ZEC Price Soars 150% in a Week amid Renewed Calls for Privacy

Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC) has staged one of crypto’s sharpest rallies in recent weeks, climbing more than 150% in the past seven days, and over 250% on the monthly timeframe.

Data from The Defiant’s price tracker shows that the price of ZEC jumped over 67% in the last 24 hours, pushing the token above $150 — a level last seen in April 2022 — to become the biggest gainer among the top-100 crypto assets, according to CoinGecko data.

The sharp rally has drawn attention from investors and builders who see privacy as an overlooked part of crypto’s future. Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, wrote on X yesterday that Zcash remains “extremely undervalued” compared with other privacy-focused peers like Monero (XMR), arguing that ZEC has “a stronger privacy and scale design.”

Mumtaz also said in the post that as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and institutional blockchains grow, demand for private transactions will rise:

Crypto asset manager Grayscale, which has over $33 billion in assets under management, noted in an X post promoting its ZEC fund yesterday that Zcash was built on Bitcoin’s code base but uses privacy technology to let users shield assets, positioning it as a closer relative to Bitcoin than most other altcoins.

Naval Ravikant, a well-known angel investor and co-founder of AngelList, also weighed in, stating, “Bitcoin is insurance against fiat. Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin.” The statement references the idea of BTC as a hedge against fiat currencies with infinite money supply, and the fact that BTC leaves transaction data open to the public, while Zcash adds a layer of privacy so that users can keep their activity hidden.

Amid the spike of interest, Hyperliquid announced on X today, Oct. 2 that the perpetual futures decentralized exchange had added support for ZEC perps. The platform, which holds more than $5.6 billion in total value locked and is currently the second-largest perp DEX by daily volumes, said that users can now long or short ZEC with up to 5x leverage.

Anarchistic Approaches

However, not everyone is convinced that the old guard of privacy coins, like ZEC and XMR, can carry the narrative forward.

Simon Dedic, managing partner at crypto VC firm Moonrock Capital, reminded Crypto Twitter that previous waves of privacy projects had failed because of “overly idealistic, almost anarchistic” approaches and weak technology. He said that while he agrees the need for privacy is greater than ever, he sees more promise in new projects.

Zcash also faces problems of its own. As of press time, its mining is concentrated in one place, with mining pool ViaBTC controlling more than 72% of the hashrate, according to data from MiningPoolStats.

And while the coin is marketed as a privacy tool, most people don’t even use the network’s shielded transactions. A Carnegie Mellon study from 2020 found that more than 99% of ZEC activity happens in the open, a sharp contrast to Monero, which researchers called “effectively untraceable” thanks to stricter privacy baked across the whole network.