Zcash Crypto Co-Founder Wants Bitcoin to Grow Supply by 4% Annually

Eli Ben-Sasson, the Zcash crypto co-founder and current CEO of StarkWare, has taken aim at the most important number in Bitcoin: 21 million.

In a post on X this week, he argued that a hard supply cap “doesn’t make sense” over long time horizons, since private keys keep getting lost. His fix is a standing issuance rate of 4% a year.

Zcash Crypto Co-Founder Says the 21M Cap “Doesn’t Make Sense”

Ben-Sasson’s reasoning starts from a simple observation. Coins tied to lost keys never come back. People die without sharing seed phrases, hardware wallets end up in landfills, and passwords get forgotten.

Estimates of already-lost Bitcoin range from 3 to 4 million coins, and that number only grows. “As time goes to infinity, all keys will be lost,” he wrote.

Under a hard cap, that means the spendable supply shrinks forever. Bitcoin supporters usually treat this as a feature, since fewer coins should mean each remaining one is worth more.

Ben-Sasson sees it differently. A currency that trends toward zero circulating units is not a currency, in his view. It is a countdown.

He was clear that he still wants a strict monetary policy. His post backs “an absolute upper bound on the # of Bitcoins in the future,” one defined by a maximum issuance rate rather than a fixed total.

The Case for 4% Annual Issuance

Why 4%? Ben-Sasson ties the figure to demographics, calling it a reasonable upper bound on how fast the human population can expand.

The logic: if new supply grows no faster than the number of people who might hold it, the currency stays scarce per capita while replacing coins that fall out of circulation. “This way, there’s enough to go around,” he wrote.

He also gestured at a second issue, which he called a security problem “looming large on the horizon.” Bitcoin miners are paid through block subsidies plus transaction fees.

The subsidy halves roughly every four years and eventually hits zero. If fee revenue never fills the gap, the network’s security budget thins out, and attacks get cheaper.

None of this is likely to move Bitcoin itself. Changing the cap would need an overwhelming consensus, and the 21 million figure is the closest thing crypto has to a religious text.

Still, the post lands at a moment when people are actually listening to what Zcash builders have to say.

Where Zcash Crypto Stands After Its Rally

The Zcash crypto rally that began around September 2025 was one of the biggest stories of the past year.

ZEC climbed more than 700% from its lows into the $400 to $600 range and briefly touched levels last seen in 2018.

Over a 12-month period, gains against the dollar were often quoted north of 1,000%, leaving BTC and ETH far behind.

The drivers were strong. Over 30% of ZEC supply now sits in shielded pools, an all-time high that points to real use of the privacy features rather than pure speculation.

The Zashi wallet and new cross-chain tooling made private transactions accessible to people who are not cryptographers.

Multicoin Capital’s disclosed accumulation set off a short squeeze estimated at $62 million. And Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot ZEC ETF, a step that would have sounded absurd two years ago.

ZEC has also started leaking into other ecosystems. Wrapped versions, such as zenZEC on Solana, are seeing real volume, putting the asset in front of DeFi users who have never touched its native chain.

Recent months have been choppy, with strong rallies followed by pullbacks, but the price has held far above its pre-rally base.