F2Pool co-founder Chun Wang criticized Zcash and called the ZEC rally an illusion.

Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool, one of the largest mining pools, publicly called Zcash's current rally speculative and unsupported by fundamentals. He believes that ZEC's ranking alongside actively used networks like Solana and Hyperliquid doesn't mean the anonymous cryptocurrency has the potential or functionality it deserves.

Wang considers the network's launch itself to be deeply unfair to ordinary network participants. For the first four years of Zcash's existence , 20% of each block reward was automatically withheld as the so-called founder's reward. These enormous funds were distributed among the creators, staff members, advisors, and early investors. Ultimately, 2,1 million ZEC were accumulated, or exactly 10% of the asset's maximum supply of 21 million coins.

Unlike Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, which rewarded miners exclusively, Zcash programmatically funded a specific commercial company and its sponsors. Moreover, when the initial distributions were about to end, a similar 20% share was returned to the protocol, this time under the guise of a development fund. Wang emphasized that a coin that incorporates its own profits into its block rewards cannot be sold to users as pure and neutral money.

Time has shown that even such financial injections failed to create a real economic basis for the asset, and the main stated function of privacy proved to be merely a smokescreen. The use of anonymous transactions on the network has always remained optional, leading cryptocurrency exchanges and simple wallet creators to choose the path of least resistance, ubiquitously implementing public addresses.

For most of the project's history, the bulk of the coins were held entirely publicly. According to Chun Wang, optional privacy is just marketing, while true privacy should be the foundation of the protocol.

Technological stagnation was exacerbated by constant internal conflicts within the leadership. Project management devolved into an endless struggle for power and funds between the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the Foundation, and other entities. These devastating disagreements culminated in January 2026, when the entire core ECC team left the project, publicly declaring they had been forced to leave.

F2Pool's co-founder noted that a core development team that can't be co-located with its non-profit board of directors is evidence that the project is broken at the very top and has nothing to do with true decentralization.

Internal governance chaos led to technical problems: in May 2026, the community learned of a critical vulnerability in the Orchard pool, which had been undetected in the code for approximately four years. In theory, this bug allowed attackers to surreptitiously create counterfeit ZEC coins. Since the pool itself is private, no one in the world can prove with absolute certainty that the counterfeit coins were never created.

Ironwood's July update closed the old pool and forced user funds through a new gateway, but this was only an emergency fix.

Money whose private supply is unverifiable, like Bitcoin's, and which required an emergency fix for a four-year-old bug, is not hard money, Wang said of the incident and the reaction to it.

Chun Wang shared an instructive story from his own practice that prevented a multitude of problems. Six years ago, a project team member constantly confused the North American time zones EST and EDT in business correspondence with him. Unable to establish normal communication, Wang took the drastic decision of blocking communication with the company, a move he still considers one of his best management moves.

To illustrate the scale of the danger of such incompetence in the financial sector, he recalled the well-known incident with the BlockFi platform, in which users were mistakenly sent 701,4 BTC instead of $701,4.

Anyone who can't tell EDT from EST will probably also confuse BTC and USD, Wang concluded.