Zcash reaches record high of $1,600 as privacy narrative gains traction

Zcash briefly topped $1,600 this week, hitting a price level the privacy-focused token hasn’t seen in a decade. The move represents an 88% gain over the past month, according to CoinGecko data, making ZEC one of the strongest performers in an already hot crypto market. For context, Bitcoin’s push above $87,000 this week was impressive. But Zcash made it look modest, climbing more than 28% in the past seven days alone. ETFs changed the game A lot of the fuel behind this rally traces back to August, when Grayscale launched its ZCSH spot ETF on NYSE Arca. The product attracted inflows in the hundreds of millions, giving institutional capital a clean, regulated on-ramp into a privacy coin for the first time at meaningful scale. Then 21Shares piled on. The firm introduced the first physically backed ZEC exchange-traded products on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam in late September. Two major regulated products in two months, for an asset class that regulators once treated like contraband. Zcash’s market capitalization now sits in the range of $25B to $27B. That’s a far cry from the sub-$500M levels the token languished at during crypto’s bleaker chapters. The privacy thesis, reloaded As AI-...