Zcash pumps 30% after Arthur Hayes’ ‘vibe check’ tips $10K target

Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash has surged 30% in the last 24 hours after crypto entrepreneur Arthur Hayes predicted the token would eventually reach $10,000. 

Zcash rallied from $272 to a peak of $355 in the hours after Hayes’s “vibe check” post on X on Sunday with the bullish prediction, outperforming all other top 50 tokens by market capitalization over the same time frame.

This isn’t the first time Hayes’ predictions have been linked to a token’s rise. At the August WebX 2025 conference in Tokyo, he stated that Hyperliquid’s HYPE token could increase 126 times over the next three years, which resulted in a 4% spike for HYPE.

Source: Arthur Hayes

Hayes’ endorsement gave traders FOMO

Crypto trader and contributor to Binance Square, AB Kuai Dong, speculated in an X post on Sunday that the Zcash rally was likely due to Hayes.

He said the endorsement by a “legendary Silicon Valley investor” drove “everyone to follow the trend and join in, subsequently triggering a full month’s FOMO market frenzy.”

At the same time, a user under the handle Clemente, a crypto trader and board member of the treasury company K9Strategy, admitted to jumping in on Zcash because they were filled with “so much fomo I couldn’t keep myself sidelined to this run.”

Source: Clemente

Privacy tokens in the spotlight

Meanwhile, a trader and investor under the handle JonnyJpegs speculated that the rally was more about users wanting to invest in privacy-related tokens, as more governments attempt to clamp down on encryption and other privacy-related technologies.

Zcash has staged a 490% rally in the last 30 days and also crossed the $5 billion market capitalization threshold for the first time on Sunday, according to CoinGecko. 

Related: ‘Dino coin’ season: Why are Zcash and Dash seeing biggest rebounds?

The token launched in October 2016 and uses an encrypted ledger with zero-knowledge proofs. Transactions can be transparent and publicly viewable, or fully shielded, meaning both the sender and receiver are private, along with the transaction amount.

Fellow privacy-focused coin Monero (XMR), the leading privacy coin by market cap, also gained 3.6% in the last 24 hours to $346. It remains delisted or restricted on most major exchanges, including Binance and OKX, as well as several European trading platforms. 

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