What Is Zcash – and Why Does Its Privacy Cost Ten Times as Much as Monero's?

On 30 September 2025 one Zcash cost $74. On 26 September 2026 ZEC closed at $1,653, its highest since it listed on Binance. A fringe coin had become number ten in the market, worth almost $21 billion. Bitcoin lost a third over the same year.

The explanation you hear is short: privacy. Zcash can do something Bitcoin cannot, and right now people need it. The first part is true, and so is the second, as the numbers below show. The question left over is yours as a buyer: does the price match what happens on the chain, and who is holding it up right now?

Zcash is Bitcoin with a locked compartment

Zcash launched on 28 October 2016 on Bitcoin's code. At most 21 million coins, the reward halved every four years, mining with computing power. The difference is a second, shielded area. Send ZEC there and sender, receiver and amount are encrypted. If you don't, Zcash is as public as Bitcoin.

So shielding is optional. On 9 October, 4.95 million ZEC sat in the shielded area, 29 percent of all coins. The larger part sits in the open.

In Zcash, privacy is a compartment you can open, not the default.

What is in that compartment that Bitcoin lacks?

What Zcash can do and Bitcoin cannot: hide the amount

A Bitcoin payment reveals three things on the chain: who was paid, which coins belong together, and how much. Bitcoin can already hide the first two, with Silent Payments and with PayJoin or CoinJoin. It cannot hide the amount on the chain. The details are in Do you need a privacy coin, or can Bitcoin already keep your payments private?.

That leaves the question of whether Lightning hides the amount. Payments there do not run over the chain, and according to the protocol each node on the way knows only its predecessor and successor. It still sees the amount. The specification tells it how much to forward, and the number sits in its part of the packet. Opening and closing a channel land on the chain with the amount. In 2021 researchers around George Kappos showed in a simulation that, depending on path length, the sender can be identified in at least 15 to 57 percent of payments. In 2020 Sergei Tikhomirov and colleagues showed that a channel's balance can be probed in under a minute.

Newer building blocks hide the receiver better. Blinded paths have been in the specification since 2023, BOLT 12 since 2024, and Core Lightning has used them by default since December 2024. LND, the most widely used implementation, still does not have them.

Lightning hides the amount from the chain, not from the nodes it passes through. Zcash hides it from everyone.

This feature has a price, and Zcash users paid it in June. On 29 May Taylor Hornby, working for Shielded Labs, found a bug in the Orchard pool, then the main shielded area, that allowed coins to be created out of nothing. It had been in the code since May 2022. Whether anyone exploited it cannot be determined with cryptography alone, according to Shielded Labs, because the pool hides exactly the amounts one would need to check. Since 28 July Orchard has accepted nothing new; new shielded payments go into the Ironwood pool. According to the indexer ZecBlock, 89.6 percent of the Orchard balance has moved.

So the feature is real. Is it used?

Private use grew as fast as the price

According to CoinMetrics, Zcash averaged 10,337 transactions a day in the 30 days to 8 October. A year earlier it was 2,856. Among comparable payment chains, Zcash is the only one that grew like this:

Daily average, 9 September to 8 October in each year. Market values from CoinGecko.

What matters more is how much of it is private. ZecBlock counts transactions with at least one shielded part: in the same window in 2025 there were 25,209, or 29 percent; in 2026 there were 168,328, or 54 percent. That is a 6.7-fold increase. The price stood at $177.56 on 8 October 2025 and at $1,187 on 8 October 2026. That is also 6.7-fold.

Two caveats belong here. Some of the private transactions are moves out of the old Orchard pool, a consequence of the bug. And fully private, shielded to shielded, is only about a quarter of all transactions. The rest move coins in or out, or run entirely in the open.

Activity eased last week, to an average of 5,667 transactions a day from 2 to 8 October.

If you hear that Zcash's price has nothing to do with use, that is wrong. Private use grew exactly as much as the price over the year.

If the story ended here, the price would be well founded. But growth does not tell you whether something is expensive or cheap. For that you need a comparison.

Per private transaction, the market pays ten times what it pays for Monero

Monero is the direct comparison, because every transaction there is private; there is no open area. Divide market value by private transactions per day and you get:

Monero handles five times as many private payments and is worth half as much. For one private ZEC transaction a day, the market pays about ten times as much.

A ratio of market value to transactions says nothing about what is "right". Networks are not valued on transactions, and Monero carries its own discount: since Binance delisted it in February 2024 it has been hard to get on large exchanges. That explains part of the gap. Whether it explains a factor of ten is open.

The feature "hide the amount" exists twice in the market. With Zcash it costs ten times as much.

Who pays that premium, and are they still buying?

Those who carry the price are not buying right now

Zcash has exactly two large buyers who disclose their amounts in mandatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The ETF. Grayscale has traded its Zcash fund as an ETF on NYSE Arca since 25 August 2026, ticker ZCSH. According to SoSoValue data, net inflows reached $306 million by 22 September. Since then there has not been a single inflow day. By 8 October $124 million had flowed out, about 93,000 ZEC at daily prices. That equals 52 days of total new issuance. Fund assets fell from a peak of $1.0 billion on 24 September to $656 million.

The inflows also contain an item that was not a purchase. On 8 September Grayscale's parent DCG contributed 85,705 ZEC worth about $100 million in kind, coins it already owned. Take them out and net inflows since launch come to about $82 million.

The largest reported individual shareholder has sold too. According to two filings, the stake was 8.44 percent of the fund's shares on 17 September and 3.31 percent on 5 October, about two thirds fewer shares.

The company. Cypherpunk Technologies, a listed company in which Winklevoss Capital holds a stake, owns 323,394 ZEC, 1.9 percent of supply, at an average price of $342. That figure has stood unchanged in its filings since 30 June; no purchase since then has been reported. The company's goal is 5 percent of all ZEC. In August it bought a mining fleet instead and has mined itself since then, 3,023 ZEC in the last two weeks of August. Whether it keeps or sells them is not disclosed.

Two buyers carried the price up. Money has been leaving one since 22 September, and the other has not bought since June.

And on the other side, among those who create new coins?

A fifth of new coins go to a miner that sells everything

Since the halving in November 2024 each block brings 1.5625 new ZEC, 1.25 of them for the miner. At 75 seconds per block that is about 1,800 new ZEC a day.

Who gets them is concentrated. According to Blockchair, 76 percent of miner rewards in the 30 days to 8 October went to just four addresses. Apart from Luxor, it cannot be established which pool sits behind which address.

One large miner is known by name nonetheless. Fortitude Mining belongs to DCG, the same group as Grayscale, and is set to go public through a merger with the medical technology company HeartSciences. The merger document of 6 October says Fortitude mined about 90,582 ZEC from January to September, about 21.5 percent of all newly produced ZEC, an average of 332 a day. And verbatim: "Fortitude currently sells or otherwise monetizes all the digital assets that it mines, including ZEC." On 30 June Fortitude held 2,956 ZEC.

At the 8 October price, 332 ZEC a day is just under $400,000 coming to market continuously. Zcash made up 65 percent of Fortitude's mining revenue in the first half, and the company plans to install 9,000 new machines. The firm whose sister runs the ETF sells a fifth of new coins every day.

With Zcash you know who is selling. The buyers have stopped.

How has the price handled this sequence so far?

The price: six years behind Bitcoin, then one year far ahead

Monthly returns in dollars from Binance monthly candles, from the listing on 21 March 2019, Bitcoin over the same period:

By the end of 2024, after almost six years, ZEC was in the red while Bitcoin had grown more than twentyfold. Since 2025 ZEC has moved almost independently of Bitcoin, and many times more strongly.

October so far stands at minus 15 percent. On 8 October ZEC closed 28 percent below its record.

The Arena has counted the run as parabolic since 23 August: the close is at least twice the 200-day average and at least 50 percent above the level 30 days earlier. The previous run of this kind lasted from 1 October to 30 November 2025. Afterwards ZEC fell from the peak of $699 on 16 November to $197 on 7 March, minus 72 percent. Across all Binance pairs, at the first end of such a run the price stood at the median 13.7 percent below the day the run began and 34.5 percent below the peak. That is 517 runs, 74 of them independent in time.

Anyone holding ZEC since 2019 owes their lead over Bitcoin to the last twelve months.

Claims about Zcash, checked

The pattern: what is in mandatory filings can be recalculated and is usually smaller than the headline. The one figure that came out much larger is from a study commissioned by a Zcash group.

The obvious objection

"The ETF is only part of the market. Binance alone trades hundreds of millions of dollars of ZEC every day. The unnamed buyers carry the price."

True. Over the last 30 days Binance traded an average of $316 million of ZEC a day, rank four among all pairs. But you know nothing about those buyers: not how long they hold, not at what price they bought. What you do know is that the two visible buyers have stopped buying and one visible seller sells every day. A market without names can carry a price. You just cannot see when it stops.

What this means for you

If you want ZEC for privacy: the feature is real and used more than a year ago. Lightning does not replace it, because the nodes along the way see the amount. But you pay about ten times what you would pay for Monero, and a fully private path is still the exception on Zcash, about a quarter of transactions.

If you hold ZEC for the price: it depends on a few named players. Three numbers show whether that changes. First, the Grayscale ETF's daily flows. Second, whether Cypherpunk buys again or sells mined coins. Third, whether Fortitude keeps selling everything after its merger with HeartSciences. A possible new buyer comes on top: on 6 October a second Zcash ETF was filed, the Winklevoss Zcash ETF, with Cypherpunk as a partner. How much it will buy at launch is still blank in the filing.

On 20 October the decision on the NU7 upgrade is due, with blocks every 25 instead of 75 seconds. Daily issuance stays the same. The open question is whether the ETF draws inflows again while the price is falling. With the Bitcoin ETFs that did not happen: flows followed the price.

Zcash sells a real feature at a price no visible buyer is paying any more.

FAQ

How is a "private transaction" counted? As a transaction with at least one shielded part, as ZecBlock counts it. Fully shielded, shielded to shielded, was about 25 percent of all non-mining-reward transactions in the last 30 days. For Monero every transaction counts, because there is no open area.

Why does DCG's in-kind contribution not count as a purchase? DCG swapped 85,705 ZEC it already owned for fund shares. Nothing was bought in the market.

Why is there no ETF ZEC figure for October? The latest amount from a mandatory filing is for 30 June, 388,674 ZEC. For 18 September CryptoBriefing reported 596,269 ZEC. Grayscale's fund page could not be reached when checked.

How are the 1,800 new ZEC a day calculated? 1.5625 ZEC per block times 1,152 blocks a day at a 75-second block time. That is 3.9 percent of supply a year. ZecBlock counted 1,139 blocks in the 24 hours to 9 October.

How are the monthly returns calculated? Month's close against the prior month's close, ZEC and BTC each against USDT on Binance, without fees. March 2019 starts from the listing day's opening price on 21 March, for both.

All ZEC monthly returns in US dollars

Figures in percent. March 2019 from listing on 21 March.

Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast — historical patterns are no guarantee.

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