Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg: Encrypted Money at Planetary Scale

Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg: Encrypted Money at Planetary Scale

From Arjun Khemani Podcast by Arjun Khemani

October 11, 2025 · 1h 41m

About this episode

Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg discuss the development of encrypted money and the Zcash protocol.

Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg aka str4d are both cryptographic engineers working on the Zcash protocol. Sean’s latest project is Tachyon, intended to bring encrypted money into the hands of 8 billion people. Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below. Watch on YouTube or X . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Follow me on X for updates on future episodes. Timestamps 0:00 - Project Tachyon 10:20 - Privacy can’t be an afterthought for a protocol 15:24 - Encrypted Bitcoin 22:11 - Soundness bug in original sprout pool 30:15 - Sapling 33:00 - A decade of progress 39:04 - Zcash’s anonymity set 51:29 - Using private money as a passthrough doesn’t work 56:04 - The importance of ledger indistinguishability 58:30 - The ultimate privacy stack 1:05:58 - Tachyon removes all cryptographic bottlenecks of encrypted money 1:08:16 - What’s next after Tachyon? 1:15:25 - Weightless blockchains? 1:18:24 - Ragu 1:19:44 - What the next 12 months look like for Jack and Sean 1:31:22 - “Everything worth doing is worth doing on ambitious timelines.” — Sean 1:32:16 - Sean’s advice for young engineers 1:34:18 - What got Sean and Jack into Zcash? This is a public…

People in this episode

Host: Arjun Khemani

Guests: Sean Bowe, Jack Grigg

Topics covered

  • cryptography
  • encrypted money
  • Zcash protocol
  • privacy
  • blockchain technology

Keywords

  • encrypted money
  • Zcash
  • Tachyon
  • cryptographic engineers
  • privacy protocols

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Zcash

Products: Tachyon

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