October 16, 2025

Welcome to the Meridian Update, your daily on-chain report. Our new Zcash privacy filter is preventing you from seeing the rest of this welcome message.

Zcash is back

We wrote about Zcash a long time ago. We said:

“Also not on Solana…is Zcash”

That was true then. It is no longer true. A company wrapped Zcash onto Solana. This is a great time to talk about wrapped assets. We’ve talked about tokenization, which is the art of taking assets that are not on-chain and making them available on-chain. We’ve also talked about the reverse, with companies like VanEck, Bitwise, Grayscale, and more taking on-chain assets and making them available off-chain through ETFs (also DATs, sort of). Somehow, we’ve never talked about wrapping assets, the art of taking an asset that is on-chain but not on this particular chain and making it available on this particular chain.

SOL is the native token of the Solana network. ETH is the native token of the Ethereum network. You can’t get SOL on Ethereum, and you can’t get ETH on Solana. Except you can. If you go on the Solana network right now, you can find an ETH token. It is ETH wrapped onto Solana. Not all wrapped assets are created equally. But a way this can happen is that someone buys the ETH on Ethereum, promises to hold it, and then turns the promise to hold it into a token you can buy on Solana. This is backing the asset one-to-one.

Someone did this for Zcash, so now you can buy wrapped Zcash on Solana.

Not to be outdone, Grayscale has a Zcash ETF. So you can own Zcash, or something like Zcash, on Zcash, Solana, or off-chain.

Anyway, this had Crypto Twitter talking about Zcash once again. As a reminder of what Zcash is, we quote from the esteemed Meridian Update:

Zcash is a blockchain network that allows users to do private transactions. And its price surged yesterday. So every transaction that happens on blockchain networks won’t be visible, exactly, at least not if Zcash has anything to do with it. Worth keeping an eye on this…but how, the privacy!

Did we read that right?

We have talked about stablecoins quite a bit here on the Meridian Update. Not because we are obsessed with them. We aren’t. How dare you suggest that. No, we talk about stablecoins a lot because we talk about what people are talking about, specifically Crypto Twitter people. And they are talking about stablecoins a lot. Because a lot is happening with stablecoins. A funny (concerning?) thing happened in stablecoins today. And Crypto Twitter was laughing about it.

PYUSD is PayPal’s one-to-one US dollar-backed stablecoin. PYUSD is issued by Paxos:

“Paxos Trust Company LLC is a regulated financial institution and every aspect of its operations are supervised by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). Paxos received the first limited purpose trust charter for digital assets from the NYDFS in 2015.”

One aspect of operations that may not have been supervised was the aspect of operations that resulted in this:

“PAYPAL'S PYUSD MINTS $300T ON ETHEREUM”

$300…trillion. We read that right, you read that right. And of course, it was a $300 trillion mistake:

“At 3:12 PM EST, Paxos mistakenly minted excess PYUSD as part of an internal transfer. Paxos immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD. 

This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause.”

We are glad there was no security breach.

That’s a wrap

For a brief moment, PayPal supposedly had $300 trillion. And Zcash was back in the news, this time on Solana.

Think we missed something today? Email email@meridianupdate.com.