Zcash Will Get a Gateway Into Ethereum's DeFi Ecosystem

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"Connecting to other chains doesn't seem to be an ethereum developer's priority," Summa co-founder James Prestwich told CoinDesk.

Josh Swihart, VP of marketing and business development at the Electric Coin Company, told CoinDesk that over the next six months the zcash community will develop a wrapped ZEC token that can be used on the ethereum blockchain.

This would be done through the same type of wrapped token the Cross-Chain Working Group, co-founded by Prestwich, is building to enable bitcoin usage on the ethereum blockchain.

A source with knowledge of zcash exchange activity told CoinDesk the asset has seen modest traction in at least one U.S.-based exchange but is not increasing in popularity over the past year.

The zcash block explorer Zchain tallied only 271,356 shielded transactions out of 70,260,454 total transactions over the past month.

In order to boost zcash usage, the ECC is going to need to find popular use cases beyond speculative trading and simple, shielded transactions.

"If you want to do lending, if you want to do DAOs , all of that stuff could be done with zcash as well. Ultimately, we want zcash shielded [addresses] to be usable in ethereum smart contracts."

On the other hand, ECC founder Zooko Wilcox is known to have a close personal relationship with ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, bolstered by the latter's longstanding interest in zk-SNARKs, the secret sauce behind zcash's privacy features.

As Buterin noted during a Devcon panel about interoperability between blockchains, the ethereum community also values privacy options even if it prioritizes usability.

Since many fans are using ethereum to make custom machines, like blockchain-powered video games, they may also want privacy options for their niche tokens.

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