Zcash has turned into one of crypto’s sharpest rallies, climbing more than 1,100% over the last year as a wave of prominent backers has started treating the privacy-focused bitcoin rival like a high-conviction trade. Earlier this month, Multicoin Capital said it had built a significant position in Zcash, and Tushar Jain put it bluntly at a crypto conference: “Multicoin has bought a significant position in Zcash to express that thesis.”
The move has drawn fresh attention because Zcash was changing hands for around $75 in October last year and has since more than doubled over the last three months. The coin now sits near a market narrative that is part ideology, part supply math: a fixed 21 million supply, proof-of-work consensus and an upcoming halving that will cut new issuance.
That has helped lift Zcash out of the niche where it spent much of the past few years and into the center of a familiar crypto debate about whether privacy still matters when the rest of the market is built for transparency. Zcash was co-created in 2016 by Edward Snowden and was designed to enable private, shielded transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography, giving users the ability to move value without exposing every detail on a public ledger.
For some investors, that pitch is becoming more relevant, not less. Interest in Zcash is tied in part to concerns about onchain stablecoins that can be monitored and frozen by companies and governments, a risk that has pushed privacy back into the conversation just as crypto prices have firmed.
The biggest public endorsement came from the Winklevoss twins, who were backing a crypto treasury company called Cypherpunk Technologies that would buy and hold Zcash. Cypherpunk Technologies was already holding more than 300,000 Zcash coins worth around $150 million, a scale that makes the bet hard to dismiss as a side project.
Barry Silbert captured the mood in a line that has circulated widely among traders: “[Zcash] feels like bitcoin circa 2013.” The comparison matters because it frames Zcash not as a relic from crypto’s privacy wars, but as an early-stage asset that some investors think is still being priced for skepticism rather than adoption.
Naval Ravikant helped seed that view late last year when he posted on X: “Bitcoin is insurance against fiat. Zcash is insurance against bitcoin.” The line has been repeated as shorthand for a broader argument that if bitcoin is the hedge against money debasement, Zcash is the hedge for people who want a system that is harder to watch, trace or censor.
That tension sits at the heart of the rally. Zcash is still a fork of bitcoin and still follows the rough monetary logic that made bitcoin attractive in the first place, but it asks a different question about what a digital asset is supposed to protect. For now, the market appears willing to pay up for that answer. The next test is whether the enthusiasm survives once the halving arrives and traders decide whether Zcash is a lasting privacy bet or just the latest beneficiary of a crowded search for the next bitcoin-like trade.
