 
 
Privacy-focused Bitcoin alternative Zcash (ZEC) has recently become a major story this month, rising 41.8% over the past month alone, even as BTC, Ethereum, and other major coins are deep in the red — and now crypto asset manager Grayscale has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to introduce the very first ZEC exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the United States.
Grayscale filed an S-3 registration statement on Wednesday to convert its existing Zcash Trust, which currently has over $196 million in assets under management, into a spot ETF.
The proposed ETF, if approved, would trade on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH.
“Zcash, shielded transactions, and zk-SNARKs broadly serve a critical role in privacy-preservation on crypto networks. As a result, we believe ZEC represents an important component of a well-balanced digital asset portfolio,” Grayscale’s chief legal officer Craig Salm said in a post on X.
The filing aligns with Grayscale’s strategy with other products like its Bitcoin Trust, which was the first to be converted into an ETF in 2024 after winning a lawsuit against the SEC. Over the past month, the asset management giant has also converted several of its closed-end trusts to ETFs, including one tracking Ripple’s XRP, Solana (SOL), and another one centered on canine-themed memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE).
 
Zcash’s Dramatic Revival In 2025
Launched in 2016 with the help of famed whistleblower Edward Snowden as a Bitcoin-style proof-of-work (PoW) chain with a hard cap of 21 million coins, Zcash was built around cutting-edge zero-knowledge proofs. These allow users to send either transparent transactions, similar to Bitcoin, or fully shielded transactions, which make it difficult to trace coin movements.
But as regulators intensified scrutiny of privacy coins, Zcash was delisted by major exchanges in late 2023 and early 2024, with Monero remaining as the go-to choice for die-hard privacy users. ZEC slipped down the crypto market rankings despite undergoing two halving events and multiple network upgrades.
But in 2025, it has surpassed Monero to become the biggest privacy-focused crypto asset by market capitalization, with a current valuation of about $8.4 billion. ZEC is now the industry’s 23rd largest crypto and has climbed over 1,000% year-to-date, according to CoinGecko.