Come to Zug, they said. It’s the Crypto Valley, they said. It may be home to a ton of crypto organizations, but who’s still here building exciting things on Ethereum? Let’s find out. Zug Ethereum Meetup #0#, September 7:

Adding ZK to @Arbitrum BoLD protocol was surprisingly simple. How does it work? Today, BoLD settlement works like this: → Proposers can make assertions (a claim about the chain's new state); when a new assertion comes in a challenge timer starts → No rival assertion within the challenge window? The assertion is confirmed → Rival posted? The challenge protocol kicks in New multi-prover path (everything above still holds, plus): → A proposer can prove any unconfirmed assertion with a ZK proof + K-of-N attestations from the Fast Confirmation Committee → ZK proof verifies on the parent chain & enough attestations check out? The assertion settles early - no waiting out the challenge window Why this beats a ZK-only design: 1. Multi-prover security: Fast confirmation needs two independent systems to agree: a ZK proof verified on the parent chain + attestations from committee nodes re-executing the chain. To fast-confirm a bad state, an attacker has to break both at once. TEE-run committee nodes are planned as a further hardening step. 2. Deterministic upper bound on settlement: If the prover stalls or has a bug, the chain simply falls back to optimistic settlement: slower, never halted, funds untouched. A ZK-only chain in the same spot may never settle without security council action. 3. Pay for proving only when you need it: Proving is optional per assertion: pure fraud-proof chains pay nothing, Hybrid ZK chains proves on demand to settle early or resolve disputes, and ZK Prove All chains prove everything for always-fast settlement. ZK-only stacks have one mode: prove every batch, forever. @Offchain will bring a proposal to the DAO to upgrade Arbitrum One to ZK settlement, and other chains built with Arbitrum Platform will be able to upgrade at will. Stay tuned for more 👀

A marketplace, especially one dedicated entirely to Zcash and closely connected to its ecosystem, could grow into a major digital commerce hub in the future. Once we truly understand what Zcash adoption can look like, we’ll see that such a marketplace is more than just a place to buy and sell things. It can become a hub where hundreds of thousands of people discover products and services, connect with each other, and where the Zcash economy comes to life. We are building the foundation for that today.

There's a proposal to change ETH's monetary policy: EIP 8361 - Tapered Issuance Burn If 50% of ETH gets staked, staking rewards go to ZERO. The researchers say it protects ETH's moneyness. Every DeFi founder says it kills their business. @TrustlessState and @RyanSAdams break down both sides, and share their takes👇

A Small Manifesto Against the Current @Zcash Bandwagon Zcash is a remarkable piece of cryptography, but cryptography isn't the bottleneck for crypto in 2026. Distribution, liquidity, and developer adoption are. And those are the exact dimensions on which Zcash is structurally disadvantaged. 1. Network effects work against single-purpose privacy chains Privacy is a network-effect product: the larger the anonymity set, the stronger the privacy guarantee. Zcash currently has ~30% of supply in shielded pools, and most activity moves in and out of the shielded layer rather than staying within it. A shielded pool with ~5M ZEC and a few thousand daily active users provides meaningfully less privacy than the same cryptographic primitives running on an L1 with 10M+ daily addresses. The math is brutal. If 100 people hide in a room, finding any individual is hard. If 100 million people hide in a room, it's impossible. Privacy coins concentrate users. Privacy features on general-purpose chains recruit them. 2. Liquidity and acceptance are non-negotiable A privacy coin that gets delisted from major exchanges, as Zcash repeatedly has across Japan, Korea, the UK, and parts of the EU, becomes harder to acquire, harder to exit, and harder to use at scale. Privacy tools built on Ethereum, Solana, or Base inherit the liquidity of the underlying chain. You don't have to choose between privacy and the ability to transact with the rest of the financial system. Zcash forces that choice. Nobody wants to make it. 3. People don't want private money. They want private applications Most people don't need to hide a $50 ZEC transfer. They need confidential business payments, private payroll, undisclosed treasury operations, sealed-bid auctions, private voting and confidential DeFi positions that don't leak through transaction graphs. None of these run on a privacy coin. They run on smart contract platforms with privacy primitives like @aztecnetwork on Ethereum, @AleoHQ as its own L1, @solana 's confidential transfers, @penumbrazone in the Cosmos ecosystem, FHE-based chains like @fhenix and ZK-rollups in general The future of privacy is programmable, not denominational. 4. The technology has been completely commoditized zk-SNARKs were Zcash's moat in 2016. By 2026, they're the foundation of every major L2, dozens of privacy systems, and most rollup architectures. The Zcash team did the foundational research, and then watched the IP escape. The chains that benefited most aren't paying rent to Zcash, and they never will. It's one of the cleanest examples in crypto of pioneering a technology and capturing none of the value. 5. Regulatory exposure cuts the wrong way Privacy coins occupy a uniquely vulnerable regulatory category. Privacy tools on general-purpose chains can be designed with selective disclosure, view keys for auditors, compliance hooks and they live inside chains regulators have already accepted as legitimate financial infrastructure. Zcash has built the same compliance tooling (view keys, selective disclosure protocols) but still carries the "privacy coin" label that triggers automatic delisting regardless of actual functionality. The technology isn't the problem. The category is. 6. The unit-of-account problem For privacy to matter for real economic activity, it has to be denominated in money people actually use, this is the biggest lesson in crypto over the past 5 years. Nobody pays salaries, settles invoices, or runs treasuries in ZEC. They use USD, EUR, USDC, USDT. Privacy that requires switching unit-of-account is privacy that won't be used at scale. The winning model is private stablecoins and private transfers of mainstream assets, which requires programmability Zcash structurally doesn't have and isn't on a path to building. 7. The "private Bitcoin" comparison is just stupid At the end of the day, Zcash only really competes with Bitcoin, except it doesn't, because the "private Bitcoin" framing falls apart on contact with reality. You don't get to slap "private" on as a feature and call yourself Bitcoin's successor when you don't have the liquidity, the decentralized robustness, the regulatory acceptance, the size, or the history. Bitcoin's hashrate is distributed across hundreds of pools and tens of thousands of independent miners globally. Zcash's hashrate is functionally controlled by a handful of pools running ASICs from a few Chinese manufacturers. Zcash inherited Bitcoin's consensus model with a fraction of Bitcoin's decentralization. And decentralization isn't a sliding scale where "more" earns you partial credit. It's binary. You're either close enough to Bitcoin to inherit the monetary properties that come with extreme decentralization, as Ethereum genuinely is, or you're not, and the "moneyness" argument doesn't apply to you at all. Ethereum and even Solana have an order of magnitude better chances of reaching Bitcoin's market cap than Zcash does. That's not a controversial claim. It's just looking at the data.