No More Trust & The Rally
Halo 2 lands in the NU5 upgrade and the trusted setup is gone for good. Snowden is revealed as a secret ceremony participant, exchanges delist privacy coins under regulatory pressure — and then, in 2025–26, ZEC rallies hard as the privacy narrative returns.
Part of Zcash
6 moments in this segment.
- — 2022 — Snowden revealed as a secret ceremony participant. Zcash Media confirms that Edward Snowden secretly took part in the 2016 trusted-setup ceremony under the pseudonym "John Dobbertin," alongside others such as Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd — a detail kept hidden for six years.
- — May 2022 — NU5 / Orchard activates Halo 2, killing the trusted setup. Network Upgrade 5 deploys the Orchard shielded pool built on the Halo 2 proving system (block 1,687,104). It permanently removes the need for any trusted setup and enables recursive proofs for future scalability — the goal Zcash had chased since the Ceremony.
- — Watch — Halo 2: SNARKs without trusted setups (Dystopia Labs). An accessible explainer of Halo 2 and recursive proofs — the breakthrough that let Zcash remove the trusted setup entirely in the NU5 / Orchard upgrade.
- — 2024 — privacy-coin delistings hit ZEC. Exchanges including OKX delist privacy-coin trading pairs such as ZEC in early 2024, part of a broad wave driven by AML/KYC regulatory pressure — the most privacy-coin delistings since 2021, following earlier moves in Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
- — 2025 — halving and a major ZEC rally. Zcash undergoes its scheduled November 2025 halving amid a privacy-coin "rotation," and ZEC rallies sharply — reportedly more than 800% over the year, briefly overtaking Monero's privacy-coin market cap and drawing renewed institutional attention.
- — Watch — Zooko: "Zcash, unstoppable private money" (TOKEN2049). Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn at TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025 making the case for Zcash as "encrypted Bitcoin" — private, fungible digital cash — during the privacy-coin resurgence.
