Building with Agents and The Bull Case for Zcash

Zaki Manian In this episode of Deeply Intents, I chat with Zaki Manian [Cosmos co-founder, Bootstrap board member, and Zcash contributor]. We start with Zaki's AI-native development workflow: he's running 7-8 projects simultaneously using Claude, Codex, and Gemini in parallel, burning through 500M tokens a day. He breaks down which model is best for what and why most developers he's hired in his career are now outperformed by Opus 4.6. From there, Zaki gives the first public podcast account of the Zcash governance crisis from a board member's perspective, how the team navigated it, what role AI played in the negotiations, and why Zcash is suddenly a credible store-of-value contender this cycle. We also get into what the privacy landscape looks like by end of year. We wrap up with the state of crypto startups post-Genius Act, why agentic finance is the only exciting build direction, and Zaki's new framework: two years of building is now two weekends, so why are founders still sending decks instead of TestFlights? Timestamps (00:00) - Cosmos, Zcash, enterprise blockchains origins (01:45) - Sanctuary technology (03:41) - Spicy AI takes (06:22) - Ideas are scarce and software is cheap (08:38) - Finding more ai forward teams to build with (12:41) - AI reasoning ability vs. regurgitating training set (15:37) - Specific use cases for each model (21:02) - AI as a strategy advisor (22:41) - From AI to Zcash, a story (26:19) - Non-profit organizations created (28:10) -From Zashi to ZODL (31:45) - Challenges with valuing revenue (33:09) - The era of super personal software (36:07) - Changes in whale behavior this cycle (37:27) - Zcash is the standard for the next era (39:11) - Encrypted Bitcoin (43:28) - The narrative is simple (47:17) - Credible fundamentals around quantum (53:24) - Privacy modalities of the future (56:21) - Intents replacing smart contracts (58:36) - How are you going to do growth? (1:00:46) - New ways to build startups (1:06:04) - No more pitch decks (1:10:59) - New generation of AI native builders (1:12:53) - We are going to have way more startups DisclaimerNothing in this episode should be interpreted as financial, technical, or legal advice. The host does contract work for Heliax, a public goods laboratory, focusing on Anoma.