Zcash at $750: Does the Privacy Coin’s 1,500% Rally Really Threaten Bitcoin?

In just a few weeks, Zcash (ZEC) has gone from a quietly traded legacy privacy coin to the loudest story in crypto. Since early October 2025, ZEC has rallied more than 1,500%, surging from under 50 dollars to above 700 dollars and briefly touching the 750 dollar mark on major exchanges. That move has pushed its market capitalization above 11 billion dollars, lifted it past Monero to become the largest privacy coin, and brought it close to the edge of the top-10 crypto assets by value.

Along the way, the rally has ignited a very public clash between Bitcoin maximalists and a newly energized privacy-coin camp. High-profile investors such as Arthur Hayes have disclosed large ZEC positions and floated long-term price targets that sound outrageous by traditional standards. A Nasdaq-listed company has rebranded itself around a Zcash treasury strategy. And Bitwise’s CEO, Hunter Horsley, has openly suggested that ZEC’s outperformance is forcing markets to revisit the old narrative that only Bitcoin matters and everything else is a distraction.

The obvious headline question is whether Zcash’s explosive rise signals a real challenge to Bitcoin’s dominance. The more useful question for a professional audience is different: what does this rally tell us about where value is accumulating in the crypto stack, and how should investors read the renewed fight over privacy?

1. The move in numbers: from forgotten coin to privacy flagship

Zcash’s resurgence did not come out of nowhere, but the velocity of the recent move surprised almost everyone. Through mid-2025, ZEC spent months drifting below 50 dollars, overshadowed by layer-1 narratives, restaking experiments and ETF flows into Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then, in October, the market’s attention pivoted back to privacy. As investors started to position around a tightening regulatory and surveillance backdrop, capital rotated into ZEC with remarkable speed.

By early November, ZEC had broken above 400 dollars, already representing a several-hundred-percent move from its summer lows. Within days it pushed past 600 dollars, then spiked intraday to roughly 750 dollars on some venues, before settling back into the 700 dollar area. At those levels, data from multiple aggregators show Zcash’s circulating market cap exceeding 11 billion dollars – more than enough to flip Monero as the leading privacy coin by capitalization and to restore ZEC to a top-20, near-top-10 ranking after years in the shadows.

That price action has been accompanied by a surge in activity. On-chain metrics point to double- or triple-digit growth in daily transactions and shielded pool usage compared with mid-year levels. Derivatives exchanges have hurried to list or relist ZEC contracts, and spot volumes have ballooned as speculative flows chased the narrative. In short: this is not only a chart story; it has materially changed how visible Zcash is in the market’s daily data.

2. Who is driving the ZEC trade? Funds, treasuries and privacy believers

Behind the candles is a set of actors that looks very different from the meme-coin crowd. On the hedge-fund side, the most visible is Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder and CIO of Maelstrom. Over recent weeks he has described ZEC as a kind of ‘encrypted Bitcoin’ and said it is now the second-largest liquid position in his family office, behind only BTC. Hayes has floated the idea that Zcash could reach 10–20% of Bitcoin’s market value this cycle and has publicly urged holders to withdraw their coins from centralized exchanges into shielded wallets, reinforcing the privacy narrative rather than a pure trading one.

At the corporate level, the big signal came from Leap Therapeutics, a small Nasdaq-listed biotech company that abruptly pivoted into digital assets. The firm announced that it would rebrand as Cypherpunk Technologies and adopt a treasury strategy focused on accumulating ZEC. To underline that commitment, it disclosed a 50 million dollar purchase of roughly 200,000 ZEC at an average price around 245 dollars and raised nearly 60 million dollars to pursue a plan aimed at owning a meaningful share of the total Zcash supply. The move, backed by capital from the Winklevoss twins, sent the stock soaring and effectively turned Cypherpunk into a listed proxy on ZEC’s performance.

Layered on top of those headline moves are endorsements from prominent builders and investors. Solana contributor Mert Mumtaz, investor Naval Ravikant and others have publicly framed Zcash as ‘Bitcoin insurance’ or as the natural complement to BTC in a world sliding toward full financial surveillance. Their messaging has helped shift ZEC from an old, dusty ticker into a live narrative about the future of privacy, money and state power.

3. Why now? The macro and regulatory backdrop for a privacy revival

Zcash’s rally is happening against a backdrop that is unusually friendly to privacy stories. On the regulatory front, major economies are intensifying their scrutiny of on-chain activity. From the European Union’s debates on travel rules for self-hosted wallets to U.S. enforcement actions against mixers and privacy-enhancing tools, the direction of travel is clear: more monitoring, more reporting, more linkage of identities and transaction histories.

At the same time, the wider crypto market is becoming more institutional and more transparent. Spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs have pulled tens of billions of dollars into vehicles that report holdings daily and are custodially structured in ways that regulators understand. Chain-analytics firms have become standard tools for compliance teams, and exchanges routinely advertise their ability to trace and block suspicious funds. For many early cypherpunks, this looks like a betrayal of the original ‘digital cash’ vision.

In that context, a credibly private, programmable and liquid asset is no longer just a niche curiosity; it is a hedge against an increasingly surveilled default. Zcash, with its long-standing use of zero-knowledge proofs and shielded transactions, is well positioned to fill that role if the market decides that the trade-off is worth it. The recent rally suggests that a critical mass of investors is willing, at least speculatively, to pay for that optionality.

4. Is Bitcoin really being challenged – or just complemented?

The headline framing that ‘Zcash at 750 dollars challenges Bitcoin’s position’ is catchy but slightly misleading. By market capitalization, liquidity and macro relevance, Bitcoin still dwarfs every other crypto asset, including ZEC. BTC’s dominance of the overall market remains high, and its narrative as a non-sovereign reserve asset has only been reinforced by the growth of ETFs, corporate treasuries and sovereign-level interest.

Where Zcash is challenging Bitcoin is not in raw size, but in the intellectual and ideological domain. For years, Bitcoin maximalists have argued that the market will converge on a single truly important asset, and that everything else is either a temporary speculation or, in harsher language, a scam. ZEC’s 1,500% run – backed by high-profile investors, a real technological story and a visible corporate treasury adopter – makes that absolutist thesis harder to defend without nuance.

At the same time, several sophisticated voices are careful to present Zcash not as a replacement for Bitcoin, but as its complement. In this view, BTC remains the transparent, censorship-resistant base money for a digital age; ZEC becomes the ‘cash-like’ layer that individuals and institutions can use when they require transactional privacy. Rather than cannibalising each other, the two assets address different parts of the monetary spectrum: store-of-value versus day-to-day, private settlement.

From a portfolio-construction standpoint, that distinction matters. If ZEC is genuinely uncorrelated or even negatively correlated with Bitcoin at key moments – as some analysts have argued during the recent rally – then a modest allocation to ZEC alongside BTC could, in theory, improve risk-adjusted returns for investors who are comfortable with the regulatory risks of privacy coins. That is a very different proposition from a narrative in which ZEC ‘kills’ Bitcoin.

5. The fault lines: centralization, funding and the ‘VC coin’ accusation

Despite the enthusiasm, the Zcash rally has not converted die-hard Bitcoiners. In fact, the move has re-energized longstanding criticisms of ZEC’s design and governance.

One recurring theme is the project’s funding model. Zcash historically used a so-called ‘founders’ reward’ and later development funds that divert a portion of block rewards to the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the Zcash Foundation and other ecosystem contributors. Supporters argue that this provides sustainable resources for research, engineering and ecosystem building. Critics see it as a quasi-tax that entrenches a small group of insiders and, by extension, the venture capital firms that helped fund them.

As ZEC ramped past 700 dollars, some Bitcoin maximalists described the move as a coordinated pump of a ‘VC coin’, claiming that thin float, narrative engineering and treasury buys from entities like Cypherpunk created a reflexive, unsustainable cycle. Posts on social platforms have even framed the rally as something close to an orchestrated short squeeze on an ill-iquid legacy asset.

There are partial truths on both sides. Zcash does have a different distribution and funding structure from Bitcoin’s pure proof-of-work emission schedule. At the same time, the network has been live since 2016, has weathered multiple cycles, and is used by a non-trivial base of privacy-motivated users. The more constructive question is not whether ZEC is ‘pure’ enough compared to Bitcoin, but whether its long-term usage, governance and economics can justify a structural place in serious portfolios.

6. Soft forks, OP_CAT and the fight to bring privacy to Bitcoin itself

Perhaps the most interesting second-order effect of Zcash’s breakout is the way it has revived debates over privacy inside Bitcoin. A wave of commentary from cryptographers and protocol researchers has argued that Bitcoin could, in principle, adopt more advanced privacy and scalability tools by re-enabling or adding specific opcodes through soft forks.

One focal point is OP_CAT, an opcode disabled by Satoshi in Bitcoin’s early years. Advocates, including zero-knowledge pioneers, have suggested that restoring OP_CAT could allow complex covenant structures and eventually native zero-knowledge proof verification on Bitcoin. That, in theory, might enable forms of opt-in privacy that reduce the need for separate privacy chains.

Zcash’s rally has given that technical conversation political weight. Pro-privacy developers frame the situation bluntly: either Bitcoin evolves to support stronger privacy primitives, or assets like ZEC will permanently capture the ‘digital cash’ niche that Bitcoin has left on the table. Opponents worry that adding these capabilities could complicate the protocol, introduce new attack surfaces, and attract even more regulatory heat at a time when Bitcoin is only just being accepted by mainstream institutions.

The result is a set of overlapping debates about what Bitcoin should be. Should it remain a radically simple, transparent base layer, leaving privacy to external tools and sidechains? Or should it, carefully and slowly, adopt new capabilities that let users hide more of their transaction graph on-chain? Zcash’s outperformance has not answered those questions, but it has forced them back into the foreground.

7. The Bitwise moment: when CIOs and CEOs enter the chat

If Zcash’s story were limited to crypto-native investors and anonymous accounts, it would be easier for Bitcoin maximalists to dismiss. What made the recent episode harder to ignore was the entrance of mainstream asset-management voices.

Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise Asset Management – a large crypto index and ETF provider – posted that ZEC’s rally is challenging the simple doctrine that ‘only Bitcoin matters, everything else is a scam’. He noted that when an asset with real technology, credible backers and years of history rallies 1,000%–1,500% in a matter of weeks, serious investors have to at least ask what they might be missing about the underlying demand for privacy.

That does not mean Bitwise is about to launch a Zcash ETF tomorrow or that large institutions will rush into privacy coins. In many jurisdictions, compliance frameworks and internal risk policies still treat privacy-focused assets with extra caution or outright restrict them. But the fact that a CEO in Horsley’s position is willing to publicly challenge Bitcoin-only orthodoxy is itself a notable shift in tone.

For allocators, this is a signal that the menu of ‘respectable’ crypto exposures could broaden over time. Today, that menu is dominated by Bitcoin and Ethereum, with Solana and a handful of others nibbling at the edges. Zcash’s revival suggests that if a strong enough narrative meets a mature enough technology and a sufficiently compelling macro backdrop, even previously sidelined assets can re-enter the conversation.

8. Risks: blow-off top, regulatory blowback and technical execution

None of this should be read as a simple endorsement of chasing ZEC at current levels. The same sharp move that has made Zcash impossible to ignore also poses classic late-cycle risks.

Technically, a 1,500% rally in a short window, with intraday swings of 20%–30%, looks like a textbook setup for a violent correction. Analysts who are positive on ZEC’s long-term prospects have warned that the same leverage, thin order books and reflexive flows that propelled it upward can just as easily overshoot on the way down once momentum fades. Even Arthur Hayes, one of the most vocal bulls, has acknowledged that the path toward his long-term targets is likely to be extremely volatile and punctuated by deep drawdowns.

Regulatory risk is another major overhang. Privacy coins have been delisted from several exchanges in Europe and Asia in past years, and renewed attention from policymakers could revive that trend. If large Western venues decided to tighten their listing standards again, ZEC’s liquidity could fragment, increasing slippage and counterparty risk for institutional participants.

Finally, Zcash still has to deliver on its own roadmap. The Electric Coin Company has outlined plans for wallet upgrades, better user experience, and improvements to the protocol’s performance and security. Turning a speculative spike into a sustained, organic user base will require boring, iterative engineering work and careful governance around funding. If that falters, ZEC could end up as just another spectacular but short-lived rotation.

9. What this all means for a professional investor

For a professional news and analysis outlet, the value in covering the Zcash story is not in shouting that a ‘flippening’ is imminent. It is in using this moment to map how the crypto stack is stratifying as the market matures.

At the top sits Bitcoin, increasingly entwined with macro portfolios, ETF structures and public companies. Just below it is Ethereum, anchoring the smart-contract and tokenization layer. Solana and a few other high-performance chains are competing to be the execution environment for consumer-scale applications. Zcash’s sudden leap back into relevance suggests that there may also be a dedicated privacy layer in that stack – one that investors will increasingly treat as a separate, diversifying exposure rather than just another volatile altcoin.

Whether ZEC ultimately keeps that seat is an open question. Monero, other privacy projects, or future Bitcoin upgrades could all reshape the space. What seems clear, however, is that demand for financial privacy is not going away, and that markets are willing to assign significant value to assets that credibly supply it.

In that sense, Zcash at 750 dollars is less a threat to Bitcoin than a reminder of crypto’s original tension: between the transparency that regulators and institutions prefer, and the confidentiality that many users still want. How that tension is resolved – through separate privacy chains, soft-fork upgrades to Bitcoin, zero-knowledge layers, or some combination of all three – will do more to shape the next decade of this industry than any single price spike.

For now, ZEC’s rally is telling us that privacy is back on the agenda. The challenge for serious investors is to separate signal from noise: to distinguish between a one-off speculative mania and the early pricing of a structural demand for censorship-resistant, private digital cash that can sit alongside Bitcoin rather than against it.

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, trading, legal or tax advice. Digital assets, especially privacy-focused coins, are highly volatile and may be unsuitable for many investors. Always conduct your own research and consult a qualified professional before making financial decisions.