[00:00:00] Luke: From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting Brave browser.

[00:00:24] And search engine now powering AI with the brave search API. You’re listening to a new episode of the brave technologist, and this one features Josh Swihart, CEO at the electric coin company and Zcash. Prior to electronic coin company, he served as SVP of global marketing for K2, leading global from startup to acquisition by Francisco partners.

[00:00:44] He began his career as a software engineer and has served as a global practice principal for EMC, the CEO of Aspenware and VP of software development for 3T systems. Thanks Josh has received numerous global and national awards for leadership, marketing, and solution delivery.

[00:00:58] Today we talked about [00:01:00] Josh’s introduction to the electric coin company and Zcash. What Zcash is all about, why privacy is important, why privacy with finance is really important, and why it’s not only important for users and for fundamental privacy reasons, but also for national security and for other areas.

[00:01:15] And now for this week’s episode of the brave technologist, Josh, welcome to the brave technologist podcast. Thanks for joining us. How are you doing today? Great

[00:01:26] Josh: to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:28] Luke: Before we get started into kind of the details on Zcash, why don’t we do a little background of like how you ended up with the company and then we can get into the mission of Electric Coin Company and Zcash.

[00:01:37] Sure.

[00:01:37] Josh: My journey actually into Zcash started back in 2016 before the project launched. I wasn’t part of the founding team, but I was looking for a privacy solution. And that was based on a couple of things. One at the time I had gotten interested in Ethereum because it was like an interesting means of alternative capital formation around the Ethereum DAO at that time, and definitely interested in Bitcoin.

[00:01:57] What happened is I had a friend, over in India who’s [00:02:00] experienced a fire in the, slum they lived in, they were unbanked. And I wanted to send some help. I wanted to send some money to be able to buy food and blankets. And so, you know, traditionally, we use these centralized systems like Western Union.

[00:02:11] I tried Western Union and they shut me down and they shut me down without explanation. And they didn’t tell me why. And I was thinking, well, I’m working with these cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency should be here to solve that problem. Ultimately, it took me three days to figure out how to get money.

[00:02:23] Outside of Western Union to my friend in this community, but in looking at cryptocurrencies, privacy is really important. It’s really important for a couple of reasons. One, I had some experience with non privacy related tech prior, and so I knew what the implications are, and I didn’t want to put my counterparty at risk.

[00:02:38] Right? So if I send money to him and he doesn’t know how to protect himself. Does it put him at risk from somebody on the other from around his community as he converts it to Fiat and that kind of thing. And so I started looking for options. I started kind of watching what was going on in the Monero community.

[00:02:52] What was going on in the Dash community. I went to a Dash meet up here in Denver where I live. Somebody there had suggested that I take a look at this new [00:03:00] Zcash project when I meet Zuko Wilcox, who’s the founder. And I kind of went down the Zcash rabbit hole and ultimately knocked on the door to come work with the project.

[00:03:08] Decided this is what I need to do with the rest of my career. It’s to work on this thing. And eventually the electric coin company hired me. It was a Zcash company at the time hired me to come in and help, but it took a while to get there. But you know, I was kind of a nerd growing up, taught myself to code when I was a kid, I ran a bulletin board system, BBS when I was in, high school and we were cracking wires and, you know, playing with games.

[00:03:28] And one of the awesome things in that as well, it was, The ability to kind of engage with people in forums, you know, precursor to the internet, you dial in and I had a modem bank and people could dial in and we could have these conversations. So unanimously, you know, with the ideas that we had, but later, you know, as it relates to the privacy journey, I worked for a consulting company and part of my work there is I ran a program and the program was to build a ground station and an Intel system, a situational awareness system for a country in the Middle East.

[00:03:56] And it was in partnership with the U. S. Government, but it was a commercial [00:04:00] entity. Sometimes those things get pretty intertwined in order to make which I won’t go into. But one of the things that we’re doing at the time was in that Intel system was you’re gathering data from multiple sources, right? So in our case, we’re gathering sensor data from multiple satellites.

[00:04:13] Data was coming in his field intelligence. Some information was coming in from UAVs or drones, and you pull all this data into a system, you analyze it, you take a look at the deltas of that information over time, and then you’re able to make a prediction about what that country or maybe what happening at a given air base or something like that, based upon that data, the architect that I was working with, he founded another company.

[00:04:35] And we use the same tools to start to do targeted marketing. It was, and so we ultimately started scraping data from over two dozen different sources and looking at the deltas of that data over time, just like we would traditional Intel in order to create robust profiles of people and to target them with ads.

[00:04:55] That they may or may not want and you target with them ads. And, you know, ads are always kind of challenge, [00:05:00] response, challenge, response. So if they respond to an ad or they don’t respond to an ad, you can give them something else, but we got pretty good at it. We had an internal tool called creepy crawler, which would allow us to somebody’s name from their name.

[00:05:14] We could tell a lot about that. We would use some, an algorithm that was kind of facial recognition from Google that was available at the time and create a pretty, it kind of trace the breadcrumbs across their different social profiles to get an idea of who they were, where they lived, who their kids were, how much money they made based upon their education, who they worked for, how much they paid for their house.

[00:05:35] We got so good that we could tell whether or not somebody was even good at their job, or we could make a probabilistic assessment of as to whether they were good at their job. It did get really creepy and all of this data that’s being collected by all of the various sites that people visit their social media presence, what they choose to post online, whether they think they’re pseudonymous or not, we were able to effectively docs people based on those breadcrumbs.

[00:05:58] And eventually we shut that [00:06:00] program down. We had a government contractor who was interested in trying to use the same technology to determine whether or not they should hire an employee based upon what they believe their political beliefs were. They said, you know, we think that. Certain types of people with certain types of belief tend to do better at our company.

[00:06:18] And we want to hire those people. So we’re going to profile based on those people. And we were like, look, we can’t sell this technology. We can’t sell this data. There’s no path here. It’s invasive in terms of people’s freedoms. And we shut it down. So I had a pretty good sense of the amount of privacy that we’re losing based on our online activity.

[00:06:35] And it’s like, shoot, like we have all of that data. And now you’re going to add cryptocurrencies that are completely transparent. Along with that data to create even a richer graph of who people are and how they act and what they do. This is a problem. And if we’re doing it with our small company, it’s definitely being done elsewhere.

[00:06:52] For me, it was paramount that we found or that I found a solution that would ultimately be privacy protecting, you know, in order to support the rights of us as [00:07:00] humans. So that’s

[00:07:00] Luke: super helpful info, right? And I think it’s one of those things where, I mean, I was in the ad tech space prior to coming to Brave too, and it’s so elusive, people don’t realize how much of their data is really leaking out or where it’s going.

[00:07:15] And the thing I kind of grappled with too, was that. I’m working in the middle of all of it. It’s like, you don’t really know where it ends up going. These companies will purpose it for different ways and reasons where people who are even in the industry aren’t even necessarily sure of where the trail ends.

[00:07:29] And now you’re thinking like, gosh, this is a over 10 years worth of data. That’s just online, offline, all of this. And I think you bring up a really good point around How, you know, finance and how they’re paying for things, right? Like factors into this and how this can be even a richer graph. And I want to drill down into that a little bit more.

[00:07:45] Why don’t you give us a little bit of background on like what Zcash is doing and how you guys are approaching the problem.

[00:07:50] Josh: Yeah. So Zcash ultimately is a privacy protecting. Cryptocurrency. It was a fork of Bitcoin, so it used, and today still uses that code [00:08:00] base, but it added something called Zero Knowledge Cryptography.

[00:08:02] And at the time, zero Knowledge cryptography really wasn’t known in crypto world. Now it’s used pretty commonly. I was just at eighth Denver and you could see zk like on half the piece everywhere using it. At the time there was like maybe two dozen people in the world that understood it, but you know, it was cryptography that was discovered in 1980s.

[00:08:17] I believe it was 1980s. At MIT. And it was theoretic and it was in a paper, but nobody had really applied it to software. So Toshi talked about it in a Bitcoin forum. and he said that if he could figure out how to apply zero knowledge to, Bitcoin, he would privacy was a key piece of it. Right. It came out of the cypherpunk movement.

[00:08:35] It came out of like, it’s the same people that were involved in figuring out how to protect our privacy through browsers. Through, you know, SSL, The math is so complicated. It’s so novel that Bitcoin released without it. Now, there’s like some scientists kind of view that as challenges like, well, we’re going to add privacy to Bitcoin.

[00:08:52] So there was 7 scientists across a number of universities, including. MIT and Johns Hopkins and Technion and Tel Aviv and [00:09:00] in Israel and some others that were at the same time started working on this and started then collaborating with one another to figure out how to add privacy to Bitcoin. Ultimately, that came out of the paper around something called zero coin, which is what Zcash is based on.

[00:09:14] And so they figured it out. But the cryptography was so novel and so non performant, you know, they went to the Bitcoin core team and said, let’s add this to Bitcoin and Bitcoin core team said, no, it’s too early. So look at forking the code and adding this cryptography there. And if it works and if it’s great, then we’ll look at adding it back into Bitcoin.

[00:09:33] So that’s where Zcash was born, you know, launched in 2016. A lot of the work that has been done to date has been on the core protocol because. That cryptography was not performing like when I started in order to send a sheet, what’s called a shielded transaction or fully encrypted transaction. You had to add a beefy PC and it was all command line tooling.

[00:09:49] You could not run it on a mobile device. There just was not enough compute. And so a lot of our work has been discovery after discovery after discovery to make it perform it. And to make it [00:10:00] accessible on a mobile devices or even hardware, you know, hardware wallets or things like that, and then to do some things like get rid of something that was called trusted setup, which is necessary for what are called snarks or non interactive proofs.

[00:10:12] So we’ve done a lot of that, and now we’re building up kind of full stack capabilities to improve usability and access and partnering folks like brave in terms of reach and things like that. Yeah, that’s the project.

[00:10:22] Luke: That’s awesome. There’s a lot of misconceptions. People kind of assume that pseudonymity equals privacy and things like that.

[00:10:29] And I’m really glad that you guys are working on what you’re working on, because I think it’s like super important that we actually have like genuinely private solutions to bring your people. When you look at like the biggest hurdles or blockers in the way of what you guys are doing, is it mainly technological, like around kind of working on some of these efficiencies that you talk about or are there other areas like policy other things that are kind of making things difficult?

[00:10:53] Josh: It feels like everything’s against us. It feels like everything is yeah, it’s way too hard. So there’s a couple of things. [00:11:00] One, quite honestly, it’s like a big challenge is public, right? Meaning that or perception and like we have gotten so used to giving up our privacy and we kind of believe in these narratives that why like privacy is for bad guys.

[00:11:12] I met with somebody yesterday. And I won’t name the company that they work with, but they’re working on an AI related project and was trying to convince her to come to work with us. And so I was describing Zcash and a little bit about it. And she’s like, well, isn’t the whole purpose of cryptocurrencies that is transparent.

[00:11:28] Isn’t that what we want? We want to be able to see transactions so we can catch criminals. But the reality is like the whole intent to begin with was private. So I haven’t talked about privacy and hope this suit anonymy was, was enough. And so that kind of public perception and like lack of kind of understanding or even thinking about the implications of giving up your privacy is, challenge, the technology has been a challenge again, like to have truly.

[00:11:54] You know, there’s projects out there that have kind of MacGyver solutions and they’re trying to office skate. And so what you [00:12:00] have with that is. Is you still have the ability to trace some things. It’s just probabilistic. It’s not absolute privacy is probabilistic. So you can say, okay, well, I’m kind of mixed in with a number of different people and I’ve got a privacy set.

[00:12:12] That’s X big, and therefore I can’t be traced, but the reality is the algorithms are getting better at tracing. The data is being tagged. You have, you know, TRM and chain analysis and others in the crypto space that are doing a good job. And if you have somebody that is. Really wants to surveil probabilistic is probably good enough.

[00:12:32] Like if I know if I have a 80 percent probability that this is the person and I’m using some other data to correlate, I can get to a higher probability and and it allows me then even to kind of test my assumptions with that person, whether that’s law enforcement or whether that’s marketing, but the other is policy and regulatory.

[00:12:49] So the walls are closing in. It’s getting worse. The expectation of even good governments or well regulated spaces, they’re asking for more and more and they will [00:13:00] continue to ask for more and more. Often that power is unchecked. Often there’s overreach and regulators are okay with it. In the past, there’s been a lot of overreach, but even more and more like the regulations and the policies are coming down are more and more restrictive and people are losing their rights.

[00:13:16] Yeah, and then there’s pressures, right? There’s pressures from those entities to, hey, you know, yeah, we don’t want. Marketers and we don’t want bad guys to be able to see what your transaction history is, but we are a good government and therefore we should have access to be able to, to see whatever we want, whenever

[00:13:32] Luke: we want.

[00:13:33] Yeah, and it seems like there’s also, I mean, and I don’t know if you guys are running into this as well, but I’m certainly seeing it on our side of things is that there’s a legitimate fear among projects to when they see developers that are getting incarcerated over things like tornado cash, right? I mean, when you think about what.

[00:13:49] People invest in life, into these projects. And then risking that is something that people don’t always have an appetite for. So it’s something I’m just seeing too, is just that uncertainty is really causing behavioral [00:14:00] changes with a lot of these projects that you wouldn’t necessarily expect either.

[00:14:03] I don’t think, but they’re understandable. I think from the perspective of like, gosh, like nobody wants to go to jail, you know, which is like, it’s really stark right now. I think with, like you’re saying. It’s really

[00:14:14] Josh: dark. Like nobody wants to go to jail. That a hundred percent true. The kinds of actions that we saw with like tornado cash are really chilling.

[00:14:20] It’s it creates, it did create a chilling effect on the cryptocurrency industry. And so you want folks to be able to say, look, we need to be able to design systems that are safe, know, that don’t support. What North Korea was doing and laundering money and ripping people off. And we, don’t want to build systems for them.

[00:14:34] That’s not what we’re building. But when you take the kinds of actions that they take against a piece of software and they villainize the people that create the software, that’s a problem. And it’s a tactic, quite frankly, of slowing things down, even outside of what is law, it makes it really hard. and we have those conversations a lot of how do we work well with it.

[00:14:55] The jurisdiction we’re in, which is in the United States and work within that policy [00:15:00] regulatory regime while protecting our rights as citizens under the 4th amendment. And that’s the thing is like, somehow we’ve like, flip this on his head, like, what America was built on, what the U. S. was built on and the freedoms that we were built on.

[00:15:12] We’re saying, uh. well, those freedoms were for them then, but now we live in this digital age. So these freedoms don’t make sense anymore. So we need to ratchet that stuff down and we’re going to do it in a way that’s completely, in my opinion, completely unconstitutional. It’s scary. Yeah.

[00:15:26] Luke: Totally resonates to the point you made around perception.

[00:15:29] I feel like totally agree with you the fact that, you know, it’s like there’s a whole generation that doesn’t realize that privacy is a right, like that everybody has this right to privacy, right? And when you look at how. Things have kind of hit a slippery slope with the laws and governance over the past, you know, 20 years and people forget there’s a fourth amendment or a first amendment and we’re seeing this all.

[00:15:47] I mean, this is the thick of it now. Right? Like, I mean, this is really where the rubber meets the road and I don’t know how you guys feel about it, but for me, it’s almost like if the technology is not adapting and adopting, that’s the best race right now is to just build the best [00:16:00] tech that is easy to use.

[00:16:01] And it sounds like that’s what you guys are doing too. Like is distribution the key thing right now? Are there things you guys have coming down the road that will help with this too?

[00:16:09] Josh: Yeah, so distribution is a key thing. Right now, code is still considered speech under U. S. law. And so, and everything we do is open source.

[00:16:17] So we want to build as fast as we can and make that code available to anybody that can use it around the world. That’s really important and that’s distribution of the code and then also it’s distribution of the technology And that’s why again like working with folks like brave We want to make sure that people have access to tools That are intuitive that are easy to use where they don’t have to think about it So we talked about the browser and the crypto wars, you know with the original cypherpunks now We don’t even think about anymore right we open a browser You know, brave users have probably more, a better perspective on privacy and data leakage than most users, but people that are using Chrome or whatever, but we expect HTTPS.

[00:16:54] When we go to a site, we expect when we put our credit card information in, it can’t be sniffed and it’s necessary for commerce [00:17:00] and it’s just super easy to use and we don’t have to think about it. In fact, We have to think about it if we want to turn it off. Right? We get the war, you’re turning your privacy off and the government now even fully supports it.

[00:17:09] Right? So the NSA, which is the biggest attacker of our cryptographic rights or privacy rights around the crypto wars. Now the U. S. government mandate right across the site. So they recognize it. And we want to see a similar thing. You know, I’ve had various conversations with different agencies in the U. S.

[00:17:26] We get called in to Explain the technology and how it works and things like that. And we’ve said, look, it’s not only a right, but let’s get real, right? It’s a security risk for people. It’s untenable for a business to be able to, you know, transact using cryptocurrencies with it being completely transparent to everybody else than the competing competitors.

[00:17:44] But this is a national security risk. If North Korean hackers, you want to talk about North Korean hackers and tornado cash, but if North Korean hackers have access to everybody’s financial data, then they can use that to target individuals. If China has access to all of the US citizens financial [00:18:00] data, then they can use that like they don’t have to break into a system.

[00:18:03] And so we ought to actually mandate encryption for US citizens and say, like, with the browser, it all should be encrypted. And if we can get to that place, I think there might be there’s with crypto wars, there’s a thing called the fire sheet moment where people suddenly realized that their information they were passing through the browser wasn’t private.

[00:18:21] We’ll have a similar thing happen. I think so that will help with distribution if we have government now governments will say, okay We’re 98 percent aligned with you on this. We just want the backdoor, you know, we just It doesn’t work with global financial systems, it just doesn’t work the tooling Like with a browser has to be that simple.

[00:18:40] It has to be as simple as being able to close your curtains in your home to get privacy. Because if you have to think about it every time, the mental load’s too high. Right. And it’s like, what am I leaking to? Who am I leaking? I mean, that just doesn’t work. We need the tools, the user experience catch up with the

[00:18:55] Luke: protocol.

[00:18:56] And it’s where I love, like even the small things, like the fact that the Zcash has cash [00:19:00] in the name, I’ve been in discussions recently where people were like, well, look like banks, this bank, that whatever. And it’s like, look, The precedent’s already there, already there. Like I can go hand a briefcase of cash to somebody and they don’t know who it was.

[00:19:12] Right. People forget these things just, and it’s, it’s amazing to me how quickly people are forgetting about even basics like cash, like in the properties that cash has, right? Like, and it’s like, look, all we’re really trying to do is, have parity with that at some level so that people can have privacy, you nailed it on the head.

[00:19:29] And, There’s these, all these practical cases too. I mean, if you think about it, it’s really a double edged thing too, because if you look at stuff like the TOR network, right, where intelligence agencies use it, so do bad people, right? Like, or bad guys or whatever, you know, right? Like, I think everybody needs to use it because everybody has a reason to use it, right?

[00:19:43] Like, and it seems like this is such a parallel in a lot of ways. These are just tools that people need to use and protocols for things to flow through, right?

[00:19:51] Josh: Yeah. And in fairness, like some of the narrative has changed. So the anti privacy people, they’re not dumb. And so they know the name, you know, the narrative came out as like, we need electronic [00:20:00] cash.

[00:20:00] You know, we need digital cash and that has the same properties as physical cash. I was listening to a congressional testimony a couple of weeks ago and in one of the speakers that was, was on the panel was saying, it’s not. Like traditional cash because it’s digital. So traditional cash, you know, you would have to, in order to move a lot of money, you’ve got to pack all these bills in a bag and you’ve got to somehow transport them.

[00:20:21] And it’s just not, you can’t do it. so we shouldn’t have the same rights with. Digital money as we do with physical cash, but they’re missing the point, right? They’re missing the whole point in terms of what we’re, they’re talking about, like, how do we catch bad actors instead of thinking about how do we empower people to be able to, be more, to do more, to communicate more, to build more?

[00:20:43] It’s just a weird lens we’re looking

[00:20:46] Luke: through. The first principles are just kind of so blurred, I think. Are you seeing things that give you some hope with, progress on this front? I mean, you know, a lot of the headlines are doom and gloom, right? Around certain things, but are there any elements of this that are giving you hope with [00:21:00] pushing us forward as far as like the policy progress or anything like that, or is it just a matter of being heads down?

[00:21:06] Josh: There’s a few things I think one at a high level and we, I mean, we tend to go through these swings, right? Or maybe it’s circular in terms of all of history and in the way that we go and we’ve certainly Swung really far towards this kind of anti privacy full up surveillance And if history is going to continue to repeat we’re going to see a swing back, right?

[00:21:27] There’s going to be something that is more measured with a recognition that it’s, you know, Necessary. It’s not a nice to have. It’s necessary for humankind is necessary for the economy and digital assets are here to stay. This is not a fat and for it to work. Privacy has to be there. I think there are people then in places of power.

[00:21:45] I’ve had you had really good conversation with a U. S. Congressman over dinner. He was very, very measured and very pro privacy. And we’ve got a number of folks up on the hill that Yeah. Understand and are fighting for the [00:22:00] right things. And we’ve seen that I’m seeing that on both sides of the aisle. No, it’s not purely partisan, although it tends to be a little bit more one way or the other in terms of that.

[00:22:09] Right? So there’s glimmers of hope there. It’s not all doom and gloom. And more and more people, I think, are waking up, right? People are wanting to have an adopting privacy things, especially as they see the implications of it. Of not having it. People are downloading the Brave browser and using it because they have a desire and that those numbers are increasing.

[00:22:29] Your user base is increasing. It’s phenomenal your growth. So I do have hope that things will change or things will get better, but it may get darker before it gets worse. Yeah,

[00:22:38] Luke: no, I agree. And I think like that’s one of the reasons why we’re really excited to be working with you guys is that, I mean, the numbers do so much the talking, bringing these things out of the abstract and out of the theory into practice is like so key.

[00:22:50] And then people realize too, there are just benefits of having these things that aren’t necessarily apparent with us. It’s like, okay, well, when you stop a lot of the stuff that’s tracking you, you get faster. [00:23:00] Something with Zcash should probably just be around, like, convenience, right? Like, and how, okay, well, yeah, permissionless money is like, it’s really nice.

[00:23:08] Just your first example, right? Like this first example you gave, right? The Western Union thing. Literally trying to give people aid and get caught up in the bureaucracy of that. And you can’t do it. You have to wait on that. It’s just silly.

[00:23:20] Josh: But it’s got to be the default, right? It’s got to be like popping up in your browser and I’m navigating sites knowing that I’m not, you know, Dropping cookies that are, are gonna, you know, wreck my privacy the same way.

[00:23:29] It’s like the Zcash has to be as easy to use as that. Where I don’t have to think about like, I have an option. I could use Bitcoin or I could use something else. But why would I? Because it’s just as easy to use something that Shields my transactions and it’s completely compliant and I don’t have to think about legal risk and I don’t have to think about all this stuff.

[00:23:46] If I want to get S you know, we talk about kind of other financial services. If I want to get issued credit, I should be able to like cryptographically prove that I have enough assets collateral to be able to be issued credit without somebody knowing, you know, my total [00:24:00] amount of assets or without the public knowing my total amount of assets.

[00:24:03] And so providing products like that on top of the protocol that are just simple, intuitive, easy to use. Like, why wouldn’t I choose that versus something that exposes everything?

[00:24:13] Luke: Yeah, I’m really glad you touched on that too, because I mean, we start to think about applications that you could build on Zcash.

[00:24:18] You mentioned earlier like shielded transactions are there like shielded messages and other like that? Yeah. I hear these things and I think people might want to hear about them.

[00:24:27] Josh: Yeah. So inherently in the protocol itself, something that’s really unique to Zcash is that with a transaction, you can include a message, an encrypted message.

[00:24:35] Yeah. Very famously, you know, love notes have been passed, even a pair of tickets for an event and things like that. So somebody built a messaging board with it because they’re not passionate. Like the fees are really low and transactions are fast. So you can have messaging on top of the protocol and pay a little bit of a fee without passing an easy cash along pan, you know, a fraction of a cent or whatever to send that message.

[00:24:57] And so there’s been actually demand. It was [00:25:00] interesting. Like we had a community. Meeting we invited a whole bunch of community members to meet us in Palm Springs and do some, some planning and people came from all over the world, which is pretty cool and some were talking about in their respective countries, like a signal isn’t even trusted completely trusted and they were looking for messaging capabilities.

[00:25:18] On top of Zcash, because they trusted that protocol more than they trusted the Signal app. That was like, it was eye opening for me. So there has been some work from some people in the ecosystem to build just a messaging app, just a messaging bill, even independent of the cryptocurrency using that same kind of cryptography.

[00:25:36] That’s

[00:25:36] Luke: awesome. It will be exciting to see like where you guys go with this especially how, you know, we can help to get more people transacting with it too. Is there anything else that we didn’t really cover that you wanted to kind of dig into a bit? While we’ve got you here,

[00:25:49] Josh: you want to touch briefly on our, partnership?

[00:25:51] Yeah, yeah, sure. Sure. This is a really cool thing. I mean, it actually, some of this, the seeds were planted years ago. I met it. Yeah. This guy named Carlos, who now works at rave [00:26:00] love Carlos when he was a school teacher and he was teaching his, he was doing financial literacy training with his kids.

[00:26:05] That wasn’t the class, but he was doing financial literacy and teaching them about cryptocurrencies and teaching them about Zcash. And it came out in the, I think the Washington post an article and I saw it and I was like, I got to meet this guy fast forward. You know, he’s at brave and I’m with him and James from the team at consensus.

[00:26:22] I don’t know, a couple of years ago and over barbecue, we’re like, wouldn’t it be awesome with brave, with the mission that you have and Zcash, the mission that they’re saying missions, right? There’s very similar missions. It just makes sense for us to work together. So we started scheming plan. Today, you know, in your nightly build, we have transparency cash supported in the brave wallet.

[00:26:43] And soon in the coming months, we’ll have shielded support in the brave wallet. And it’s in partnership also with file coin, which is pretty cool. So Filecoin allows for, if people don’t know, a decentralized storage mechanism, so I can store files like a Dropbox kind of thing using a decentralized [00:27:00] network.

[00:27:00] So we have this messaging capability, but the messaging capability is basically text. But what if you could add payloads? What if you could add a payload to it in the message itself, and then that’s stored in Filecoin? So we started working on those kinds of solutions. So there’s some fun stuff in the mix.

[00:27:14] We’ll get this launched, you know, working on making sure that it’s easy to use within the Brave browser. So people can spend their, their shielded Zcash through Brave without being tracked and traced.

[00:27:24] Luke: That’s what I love about it too, is the fact that these types of features too, within the wallet and this accessibility, I mean, people forget every single Brave browser now has this.

[00:27:33] Self custody wallet built in. And so like, we’re going to be able to unlock the potential for some, for tens of 70 million monthly active users, right? Like we’ll be able to have this at their fingertips. It’s pretty exciting. I’m super excited about that. I’m glad you mentioned it and absolutely love the work Carlos is doing.

[00:27:49] And I think that’s one of the cool things about these projects. I don’t know. I see this with Brave myself included is just. When the mission’s there and it’s hard, you get amazing people from all [00:28:00] walks of life that want to be part of something like this, and I don’t know about you, but for me, this is definitely kind of almost like a, whether it’s a second or last chance moment of being able to, like, approach these things and get it right.

[00:28:12] I get that impression from you guys, like, for sure. And also from, I mean, but even folks like Carlos too came on and just, it was, it was teaching schools. Now he’s like, you know, now we’ve got Zcash in the browser, right? Like, this is awesome. You know, like, it’s just amazing. Like how the draw that this can have and how you can have people from all different kinds of backgrounds working on this thing.

[00:28:29] You mentioned one thing earlier too, that really stood out to me where you’re like, it feels like everything’s almost against you all the time. And I think that’s something that folks really underestimate how hard everything that’s simple in tech has to become complicated when you need to do it privately by default, right?

[00:28:44] Like, so like, there’s so many little steps that you have to get right. And you guys are doing the good work on making these things accessible and easy. And my hat’s off to you guys. I really, really appreciate it. Where can people find out more about what you guys are doing or and follow you on X or wherever you’re out there

[00:28:59] Josh: on X or [00:29:00] Twitter?

[00:29:00] I’m at Jace Weihardt. I think that’s right. Yeah,

[00:29:03] Luke: we’ll follow you. Follow

[00:29:04] Josh: me there. And then you can go to electric coin. co is ECC. So that’s our, we’re one of now. I mean, we were the inventors and rolled out the Zcash initially, but there’s also now a foundation called the Zcash foundation and get more information there.

[00:29:20] There’s some, community links at the bottom of, those sites that you can get into discord or the forums or telegram or wherever you like to engage. So awesome. I’m getting a place for more,

[00:29:29] Luke: more info. Perfect. Thanks again, Josh. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your time with us. We’ll be sure to have you back to like, maybe we’ll do an update once this is rolled out maybe some show and tell or something.

[00:29:40] That’d be fantastic. All right, man. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the Brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave.

[00:29:55] com. And start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately. [00:30:00] Brave also shields you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff following you across the web.