Zcash Surges 170% as Privacy Crypto Gains Momentum

The Zcash rally that began in late September represents one of the most explosive moves in the crypto market this quarter, with ZEC vaulting from suppressed levels around $16-$20 to briefly touch the low-$150s on October 2. Unlike typical crypto surges driven by specific protocol upgrades or on-chain events, this move lacks a single clear catalyst. Instead, it reflects a confluence of factors that have collectively pulled ZEC into the center of crypto’s attention cycle at a time when privacy is re-emerging as a critical ecosystem theme.

The timing coincided with significant institutional validation of privacy technology. On October 1, the Ethereum Foundation formalized new leadership for its Privacy Cluster—an organizational push to coordinate privacy-preserving research and infrastructure. While not Zcash-specific, this announcement signaled that major actors in crypto are again foregrounding user confidentiality and data minimization as core priorities. This institutional endorsement helped set the tone for a broader market repricing of privacy as a necessary component of the next market cycle, creating fertile ground for ZEC’s dramatic appreciation.

Mechanically, the rally exhibits classic signatures of a narrative rotation. As privacy returned to headline status and ZEC became the cleanest liquid proxy for that theme, order books thinned and intraday ranges expanded dramatically. At press time, ZEC traded at $142.84, representing a staggering recovery from its prolonged consolidation period and demonstrating how quickly market sentiment can shift when multiple favorable factors converge simultaneously.

High-profile endorsements provided significant fuel for ZEC’s surge, with influential market voices amplifying the privacy narrative directly. Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList and a long-time crypto commentator, captured attention with his concise framing: ‘Bitcoin is insurance against fiat. ZCash is insurance against Bitcoin.’ The line—short, memetic, and highly circulatable—propelled visibility for ZEC across trading circles and crypto media, creating the kind of viral momentum that often drives outsized price movements in crypto markets.

Institutional validation came from multiple directions. Grayscale highlighted via social media that ‘@Zcash is similar to Bitcoin in its design’ but adds ‘a privacy technology that encrypts transaction information and allows users to shield their assets,’ while noting that the Grayscale Zcash Trust was open for private placement to accredited investors. This institutional recognition provided credibility to the privacy narrative while opening additional investment channels for sophisticated market participants.

The current move also echoes longer-running endorsements that many investors had forgotten. In August 2024, Tyler Winklevoss called Zcash ‘one of the most important and underrated crypto projects in the world,’ arguing it ‘brings privacy and decentralization to money, two fundamental building blocks of a free and open society.’ At the time of that post, ZEC traded near $30, suggesting early recognition of the value proposition that would eventually capture broader market attention nearly fourteen months later.

From the builder perspective, Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz distilled a multi-part investment thesis that resonated with technically minded traders. He argued that privacy has been ‘slept on’ and is ‘about to make a comeback’ amid growing momentum around CBDCs and centralized stablecoins. His analysis pointed to a ‘Renaissance of talent’ entering the Zcash ecosystem across the Zashi wallet, intents research, and performance workstreams, alongside several ‘large tech improvements’ in flight that could ‘1,000x performance and scale as well as help with security and finality.’

The valuation argument proved particularly compelling. Mumtaz noted that ‘Monero is a $5B coin and somehow Zcash was below $700M when I started talking about it,’ framing this as ‘an obvious mispricing, as Zcash has a stronger privacy and scale design but almost no one in crypto is technical enough to look into this.’ He suggested investors didn’t need to believe ZEC was technically superior to recognize it was ‘extremely undervalued’ relative to peers, creating a compelling risk-reward proposition for those entering the trade.

Well-followed traders like Luke Martin captured the positioning dynamics succinctly, noting that ‘some of the smartest people on this app are bullish on ZEC right now’ while acknowledging that ‘one of the dumbest things you could do on this app for the past 7 years was buy ZEC anytime someone shilled it.’ This tension between historical underperformance and current bullish sentiment created what Martin described as ‘fuel for a hated rally’—a scenario where skeptical market participants provide additional buying power as confirmation of the trend emerges.