons. And if someone can freeze your money, it's not really your money. With something like USDT, they don't have a way to prove their reserves, by the way. They just claim that it is backed by US Treasuries, which is also quite questionable. It's completely transparent, and they can freeze it whenever they want. So this is just a much worse version of fiat money, if you ask me.

Then you have something like Freedom Dollar, or take any privacy stablecoin: your money cannot be traced or followed. It's truly yours. It cannot be blacklisted or frozen by the project. It behaves like cash, like you said. It's truly censorship-resistant and truly yours. You decide where to spend it. You decide when you share transaction details with someone, and nobody else can do that.

On top of that, Freedom Dollar has an auditable wallet. Zano has a feature named auditable wallets. Everything is private by default on Zano, but this is a special type of wallet that you can create as a project, and these wallets have a view key. By sharing that view key with the community (Freedom Dollar, for example, has it live on their website), you can import it into your Zano wallet and cryptographically verify how many assets are in that wallet and the incoming and outgoing transactions, without being able to spend them yourself. So instead of Freedom Dollar saying "trust me, bro, we have enough assets," you as a user can cryptographically verify that they have the assets they claim to have. And it's overcollateralized in Zano coins. I believe they just passed 1 million Zano coins, which is worth about $6 million at today's value, in the reserve wallet. So it's an overcollateralized privacy stablecoin built on Zano, with a way to prove its reserves. Provable reserves, full privacy, and unfreezable, so truly censorship-resistant. Those three points matter the most by far, and that is why Freedom Dollar is so much better than USDT, USDC, USD1, or whatever else they create.

Hodl Up: This brings me to my next point. You've also made some integrations so that people can use their private stablecoins with merchants. How does that work on the back end? I feel like at some point it might touch a third party that can show the authorities that this is the person using this privacy coin to make a purchase. I hope that made sense. I just want to understand how the whole merchant integration works on the back end, paying in a supermarket with privacy coins, for example.

Quinten: It's a good question. It depends on the solution. There are all kinds of integrations and tools that work with Zano, and it depends on each specific case, so I cannot give a global answer for all of them. Each integration is a little different. But two really cool things we have are these. First, we have the AEON Pay integration, which is very popular in emerging-market countries like Brazil, the Philippines, and Vietnam. It's a Telegram mini app, so it's as simple as registering an account, and you can top it up with all kinds of cryptocurrencies, now including Zano and Freedom Dollar. Then, when you're at a store, since these countries work a lot with QR code payments, you simply scan the QR code and transfer the money. The merchant receives whatever they prefer to receive, maybe fiat or some other currency, you pay in Zano or Freedom Dollar, and the conversion happens automatically. It's a really cool solution.

We also have the Zebec integration, which is a Mastercard with light KYC. No KYC is enforced by default, but if you trigger specific things, they could enforce KYC on you. So you still have to be a bit careful with how you use it. If you name yourself Mickey Mouse during registration, I can assure you it will get triggered and you will have to do KYC. But it's a Mastercard, and you can use it anywhere that accepts Mastercard, which is practically any place in the West, and spend your Zano and Freedom Dollar there. It's really cool, but of course, if Zebec enforces KYC on you, your transactions could still be revealed.

So the only way to stay truly private is doing peer-to-peer transactions by staying on the Zano blockchain, because that's completely private. For that we have Zano.cash in the Zano ecosystem, which is a point-of-sale system. As a merchant, you type in $50, the payment happens in Zano, and it automatically shows an amount on the screen, for example 8.5 Zano for $50. You scan that QR code, and boom, the transaction gets sent. That is truly private and truly peer-to-peer. There's no intermediary there, so that is the purest form of Zano payments, and it works with Confidential Assets as well. So I just highlighted three of the solutions we have, but it depends on each specific one.

Hodl Up: The one thing I like about privacy-by-default chains in general is that users have to do a lot of due diligence to get the best out of them. And what I got from this is that I should not name myself Mickey Mouse. Maybe Donald Duck or something.

Quinten: You could try.

Hodl Up: Now, since you talked about the solutions you're providing, I want to talk about the challenges, of Zano specifically and of the whole privacy sector in crypto at the moment. In your eyes, what are the key challenges?

Quinten: One of the key challenges, in my opinion, is that 95, maybe even 99% of crypto projects give in when they're pressured by governments or compliance requests, because everyone just wants to be where the money is, and as long as you're compliant, you can be listed on the big exchanges where the money is. So it's basically a trade-off. There are very few projects like Zano that stay true to the ethos the project stands for: freedom of choice, censorship resistance, true decentralization, power back to the people. That brings a major challenge, because we are not listed on the major exchanges. So if you ask me how easy it is to buy Zano, it's probably not as easy as these compliant, transparent blockchains. You have to take a few more steps to get there. That's a trade-off, because it's less accessible than some of the other cryptocurrencies that are fully compliant. I think that is the biggest challenge.

But I also like the way it is, because it means the people we have in the Zano community are usually very informed, and everyone is willing to help each other. The Zano community is a very special one, because it's not about getting rich or "Zano to the moon." It's about the ethos and the ideology behind it. People are aligned. People understand what it's worth to be able to transact in complete privacy and have control over their own finances, and they're willing to stick their necks out for each other, to help each other forward, get things working, and also promote it. We have a lot of big backers who are mostly libertarian-oriented, agorists, and anarchists, and Zano does very well in those communities. We also work with the Libertarian Party of the United States, for example, and with Roger Ver and Aaron Day. It's a great community to have, because these people really understand the value of something like what we're building, and they do anything they can to help us forward.

So the Zano community is very strong and very educated. We don't need the whole world to start using Zano. If we can get just 1% of the world to use it, or even 0.1%, it would already be a full circular economy where you could do all kinds of things, and that is what we're aiming for. We don't need the moon boys with Zano, please.

Hodl Up: It's challenge enough to educate people on why they should use privacy coins, but it's a whole different thing to deal with misconceptions, and there are a lot of misconceptions, especially about privacy-by-default chains. I don't blame people for having them. In the past, a couple of guys reached out to me asking how to use privacy coins, and in both cases it was because they dealt with some fishy stuff and didn't want any liability with the governments, which I do not support, by the way. But the point I'm trying to make is that people tend to believe that those who use privacy coins are going to the dark web and dealing in shady activities. It's not just about that. It's about you having the right to be private, because if your money is not private, you're not living a private life.

So how do we deal with the fact that not just authorities but most people outside crypto associate privacy coins with crime? If you compare it with the financial crimes committed by traditional companies, it's a very minuscule amount. Yes, crypto and privacy coins may enable it, but they're not the reason these crimes happen. They would still happen whether crypto existed or not. So how do we deal with all these misconceptions about crypto and privacy coins in general?

Quinten: Once again, education. The answer is super simple, but it's easier said than done, of course. With privacy, it's a bit the same as with cash. At least here in the Netherlands, ATMs are disappearing, and the government is creating a narrative where if you use cash to pay at a store, people look at you weird. "Why are you using cash? Why are you still using that? That's old. You must be dealing with some shady stuff." That's exactly the narrative the government is creating here and wants people to believe, because they want to ban cash. They want to make sure everything goes digital, with them in full control, like with CBDCs. I believe over 80 countries in the world are already running some kind of CBDC pilot.

Hodl Up: Since you mentioned CBDCs, I want to compare Europe and the US right now in terms of CBDC adoption and pilots, because I think the US has already banned the whole concept of CBDC pilots, correct me if I'm wrong. Where do you see these two political actors in 10 years when it comes to crypto, the freedom of cash, and the freedom of individuals to move value, whether that's crypto assets or cash? What do you think is the main difference right now? Because I think Europe is just decimated at this point.

Quinten: Like you said, the United States claims it has moved away from doing a CBDC, but they have already introduced what is basically a CBDC. They don't have to call it a CBDC anymore. They just launched USD1 and things like that, which are essentially CBDCs. It's programmable money. They could very well use this and want the world to start using so-called cryptocurrencies that have nothing to do with crypto. They're more like CBDCs. It might be disguised as something else, but if you look under the hood, the end result is still the same. And here in Europe, they're working on some very interesting regulations currently. I cannot predict the future of where this is going, but I don't think it will lead to anything good. It's better to be careful, at least make sure you stay in control of your own finances, and never settle for something that takes away your freedom.

Hodl Up: As you said, it's the same wolf in sheep's clothing. It feels like all of these regions and jurisdictions have systematically set everything up so that the average crypto user becomes fine with it and doesn't actually protest. I think about the values of crypto, the values of Satoshi, as you said in the beginning, and most of them are fading away. If you had told me five years ago that Bitcoin would be traded on Wall Street, I would have said that's nonsense, because crypto was not meant to be institutionalized, and it was not meant to be the way it is today and the way it's becoming. So I really value the whole idea of privacy-by-default chains acting as a sort of resistance to whatever is happening out there in terms of regulation and adoption.

People compare the EU with the US and all these highly developed regions, whereas what we should focus on is developing countries. That's where most of the use cases are, and that's where we could really see what's happening, what should happen, and how it should happen, because those are the people who use it. People in the West use stablecoins, as I said, for yield. People in developing countries, even in our country, use stablecoins for day-to-day payments. Until a couple of years ago, I couldn't make online payments with my debit card in my country, but I could use crypto for that.

Quinten: It's a very good point you're making. I have some real-life examples. I have some relatives and friends, and if I ask them, "Do you guys have crypto?", maybe half of them say, "Yes, I have crypto." And I ask, "Oh, cool. What wallet do you have? Where are you holding it?" And they say, "Oh, no, no. I bought it through an ETF." Then you don't have crypto, man. You have something that promises you the value of a portion of Bitcoin, but you don't have the actual Bitcoin. You have paper Bitcoin. Some other people say, "Oh, I hold it on Binance." Well, then it's not yours either, because you're still using a custodian, and they hold your Bitcoin, not you. Only if you have withdrawn the crypto to your own self-custody wallet is it actually yours.

So I think you're making a good point, because many of these people in the West just want Bitcoin or something else because they heard "number go up," it's exciting, maybe they get rich from it, and that's their only reason to get into it. But in emerging-market countries, it comes down to other incentives, like being debanked. One of my team members, Gonzalo, got into crypto in the first place because he didn't have access to the banking system. He lives in Argentina, and things were way worse a couple of years ago, before Milei. He got into crypto to pay for certain things online, and then he started to look into crypto more deeply and figured: if I now make a payment to this company, they can see my balance and my transaction history, and it will likely be traced back to my real identity, because 99% of services in crypto enforce KYC nowadays. That's where it started to click for him: this is why I need privacy, and I need to be able to self-custody my funds, because otherwise they can get hacked, or all the other dangers out there.

So that's why it's super important for people in emerging countries. Another example is Nigeria, where many people don't have access to a bank account either, and Zano Africa, in particular Zano Nigeria, is probably the largest local Zano community there is, because these people actually benefit from using it. It's an alternative way for them to transfer funds without walking around with a stack of cash in their pocket. They can just have the Zano wallet and do transfers with each other within the Zano ecosystem. It's super cool. If you follow Zano Africa on Twitter, sometimes you see a post pop up about a small store that starts accepting Zano, with a "Zano accepted here" sticker on the window, and I love to see that.

Hodl Up: As you guys said, Bitcoin being traded on Wall Street was not part of Satoshi's vision, and Wall Street would never have accepted Bitcoin if they hadn't checked how transparent it is and how easily accessible everything behind it is. So I get that point, and I also get why emerging economies and developing countries are a point of focus in crypto, because that's where the use cases apply. But what I want to focus on right now is the resistance that Dren mentioned, because I think the resistance is weakening at this point. I'm not talking about Zano; I'm talking about the resistance around the true values of crypto. We've been saying throughout the episode that institutions are taking over, and the ethos of crypto is technically gone, if I may say so. You guys are one of the last ones standing, and actually thriving, in this resistance.

Let's take a look at Monero, for example. There were some rumors, I think I saw some tweets a few months back, that a 51% attack was ongoing at the time. I'm not sure which company was behind it specifically, but I know it was through mining hash rate. So if you know about that, I'll ask you: do you think there's a real chance of the resistance actually getting bigger, and more companies joining you in this privacy-focused, let's say Satoshi-vision, future for crypto?

Quinten: I have to respectfully disagree with you here. I think the resistance, as you called it, is actually not shrinking at all. As a matter of fact, with these centralized exchanges banning private cryptocurrencies, you can notice a shift more towards the dark markets and so on. And if you just look at Monero's price action, and how the Monero community is still super active and flourishing, I don't think that indicates it's dying. I actually see a new surge of interest in privacy coins in general. We've seen it with Zcash as well, and with Zano.

Now that crypto is more in a bear market state, we focus a lot on the libertarians we work with, and you can see it with these people. They are entrepreneurs, usually a bit older, the older generation, maybe around 60 years old, and it's harder for them to understand crypto, but they have a very big interest in it because they don't like where the world is heading and they want a hedge against this uncertainty, as a safety precaution. That's where crypto, especially Zano or Monero, comes in, and I do see an uptick in interest in projects like Zano from those particular corners of the world. So I don't think it's dying at all.

Of course, it might be harder to get your hands on, but there are always solutions. For example, with centralized exchanges banning privacy coins, we will soon introduce gateway addresses, which make it possible for Zano to get listed on a number of decentralized exchanges. So we always adapt and look for solutions to the problems we face.

Hodl Up: I'm glad this came up, because I wanted to ask you who you think your real set of competitors is. Is it other privacy chains, or is it non-private L1s and L2s? And if you do consider other privacy chains like Monero and Zcash competitors, how do you stand out? How do you onboard someone into Zano so they don't go into Zcash, for example?

Quinten: I think the first step would be to not have the entire team leave the ecosystem the way it happened with Zcash. You get my point. It's hard to say, because in the end we want to compete with traditional layer ones like Ethereum and Solana, because Zano is supposed to be an alternative to those, but with privacy by default enforced at the protocol level. Neither Monero nor Zcash does that. They're not at that level yet, or they don't have plans to go there. Zano is a privacy platform for users and developers to build on. Monero is peer-to-peer digital cash that is super private, and that's what it's good at. It's quite a simple purpose, but a good one, of course. Zcash is kind of similar, although they also want to introduce confidential assets so they can support privacy stablecoins, but they're still multiple years away from that.

Also, optional privacy results in weak privacy, in my opinion. The user defaults to whatever the standard is, so the majority of people don't even use Z-addresses in Zcash. They only use T-addresses, the transparent ones. And when it comes to integrations, some centralized exchanges and other compliant services only accept transactions coming from T-addresses, not from Z-addresses. So you basically create a two-class system, where the people using Z-addresses are seen as suspicious and the T-addresses are the good people. I'm not a fan of that either.

So it's hard to pinpoint the real competitors for Zano. In the privacy space you could say Monero and Zcash, but if we zoom out a little, the real competitors are more like Ethereum and Solana, because we are also a platform for developers to build on.

One of the really exciting upgrades coming this year is that Zano is going full proof of stake. Right now we still have a hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake consensus algorithm that alternates between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake blocks, which is already so much better than pure proof of work, because the cost of a 51% attack is much higher. You mentioned the 51% attack on Monero last year. That was not expensive to do at all, because of pure proof of work: you just need the majority of the hash rate. With a hybrid solution, you also need a majority of the total staked coins. By going to full proof of stake, we make the cost of an attack even higher, because proof of work is still the weak link in the current consensus, in our opinion.

This is where it gets really exciting. Most people in crypto say, "Yeah, privacy is cool, but privacy blockchains are super slow and therefore hard to use." Which is true. Look at Monero: two-minute block times and 10 confirmations before you can re-spend your assets, so 20 minutes on average. Zcash is even slower, 25 minutes I believe, or 22 and a half, somewhere in between. And Zano is also still slow: a one-minute block time and 10 blocks, so 10 minutes. But with this full proof-of-stake upgrade, we will probably have 15-to-20-second blocks, so you move towards speeds like Ethereum, and we only need three block confirmations before you can re-spend your assets. Suddenly you have transaction finality in under a minute, with full privacy and versatility, because you can create your own assets on Zano.

In my opinion, that's super interesting, because a year from now Zano will be 20 times faster than Monero and Zcash, private by default, with super strong privacy for the assets too, and you can create assets on top of it. We burn 100% of all transaction fees, so the more it gets used, it could at some point even become deflationary for that reason. We also plan to launch a grants program to attract developers to build on Zano. I think the barriers people still face when building on privacy chains are being broken down by us, and I'm very eager to see where Zano will be a year from now, because those barriers will be broken down by then.

Hodl Up: You basically answered everything I wanted to ask. If someone wanted to know why they should use Zano instead of Monero or Zcash, you explained that you're faster, and you're now moving to a proof-of-stake mechanism, which to me feels refreshing, because for some reason I thought every privacy coin was proof of work by default.

Quinten: That's actually a good point you make again, because most privacy coins are proof of work. That's because with proof of stake you always had less privacy: when you're staking, you had to reveal to the network the amount you were staking, so the staked amounts were visible to the public. That's why privacy coins used to run on proof of work. But Zano invented something named Zarcanum in 2023, which is the world's first proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that works with hidden amounts. So even the staking amounts in Zano stay completely encrypted, and you cannot see them as an outsider either. So there's just no reason not to go to proof of stake anymore, because proof of stake is much harder to attack, much more secure for that reason, and also much faster.

It's no mystery why everyone is suddenly moving to proof of stake. Ethereum did it a couple of years ago, and proof of work is simply a dying concept. Although there are still plenty of proof-of-work maxis who will tell you otherwise, and they're convinced that proof of stake is oligarchic or unfair. But that's just how the world works, man. I'm sorry to break it to those people, but of course, if you buy more coins, you have more input in the network. You should also get proportionally more staking rewards. That's just how capitalism works too. Otherwise we might as well adopt communism, and I don't think people want that either.

Hodl Up: And let's not forget we're environmentalists, right? We care about environmental health.

Quinten: That's an argument people also make. They say proof of stake is greener, which may well be true, but that's not the reason we're adopting proof of stake. Proof of stake is safer. The cost of an attack is higher, and that's all that matters when it comes to blockchain consensus. You want the cost of an attack on your network to be as high as possible, so that attacking the network simply becomes infeasible. That is all consensus is about. All the other reasons can be thrown out the window.

Hodl Up: Well, I had to say it, because if we're ever planning to apply for European Union grants or anything like that, they do love that environmentalist stuff. So, we're environmentalists.

Quinten: I'll keep it in mind. If I'm ever in the European Parliament, I'll have this argument.

Hodl Up: Great. To wrap things up, and trust me when I say I don't want to sound like an HR recruiter: where do you see yourselves in five or 10 years, as a chain, as the resistance? Or do you see a shift in user behavior, with people relying more and more on privacy-by-default chains?

Quinten: Super hard question to answer, but I just hope Zano will be a safe haven for people to interact financially with each other, no matter where they are geographically. Cheap, fast, private, borderless payments. And hopefully the ecosystem will flourish with all kinds of cool apps and assets running on top of it that people can use and benefit from. I believe we will get there much faster than five years. Based on what I just explained, it will be very interesting to see where we're at in a year, and in two years even more. I don't think we need five years to build that. I think we're very well positioned and on the right path. So if anyone got interested listening to this episode, give us a follow and go check it out.

Hodl Up: We'll be rooting for you guys. You basically onboarded me in this one-hour talk. So Quinten, thank you.

Quinten: Glad to hear it.

Hodl Up: It was a very insightful episode and an enjoyable one as well. Thank you so much for joining us today and for making the time, because I know you guys are extremely busy. We're just glad we managed to make this happen.

Quinten: Likewise, it was a fun interview to do. I'm glad I was here, and maybe we can do another one in half a year or a year from now to check out the progress that's been made. Thank you.