An exchange on X between Polygon’s CTO Mudit Gupta and Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox reignited a long-simmering debate over whether privacy-preserving shielded pools can be perfectly audited — and, by extension, whether ZEC’s 21 million cap can be trusted under all conceivable failure modes. The dispute hinged on a familiar fault line in privacy-coin design: zero-knowledge protocols can obfuscate individual balances and flows, but they still must preserve a hard monetary base.

Polygon CTO Attacks Zcash

Gupta opened with a stark framing: “Nobody knows how many Zcash tokens actually exist. Shielded assets like Zcash are hard to audit. In March 2019, an infinite mint bug was detected in Zcash shielded assets. It was fixed in October 2019 but there is no guaranteed way to tell if the bug was

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