Zcash's Glow-Up: Core Foundation Franchises Satoshi Plus for Privacy-First Z Protocol

The team behind Bitcoin scaling solution Core is rolling out its first "franchise protocol," this time designed to add capabilities to privacy-enabling blockchain Zcash. Dubbed Z Protocol, the new EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain leverages aspects of Core's Bitcoin solution to bolster Zcash. Z Protocol will enable a range of native onchain use cases on Zcash, a privacy-focused fork of Bitcoin that has developed into a wholly independent ecosystem. Think of it as giving Zcash the application layer it desperately needed instead of just being the crypto equivalent of that friend who has great ideas but never executes.

"In terms of the competitive space, it's pretty much a white space," Dennis said in an interview. "Zcash kind of brought the solution but not the application layer. Other folks have built out privacy-focused application layers, but they haven't been EVM compatible and haven't been able to get any sort of adoption from developers or users because of that lack of composability or familiarity." Basically, privacy chains have been building beautiful castles in the air while forgetting to install doors. Z Protocol is here to add both doors and a welcoming mat.

Z is expected to launch in the second half of 2026, according to the announcement. In addition to building Z Protocol itself, the Z team is also building a set of "vertically integrated" financial primitives to seed the ecosystem, Dennis said. This includes a private trading venue, Z Trade, lending and borrowing platform, Z Lend, and private stablecoin USDZ, along with a yield-bearing savings token yUSDZ, among other applications. They're basically building an entire DeFi stack while everyone else is still arguing about whether privacy is even cool anymore. Bold strategy, cotton.

Z offers a default shielded pool and application layer to extend Zcash's functionality. "Once your assets are there, any holding, any sending, any receiving is completely invisible to the outside world," Dennis said. No more nervously checking over your shoulder when moving funds. It's like being invisible, except the NSA can't see you either. Revolutionary concept, we know.

The Core Foundation has partnered on the buildout of Z. Under a licensing agreement, a portion of Z transaction fees will flow back to Core and CORE token holders will have "preferential access to some of the Z tokens at launch," Dennis said, noting airdrops are planned. Nothing says "we're friends" in crypto like revenue sharing and airdrops. This is basically the franchise model, but make it decentralized.

"So Core pioneered this consensus mechanism Satoshi Plus, which allows the Core blockchain, which is an EVM compatible L1 to be secured by Bitcoin staking and Bitcoin mining. What we're doing with Z is we're applying that same principle for Zcash Satoshi Plus so that Zcash stakers and Zcash miners can secure Z," Dennis said. It's like taking the best parts of Bitcoin's security blanket and wrapping Zcash in it. Layer upon layer of decentralization onion.

In both cases, the scalable blockchain solutions enable proof-of-work miners on Bitcoin and Zcash to vote for Core or Z validators. Z stakers can also vote for Z validators, with the combined weight from miners and stakers determining what validators end up securing the Z network, Dennis explained. Everyone gets