Balaji Srinivasan has distilled 15 years of crypto experimentation down to a stark claim: after Bitcoin, only two core protocol breakthroughs truly matter—Ethereum for programmability and Zcash for privacy.

In a wide-ranging appearance on Mert Mumtaz’s “Accelerate with Mert” podcast , Srinivasan argued that the industry has already completed the “programmability era” and is now entering a decisive phase where privacy and zero-knowledge cryptography become central to crypto’s mission. “The two major innovations on Bitcoin were programmability in the form of Ethereum and privacy in the form of Zcash,” he said.

From Bitcoin To Programmability To Zcash

Srinivasan breaks crypto’s history into three arcs. First, Bitcoin simply had to prove that non-sovereign, cryptographic money could work

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