Zcash tops $20B market cap on Grayscale ETF launch — SkimNews
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Zcash (ZEC) reached $1,249.28 — its highest price since 2016 — before retreating to about $1,195 on Monday, with the token gaining roughly 45% over the past week and 138% over 30 days
- The rally leaves ZEC well below its launch-era all-time high of $3,191.93 set on Oct. 28, 2016, when only a small supply of tokens was in circulation
- Grayscale converted its existing Zcash Trust into an exchange-traded fund (ticker ZCSH) that began trading on NYSE ARCA on Aug. 25, giving investors exposure to ZEC through brokerage accounts
- The ZCSH ETF closed Friday at $83.77 a share with $463.2 million in assets under management, with US markets closed Monday for Labor Day
- Zcash lets users choose between public and "shielded" transactions, with the latter using zero-knowledge proofs to verify payments without revealing sender, recipient, or amount
- Zach Pandl, Grayscale's head of research, said in an Aug. 31 analysis that AI could increase demand for financial privacy by making it easier to link public blockchain transactions to user identities
Why it matters: The ZCSH ETF crossed $463 million in AUM in just over a week, giving investors a regulated, brokerage-accessible vehicle to bet on Zcash's privacy narrative. Grayscale is explicitly positioning ZEC as a challenger to Bitcoin's network effects, betting that AI-driven identity-linking will make shielded transactions more valuable.
Ask SkimNews
