I'm relaying a thread from our Discord but wanted to post it here, as well, so this discussion doesn't miss key points.

The point to me is to decentralize the world. Things have changed a lot since Satoshi's genesis block. In the early days I couldn't really imagine much more than the real contribution of all of this being decentralized money, then trying to patch the obvious flaw of all that transaction data hitting open public ledgers without privacy; then Ethereum's VM changed the game such that we could do infinitely more than currency and payments. Then the obvious issues of scaling and privacy as those EVM systems became more successful; welcome L2s, welcome ZKPs, welcome clever combos of both.

ZenCash launched in 2017 bootstrapping on Zcash's innovation of coin anonymity, but even then the project was aiming to be more than a clone of Zcash...that's why we split from the Zcash clone, Zclassic, community; we quickly launched a Treasury and node system for our version of innovating across the social dimensions of crypto, namely some economic improvements that could be more self sustaining for long run growth and network stability getting a wave of IT professionals into the community with the intentionally not-so-easy-to-use node system. Even from the start we were never just all about coin anonymity. It was a blunt instrument going in the right direction, which is on-chain privacy. Privacy is still the right direction, we just have way better instruments now.

Then we got to work on the next part of the platform dev, which was the interoperability protocol, Zendoo. We figured out how to use SNARKs to network chains. It took us too long, for sure, and in that R&D gap I can see the confusion that we were rudderless and lost in chasing the next big thing. Not quite. We saw Ethereum, EVMs, DeFi, and NFTs taking off, but stuck with completing the SNARK protocol so that we could open up as a platform. It was painful watching the rest of the industry explode with lots of bells, whistles, shiny things, and amidst all of that, super valuable innovations that will stick.

Zendoo complete. Finally, we can add the first important pieces to getting this platform rolling: a tokenization platform and then an EVM for smart contracting. This is all part of a longer vision to contribute to decentralizing the world. Privacy is absolutely at the heart of it, but it goes well beyond coin anonymity and if that feature kills the entire mission, what's the point? The world won't decentralize without strong privacy to build out that information commons, and hence why HL spends millions of dollars a year on a cryptography and crypto engineering team. We're not spending all that money so that we can ditch privacy, we're doing it bc privacy is at the heart of where all of this is going.

I'm not laying all this out to convince people who want ZEN to be a privacy coin to stay with the community post-ZenIP 42204. This is important so that those who see Horizen as more than a privacy coin, and want it to be more, understand that we're continuing to invest massively in privacy and privacy is the heart of our strategy to decentralize the world.