Zcash Ran 2,000% But THIS Is Next

Now, to understand how we got to this point, we need to start with how radioactive this whole category was until very recently.

For most of the last decade, wanting financial privacy in crypto was treated with heavy suspicion.

In 2022, the US Treasury sanctioned the Tornado Cash smart contracts.

In 2024, the founders of Samurai Wallet were arrested for running a CoinJoin service, and by late 2025, both had pleaded guilty.

with Keone Rodriguez sentenced to five years and William Hill to four.

Roman Storm was indicted in 2023, and his trial in 2025 ended in a mixed verdict, convicted on one count of conspiracy to run an unlicensed money-transmitting business, with the jury deadlocked on the heavier charges.

His retrial has since been pushed all the way out to April 2027.

Meanwhile, exchange after exchange delisted privacy assets under travel rule and anti-money laundering pressure.

So privacy, when it really came down to it, was a liability.

And then the whole thing flipped.

In March 2025, the Treasury removed Tornado Cash from the sanctions list, after the Fifth Circuit found that immutable smart contracts aren't property that OFAC can sanction.

In October 2025, Naval Ravikant posted his now-famous line, presenting Zcash as insurance against Bitcoin, rather than insurance against fiat.

Arthur Hayes followed in January 2026 with an essay called Suavemente, making ZEC his second largest liquid position after Bitcoin.

And the numbers followed the narrative because ZEC's 52-week low was about $38 on the 1st of September 2025, and its 52-week high was $888 on the 23rd of August of this year.

Market cap today? Roughly $13.4 billion.

Monero came along for the ride at over $500, up 94% on the year.

Two days after that Zcash high, Grayscale converted its Zcash trust into what's being called the first US spot privacy coin ETF on NYSE ARCA, charging a 2.5% annual sponsor fee, which is roughly 10 times what you pay for the Bitcoin ETF.

And people are paying for it anyway.

Now, here's what's really important for the focus of today's video.

Shielded supply on Zcash went from around 8% of circulating coins in early 2024 to somewhere north of 30% today, roughly 5.15 million ZEC.

Coindesk Research clocked shielded transactions at an all-time high of 59% of transfers in February of 2026.

So a majority of people using that network chose to be invisible, in a month when nobody was forcing them to.

That's people not wanting strangers reading their bank statements.

so the appetite is proven but the question nobody in the market has answered is what privacy is actually for beyond your balance well that brings us to a problem vitalik has been chewing on since 2019. back then he proposed something called minimal anti-collusion infrastructure or mackie through the ethereum foundation's privacy and scaling explorations team The problem Mackie was built to solve is actually rather simple.