Winklevoss twins launch Cypherpunk Technologies with $50M Zcash bet on financial privacy
Nov 13, 2025 with Tyler Winklevoss & Cameron Winklevoss
Key Points
- The Winklevoss twins invested $52 million in Cypherpunk Technologies' PIPE round, taking the vast majority of equity themselves to ensure long-term holders dominate the shareholder base rather than traders.
- Cypherpunk Technologies, a rebranded public company trading under ticker CYPH, is accumulating Zcash as its core treasury strategy, having purchased 203,775 ZEC at an average price of $245 per token.
- The twins are positioning themselves as conviction holders in financial privacy infrastructure, mirroring their strategic preference for ownership concentration over capital diversification.
Summary
The Winklevoss twins anchored the Cypherpunk Technologies PIPE financing with a $52 million check, deliberately taking the vast majority of the equity themselves rather than filling the round with outside capital. The strategic logic is straightforward: they want the shareholder base dominated by long-term holders, not traders rotating in and out. That concentration of ownership mirrors a conviction bet on Zcash and financial privacy infrastructure, with the twins positioning as holders rather than flippers.
The segment transitions to Max Hodak, co-founder of Science and a co-founder of Neuralink, where he spent four and a half years before departing in spring 2021. Science now employs roughly 180 people and is developing what Hodak describes as the first clinically effective retinal prosthesis.
Science's Prima Retinal Chip
The company's lead program, Prima, is a subretinal implant that works in tandem with laser projection glasses worn by the patient. The device targets age-related macular degeneration, a condition that leaves patients profoundly blind in their central visual field while retaining limited peripheral vision.
A major clinical trial completed last summer and results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The headline outcome is material: patients who entered the trial unable to read any line of an eye chart progressed to reading the full chart. Hodak frames restoring vision to the blind as a problem humans have pursued for thousands of years, and positions the New England Journal publication, alongside a Time magazine cover the week of the segment, as validation that the science is translating into real clinical results.