On 20 February 2024, Binance halted Monero spot trading. Eight months later, at 15:00 UTC on 31 October 2024, Kraken switched off XMR for its European Economic Area customers and began converting leftover balances to bitcoin. In between, on 23 November 2024, Zcash activated its NU6 network upgrade at block 2,726,400 and cut the block subsidy in half. Three dates, two chains, one theme: privacy coins are being pushed off centralised venues faster than their protocols are being weakened — and that gap is the whole reason self-custody matters here.
This final part of the series steps away from Litecoin, Dogecoin and Bitcoin Cash to look at the two coins that take privacy seriously at the protocol layer — Zcash and Monero — and shows honestly what Zelcore can and cannot do with each today.
Why privacy coins exist
Transparent chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum publish every transaction forever: amounts, addresses, and the graph connecting them. Chain-analysis firms cluster those addresses and, once one is tied to a real identity through a KYC on-ramp or a public post, the entire history attaches. That history is not just a privacy issue. It is a fungibility issue. Coins with "tainted" histories can be flagged, frozen or rejected by exchanges, which means one BTC is no longer strictly interchangeable with another BTC.
Privacy coins try to restore the cash-like property that a unit of money is a unit of money, full stop. They do it with cryptography rather than policy. Two dominant designs have emerged: Zcash, which uses zero-knowledge proofs to make privacy an opt-in pool, and Monero, which makes a stealth-address, ring-signature, hidden-amount stack mandatory on every transaction. Litecoin took a third route with its optional MimbleWimble Extension Blocks, covered in Part 1 on Litecoin — but Zcash and Monero are the benchmarks for what each philosophy looks like in production.
Zcash: zero-knowledge proofs and an optional shielded pool
Zcash launched on 28 October 2016, built by the Electric Coin Company (ECC) on the Zerocash academic protocol. Its supply is capped at 21 million ZEC, mirroring Bitcoin's. What differentiates Zcash is a dual-address model: transparent t-addresses behave like Bitcoin addresses, while shielded z-addresses hide sender, receiver and amount behind a zero-knowledge proof that the transaction is valid without revealing its contents.
The shielded pool has evolved through three generations. Sprout (2016) relied on a ceremonial trusted setup. Sapling (2018) made shielded transactions mobile-viable. Orchard, activated in May 2022 as part of NU5, switched to the Halo 2 proving system — a recursive zk-SNARK with PLONKish arithmetization co-designed by Sean Bowe, Jack Grigg and Daira Hopwood that requires no trusted setup at all. Orchard is the current target for shielded Zcash usage.
On 23 November 2024, the NU6 network upgrade activated at block 2,726,400, coinciding with the second Zcash halving from 3.125 to 1.5625 ZEC per block. NU6 also restructured the development fund: 8% of the block subsidy now flows to Zcash Community Grants and 12% sits in an in-protocol "lockbox" pending governance-approved disbursement, per the ECC NU6 post. Protocol development is split between ECC, the Zcash Foundation and Zcash Community Grants.
Perhaps the most watched data point is shielded-supply adoption. According to Coin Metrics and The Block, the share of circulating ZEC held in the shielded pool rose from roughly 8–11% at the start of 2025 to approximately 27–30% by early 2026 — a multi-year high that suggests Orchard has finally become the default for serious Zcash users.
Monero: private-by-default with ring signatures
Monero launched on 18 April 2014 as a fork of Bytecoin's CryptoNote protocol. It has no foundation, no company and no fixed supply cap; tail emission of 0.6 XMR per block began in 2022 and continues indefinitely to keep the security budget non-zero after the main issuance curve tapers.
Privacy in Monero is mandatory and stacks three primitives. Stealth addresses give every payment a fresh one-time destination that only the recipient's view key can detect, so the public ledger never records the real receiving address. Ring signatures hide the true sender by mixing the spend among a ring of decoys — the current algorithm is CLSAG, live since October 2020, with a default ring size of 16. RingCT, mandatory since September 2017, hides the transaction amount using Pedersen commitments.
Monero has a strong history of shipping efficiency upgrades alongside the privacy ones. Bulletproofs, activated in October 2018, cut range-proof size and dropped transaction fees by roughly 80%. Bulletproofs+ followed in August 2022. On the research roadmap, Seraphis plus the Jamtis address format aims to replace ring signatures with much larger anonymity sets, with full-chain membership proofs (FCMP++) discussed as an intermediate upgrade around 2026. Governance is rough-consensus: the Monero Research Lab and core devs on GitHub, funded via the Community Crowdfunding System.
The contrast with a transparent UTXO chain is sharp. Where Bitcoin's model, covered in the UTXO primer, lets anyone audit the entire coin supply and trace any output back to coinbase, Monero's RingCT obscures amounts and sources by construction. It is a deliberately different trade-off.
The 2024–2026 delisting wave
The last two years have reshaped where privacy coins can actually trade. Binance announced the Monero delisting on 6 February 2024 and halted spot trading on 20 February 2024; XMR dropped roughly 30% on the news, and residual balances on Binance were auto-converted to USDC starting 2 September 2024. Kraken, in its support-centre notice, halted XMR trading and deposits across the European Economic Area on 31 October 2024 at 15:00 UTC and converted remaining EEA balances to BTC on 31 December 2024, citing MiCA and EU anti-money-laundering rules. OKX and HTX had already delisted privacy coins in 2023.
The structural driver is regulatory rather than technical. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, combined with the Transfer of Funds Regulation, effectively ended compliant centralised listing of privacy coins inside the EEA. This dovetails with the broader Travel Rule and self-custody picture, where exchanges are required to attach originator and beneficiary information to outgoing crypto transfers — a requirement that is trivially satisfied for transparent coins and structurally incompatible with mandatory-privacy ones.
The counter-trend is worth noting. Zcash's shielded supply kept growing through 2025–26, and ZEC remained listed on Coinbase, Gemini and Kraken outside the EEA. XMR remained tradable on Kraken outside the EEA, on KuCoin and on decentralised venues such as Haveno and Retoswap, though LocalMonero shut down in 2024. Chainalysis reported in 2025 that darknet markets shifted back toward Bitcoin as settlement currency after the Binance delisting reduced XMR liquidity — a useful reminder that, in practice, real-world privacy behaviour follows liquidity at least as much as cryptography.
How to hold ZEC and XMR in Zelcore
This is where honesty matters, because the two coins land in very different places inside Zelcore today.
For Zcash, Zelcore supports ZEC natively on desktop and mobile using transparent (t-addr) send and receive. That covers deposits from exchanges, withdrawals to exchanges and peer-to-peer transfers that do not require the shielded pool. Full Orchard and Unified Address shielded sending is not implemented in Zelcore at the time of writing. If you want Orchard-level privacy for ZEC, the practical workflow is to receive to your Zelcore t-addr and then shield inside a Zcash-native wallet such as Zashi (from ECC), Nighthawk or Ywallet, which implement the full shielded stack.
For Monero, the picture is more recent. Zelcore announced XMR discontinuation on 15 January 2024, then re-added Monero support on desktop in October 2024, per the Zelcore team's release note. Mobile receive is live; full mobile send is being rolled out across subsequent update cycles, so check the in-app release notes before assuming parity with desktop. For users who want maximum feature coverage — multisig, custom daemon selection, hardware-wallet signing, subaddress management — the canonical Monero wallets remain the official Monero GUI/CLI, Feather Wallet on desktop, and Cake Wallet on mobile.
The operational rules are the same in both cases: write the seed phrase down offline, verify wallet downloads against the team's published signatures, test-send small amounts first, and do not assume a ZEC t-addr balance is private — shielding is an explicit action, not a default. On the legal side, holding and self-custodying privacy coins remains lawful in most jurisdictions, including the United States; MiCA restricts centralised exchange listings, not personal possession. Always check local rules.
Risks and what to watch
Liquidity is the first risk. With fewer CEX on-ramps, entering and exiting XMR increasingly routes through DEX venues (Haveno, Retoswap), atomic swaps or peer-to-peer trades. Spreads are wider and settlement is slower than on a major CEX. Second, mining pressure: Qubic-led selfish-mining attempts on Monero's RandomX network drew attention in 2025, and although hashrate recovered, mining centralisation remains a live concern worth monitoring. Third, protocol change: Seraphis/Jamtis and FCMP++ are ambitious upgrades and Monero hard-forks historically produce short wallet-compatibility breaks, so keep software updated around activation windows. Fourth, regulatory drift: the UK, Australia and individual EU member states may go further than MiCA, and the signals worth tracking are often custody-provider announcements, not just protocol news.
A closing frame: privacy is a property of how you use a coin as much as the coin itself. A shielded Zcash transaction followed by a KYC off-ramp is still linkable at the edges, and a Monero withdrawal from an exchange that recorded your identity already reveals the on-chain entry point. Self-custody, operational hygiene and understanding the cryptography live in the same stack.
That closes the Litecoin and Forks series. If you came in from Part 3 on Bitcoin Cash, you have now seen the four most instructive Bitcoin-family branches — a fee-market fork (LTC), a cultural fork (DOGE), a block-size fork (BCH) and a cryptography-first sibling (ZEC/XMR) — and how each one looks from a Zelcore self-custody seat.
