What happens when two of the oldest privacy-focused blockchain projects, one with 12 years of payment infrastructure and the other with the most advanced zero-knowledge cryptography in production, decide to combine their strengths rather than compete?
That is the premise behind Dash's announcement that it will integrate Zcash's Orchard shielded pool into its Evolution chain. Dash has operated protocol-level privacy features since 2014, making it one of the longest-running privacy-enabled blockchains in operation. Zcash launched in 2016 and has since iterated through three generations of shielded transaction technology, with Orchard representing the current state of the art: zero-knowledge proofs that require no trusted setup, support recursive proof composition, and are already proven at scale with 4.2 million ZEC held in Orchard pools. The integration brings this cryptographic capability to Dash's payment rails and upcoming token infrastructure on Evolution, with mainnet deployment anticipated next month.
The timing aligns with a broader industry shift. Privacy technology in crypto has moved from a niche concern to a foundational requirement. Zcash gained over 820% in 2025 as demand for confidential transactions accelerated. The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated privacy research unit. Gartner projects that half of all blockchain transactions will include built-in privacy features by 2026. Dash and Zcash are not responding to this trend. They have been building toward it for over a decade.
What Orchard Brings to Dash
To understand the significance, it helps to understand the difference between Dash's existing approach and what Orchard enables.
Dash has used CoinJoin mixing at the protocol level since its early years, providing transaction privacy across thousands of merchants and exchanges globally. CoinJoin combines multiple users' transactions together, making it more difficult to trace which inputs correspond to which outputs. It has served as a practical privacy tool for Dash's payment-focused user base. The addition of Orchard introduces a complementary and more advanced cryptographic layer on top of this foundation.
Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party to prove to another that a statement is true, such as "this transaction is valid," without revealing any of the underlying information. The sender, recipient, and amount all remain encrypted while the network verifies correctness. Rather than obscuring the trail through mixing, zero-knowledge proofs ensure there is no trail to begin with.
Zcash's Orchard protocol is the third generation of this approach. The first, Sprout, launched with Zcash in 2016 and demonstrated the feasibility of shielded transactions on a public blockchain. Sapling, deployed in 2018, reduced proof generation times by orders of magnitude, making private transactions practical for everyday use. Orchard, activated in May 2022, uses the Halo 2 proving system, which eliminated the trusted setup requirement entirely and enabled recursive proof composition, a capability that opens the door to future scalability improvements where one proof can verify another. As of late 2025, 4.2 million ZEC sits in the Orchard pool, representing the majority of all shielded funds on the Zcash network and contributing to a broader trend where 30% of ZEC's total supply has moved into shielded addresses.
Samuel Westrich, CTO of Dash Core Group, said the team has been tracking Zcash's zero-knowledge proof research since the first academic papers in 2014.
With the latest release of the Orchard crate, we felt it was a good time to investigate adding the technology to our newer Evolution chain, which interacts seamlessly with our main Core chain, Orchard is open source and mature, integrating it has been easier than expected. Kudos to the team that built it.
The approach reflects a strategic clarity: rather than spending years developing an independent zero-knowledge system, Dash is adopting proven, battle-tested cryptography and coupling it with its own homegrown payment and platform technologies. The result is a privacy stack that combines Dash's instant-settlement network and Evolution's application platform with the most advanced shielded pool protocol currently in production.
The Evolution Platform and What It Enables
Dash's Evolution platform launched on July 29, 2024, after a community governance vote to release the initial version and iterate from there. It operates as a second blockchain alongside Dash's original Core chain, using a modified version of Tendermint consensus called Tenderdash, and is validated by Evolution Masternodes (EvoNodes) that secure both chains simultaneously.
Evolution was designed to take Dash beyond payments. It supports usernames through the Dash Platform Name Service, contact lists, data contracts, decentralized storage, and token issuance, all at the protocol level. The vision, first articulated by Dash founder Evan Duffield in 2015, was to build a full payments experience that is decentralized from top to bottom, eliminating the need for centralized intermediaries to fill in the gaps around how people use money. After years of development, Evolution delivered on that initial premise and now serves as the foundation for the next phase of Dash's capabilities.
The Orchard integration targets Evolution specifically, which matters for two reasons. First, Evolution's architecture may enable more efficient mobile sync of shielded data. Westrich said the team is "targeting to verify in the upcoming weeks" that the Evolution chain's design allows for faster sync on mobile devices, a historically challenging problem for zero-knowledge privacy systems. If verified, this would address one of the key usability barriers that has limited privacy adoption on mobile wallets across the industry, and would represent a meaningful contribution from Dash's own engineering work rather than something inherited from the Orchard crate alone.
Second, the planned extension to tokenized assets is a forward-looking capability that could differentiate Evolution in the broader Layer 1 landscape. Zcash pioneered the concept of Zcash Shielded Assets, which apply zero-knowledge privacy protections to tokens beyond the native currency. Dash's implementation would bring comparable shielded functionality to any asset issued on Evolution. In practical terms, this means token issuers on Evolution could offer their users the same level of transactional privacy that Orchard provides for native Dash transfers, a capability that few if any token platforms currently provide at the protocol level.
Why Cross-Project Collaboration Matters Now
The collaboration between Dash and the Zcash ecosystem, specifically Shielded Labs, is significant because it signals a maturing industry where privacy technology can be shared rather than siloed.
Jason McGee Stramaglia, Executive Director of Shielded Labs, described Orchard as,
the most advanced privacy protocol to date" and noted its influence beyond Zcash. "It was a massive engineering effort, so it's great to see it influencing how other projects think about privacy, and we're glad to see Dash integrating Orchard into the Evolution chain
He also made a broader point about the tendency of mature protocols toward ossification.
"Privacy technology still needs to evolve as new use cases emerge. Extending strong privacy beyond payments to assets and tokens is a natural next step that many chains are exploring."
The market data supports the demand thesis. Privacy-focused assets outperformed the broader crypto market in 2025, with Zcash's 820% gain leading the sector. The amount of ZEC in shielded addresses grew from 11% to 30% of circulating supply over the course of 2025, driven in part by adoption of the Orchard pool through wallets like Zashi. Grayscale launched the first Zcash ETF in November 2025, adding an institutional access channel. Privacy use in crypto transactions rose to 11.4% of all cryptocurrency transactions globally in Q1 2025, up from 9.7% the year before. The U.S. Treasury lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash, and the Ethereum Foundation's new privacy unit signals that even the largest smart contract platform views privacy as essential infrastructure rather than a fringe feature.
For Dash, adding Orchard-level privacy to a network that already processes instant, low-cost payments positions the project at the intersection of two capabilities that have historically been separate: fast settlement and strong confidentiality. For the Zcash ecosystem, seeing its technology adopted by another established project validates years of engineering investment and expands the community of developers contributing to and auditing the Orchard codebase.
What Comes Next
The initial deployment will enable Orchard shielded pools for standard Dash transfers on the Evolution chain. A subsequent upgrade will bring privacy to tokenized assets issued on Evolution. Additional technical details will be released ahead of mainnet activation.
The broader trajectory is worth watching. If the Orchard crate proves portable enough for Dash to integrate with relative ease, other blockchain projects may follow. The concept of shared privacy infrastructure, where cryptographic protocols are adopted across chains rather than rebuilt independently, could accelerate the industry-wide shift toward confidential transactions that Gartner and others are projecting. Dash and Zcash, two projects that have been building privacy technology since 2014 and 2016 respectively, are now demonstrating what 22 combined years of engineering look like when the work is shared.
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