Zcash has become one of Crypto’s hottest coins in recent weeks, surpassing 250% in just 30 days.
Privacy-centric cryptocurrency ZCASH (ZEC) has performed one of Crypto’s most sharp-hearted gatherings in recent weeks, surpassing over 150% in the past seven days and over 250% in the monthly time frame.
Data from Defiant’s price tracker shows that ZEC prices have surpassed 67% in the last 24 hours to 67%, pushing the token, the last seen level in April 2022, to over $150, according to Coingecko data.
The inspiring gathering has attracted attention from investors and builders who view privacy as an overlooked part of Crypto’s future. Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of Solana Infrastructure Firm Helius, wrote in X yesterday that Zcash is “very underrated” compared to other privacy-centric peers like Monero (XMR), claiming that ZEC has “a stronger privacy and scale design.”
Mumtaz also said that increasing central bank digital currency (CBDC) and institutional blockchains will lead to increased demand for private transactions.
“A world where cryptography is successful, but privacy is not a dystopian nightmare, there is no choice.”
Crypto Asset Manager Grayscale has over $33 billion in managed assets, but with the XPost that promoted the ZEC fund yesterday, Zcash was built on Bitcoin’s codebase, but uses privacy technology to protect the assets and is closer to Bitcoin than most other Altcoins.
Naval Ravikant, a well-known angel investor and co-founder of Angellist, also said, “Bitcoin is insurance for Fiat, Zcash is insurance for Bitcoin.” This statement refers to the idea of BTC as a hedge against Fiat currency with endless money supply and the fact that BTC exposes transaction data to the public, Zcash adds a layer of privacy so that users can hide their activity.
Amid a surge in interest, Hyperliquid announced on October 2nd X that permanent futures decentralized exchanges added support for ZEC Perps. The platform is locked to a total of over $5.6 billion and says it is now the second largest PERP DEX every day, but users say it can have long or short ZECs with up to five times the leverage.
Anakistic approach
However, not everyone is sure that older guards of privacy coins like ZEC and XMR can move the story forward.
Simon Dedic, managing partner at Crypto VC Firm MoonRock Capital, reminded Crypto Twitter that previous waves of privacy projects have failed due to their “overly idealistic, almost disorderly” approach and weak technology. He agrees that privacy needs are greater than ever, but he says he is seeing more promises in his new project.
Zcash also faces its own problems. According to data from Miningpoolstats, at press time, the mining is concentrated in one location, with the mining pool VIABTC controlling more than 72% of the hashrate.
Coins are sold as privacy tools, but most people don’t use network shield transactions. A 2020 Carnegie Melon study found that over 99% of ZEC activity occurred in the open. This contrasts with Monero, which researchers called “not effectively tracking,” thanks to strict privacy burned throughout the network.