TL;DR
- ZCash rose 45% in one week and 140% in one month, pushing the token to $1,249, its highest level since 2016.
- Grayscale launched the first ZEC spot ETF in the U.S. on August 25, accumulating nearly $463 million in assets within two weeks.
- The founder of F2Pool described the rally as a “bet narrative” and questioned the network’s reward model and non-default privacy.
ZCash posted one of the strongest surges in the market over the past few weeks. ZEC reached $1,249, its highest price since 2016, before pulling back to around $1,152, recording minimal variation over the last 24 hours.
The current market capitalization stands at around $19.47 billion, which briefly placed the network among the ten largest in the sector. Daily trading volume came in at approximately $1.15 billion. The rally had no single trigger. Several factors converged almost simultaneously, with the U.S. market being the primary driver of its strength.
ZCash and the First Spot ETF in the U.S.
The most significant shift came when Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into ZCSH, described as the first ZEC spot ETF in the United States. The fund began trading on NYSE Arca on August 25 and accumulated nearly $463 million in assets in just two weeks, offering institutional investors a regulated avenue for exposure to the network. Given that ZCash has a maximum supply of 21 million coins, the combination of new demand and limited supply helped sustain the upward pressure.
That factor was compounded by the Ironwood upgrade, implemented in July. The improvement closed the legacy pool, forced coins through a public turnstile to facilitate total supply auditing, and introduced recoverable notes against quantum threats. Previously, a bug in the shielded pool had generated chaos and uncertainty for weeks and triggered an approximately 50% drop in ZEC’s price in May. The technical resolution drove its strong recovery.
F2Pool’s Founder Dismisses the Narrative
Not everyone in the industry shares the same enthusiasm. Chun Wang, founder of F2Pool, described the rally as a “bet narrative” and argued that a rising market cap does not mean Zcash has reached the standing of networks like Solana or Hyperliquid.
Zcash’s latest rally is a narrative bid. A big market cap does not mean a coin earned its place. Sitting near Solana and Hyperliquid on a ranking list does not mean Zcash does what those two do.
The launch was not fair. For the first four years, 20 percent of every block reward… https://t.co/g1PNEKWCNr
— Chun (@satofishi) September 8, 2026
Wang also noted that during the network’s first four years, 20% of each block reward was allocated to the Founders’ Reward, amounting to approximately 2.1 million ZEC, equivalent to 10% of the total supply. A similar allocation later returned through a development fund.
Wang further questioned that private transactions were never mandatory by default, since transparent addresses were more compatible with exchanges and wallets, which in practice limited privacy as a standard experience. Currently, ZEC’s RSI sits in the high 70s, signaling a market that moved with unusual speed over a very short period.
