Privacy was already one of 2025’s most important trends for Web3, but ZCash’s meteoric rise over the past month has thrown the topic of confidential transactions back into the spotlight. After years in the shade, this pioneer of privacy coins is surging back, and some in our community have been asking: how does COTI compare to ZCash? Both tackle the urgent topic of Web3 privacy, but in very different ways. Let’s take a look at the key comparisons.
The Top Line
ZCash pioneered the use of zero-knowledge cryptography for confidential transactions, offering optional privacy on its own L1. Though groundbreaking for its time, ZCash is, by today’s standards, somewhat limited in its use cases. COTI targets the next step, programmable privacy, using garbled circuits to run private smart contracts across multi-party workflows. Early benchmarks report a materially higher throughput and a design aimed at low-cost, scalable confidential computation, enabling COTI to pick up where ZCash left off.
Two Generations of Blockchain Privacy
Both COTI and ZCash are OGs of the crypto space. ZCash was founded by Zooko Wilcox, along with a team of scientists from MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Technion, and launched in 2016. COTI was founded shortly afterwards, in 2017, and also comprised scientists from Technion. COTI started out as a high-scale payments platform before shifting its focus to privacy, collaborating with Soda Labs to advance its cryptographic foundations. This work culminated in the launch of COTI V2 mainnet in March 2025, marking a major step forward in scalable, programmable privacy.
ZCash’s private transfers are based on zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge). It claims OG status for being the first blockchain to implement this type of cryptography into its consensus rules. ZCash allows users to prove that a transaction is valid without revealing any information about the sender, receiver, or transaction amount. While this is powerful cryptography, it does not support use cases that require inputs from two or more parties.
COTI’s privacy protocol uses Garbled Circuits (GCs) to enable multiple parties to compute over encrypted data without ever revealing their inputs. Each step of the computation is encrypted using NIST-standard cryptography, keeping all data and results fully confidential.
While zero-knowledge proofs are designed to prove information without revealing it, garbled circuits allow the network to compute over encrypted data without disclosing any of it, an approach that enables much richer functionality. COTI’s garbled circuits also support multi-party computation, since there is no limit to the number of inputs a circuit can have, or who can provide them.
In terms of speed and cost, ZCash manages confidentiality via shielded transactions, which are computationally large due to the inclusion of a zero-knowledge proof. ZCash can support around 3–12 confidential transactions per second (cTPS), whereas COTI has benchmarked speeds capable of supporting over 80 cTPS, and averaging out over 40 TPS. Both protocols have very low transaction costs of under $0.01.
Together, ZCash and COTI represent two generations of blockchain privacy. ZCash proved that confidential transfers were possible on a public ledger, laying the foundation for privacy in crypto. COTI expands the scope of privacy with programmable, multi-party privacy designed for the complex needs of modern Web3. It transforms privacy from a single feature into a core layer of computation.
Broad vs. Narrow Utility
ZCash is designed to do one thing well: simple, confidential transfers. It is not a smart contract platform and cannot be used for dApps or more complex Web3 services.
COTI, on the other hand, is an EVM-compatible platform, capable of supporting dApps of theoretically any complexity. Garbled circuits can be used to execute any type of operation, with COTI’s confidential transactions being well-suited to a wide range of use cases.
COTI excels at handling the complexities of DeFi operations, including cross-chain privacy. It can support confidential smart contracts for all manner of programmatic and compliant blockchain uses, such as private DAOs, stablecoins, real-world assets (RWAs), and AI in the form of private federated learning. Owing to its programmable privacy, it is possible to provide auditability and maintain compliance, opening the doors to institutional adoption.
Network Value
At the time of writing, ZCash is trading around $260/ZEC, with a total market cap of around $1.4 billion, though that’s changing fast.
COTI, meanwhile, is trading just over $0.05 and has a market cap of $125 million.
Summary
ZCash pioneered the use of zero-knowledge cryptography for confidential transfers. While the system was revolutionary for its time, it is suited only to simple transactions and not for the kind of programmable, composable privacy required by today’s DeFi and Web3 applications.
COTI’s architecture, by contrast, provides a lightweight, flexible means of executing confidential transactions of all types. It is high-scale, low-cost, and supports multi-party computation and cross-chain interoperability. These features make COTI an ideal choice for privacy-preserving functions across the broadest spectrum of use cases.