Written by: Eric, Foresight News
This article was published on September 21
The only two positions above $1,500 on the K-line chart are only a few centimeters apart on the phone, but ZEC has been going for almost 10 years.
This "old antique" reached a maximum of 25 BTC/ZEC on Bitfinex when it was first launched, and even an outrageous price of 3299.99 BTC/ZEC appeared on Poloniex (the "nominal price" is equivalent to more than 2 million U.S. dollars). At that time, Bitcoin was only about 700 U.S. dollars.
But that round of madness did not last as long as the current Meme coin. From the sixth day of its launch, which was November 2, 2016, to September 14 this year, ZEC never reached more than $1,500.
Just a year before its return to the top, its price was hovering around $40.
In the past ten years, Bitcoin has increased hundreds of times. EOS came and died, Terra came and exploded, star projects were promoted to the altar one after another, and then quietly withdrew. And some "zombiees" who had "very good technology but hopeless currency prices" many years ago are still hiding in the corners of the exchange that no one cares about. From time to time, they follow the market and pull out a few positive lines, and then silently fall back.
Among them, Zcash, which carries the predictions of a group of utopian enthusiasts from the United States in the last century, climbed out of the graveyard after falling to an all-time low of less than $16 in July 2024, and has grown nearly a hundred times in two years.
The obsession of cypherpunks
In the 1990s, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn worked at David Chaum's DigiCash.
The gears of fate started turning the moment Zooko stepped through the door of DigiCash Company. This "yellow-haired boy" with long hair in his youth later became a well-known cryptologist and co-founder of Zcash. He also proposed the famous ternary paradox "Zooko Triangle": the naming/identification system in a network protocol cannot be memorable, decentralized and secure at the same time.
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn as a young person (first from left)
David Chaum, who founded DigiCash, can be said to be the ancestor of the cypherpunks. He published the paper "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" in 1983, in which the core blind signature technology can allow banks to confirm payment without knowing what you bought. Six years after the paper was published, Chaum established DigiCash. On the one hand, it launched eCash, the first true "digital cash" in human history, and on the other hand, it helped traditional banks make private payments.
On May 27, 1994, DigiCash processed the first true electronic cash transaction. After that, Mark Twain Bank, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, etc. all adopted this technology to try small anonymous payments. At its peak, thousands of users and hundreds of merchants participated in this experiment.
But this product, which was 20 years before the birth of Bitcoin, was too advanced. It was so advanced that the market that even swiped a credit card struggled to catch it. Zooko was there the day the company went bankrupt in 1998. This seed has been buried in his heart for nearly twenty years.
After DigiCash closed, Zooko did not give up and turned around to start MojoNation, a decentralized network that allows strangers to rent hard drives and bandwidth to each other. The token circulating in the system is called Mojo. Naturally, this project also ended in failure, but the direction of Zooko’s beliefs has never changed. What he wants is a kind of digital cash that is not watched by anyone.
In 2009, the Bitcoin mainnet was officially launched, and Zooko was one of the first people to cheer for it. But after the excitement passed, he saw a fatal flaw: Bitcoin's ledger is completely open, and anyone can see how much money you have in your wallet and who you have done business with.
Bitcoin is a better eCash, but still not the perfect currency in Zooko's mind.
Zcash’s “Six Horsemen of the Apocalypse”
In fact, the cryptography community, like Zooko, is looking for the "perfect" answer all the time.
In 2013, cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University proposed the Zerocoin protocol, which evolved into the Zerocash paper the following year. The core of the paper is the zk-SNARKs algorithm, which has been mentioned and used countless times in the Web3 industry. This makes the matter of "everyone can verify that the transaction is legal, but no one knows the content of the transaction" move from theory to practice for the first time.
The concept of zero-knowledge proof itself was not first proposed by Zerocash, but Zerocash is the first implementation design that can truly achieve both decentralization and end-to-end encrypted privacy. Zooko later said in multiple interviews that he was "extremely excited" when he saw the paper. In 2015, Zooko roped in the authors of the paper to form the company Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which was later renamed Electric Coin Company, which is now ECC, the operating company of Zcash.
Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant wrote a check for $715,000 when the company was founded. In subsequent financing, 17 investors raised about $3 million, including Barry Silbert of Digital Currency Group and Pantera.
Everything is ready, and the countdown to Zcash’s mainnet launch has begun. Zooko and ECC prepared the most ceremonial "opening ceremony" in the history of cryptocurrency for the launch of Zcash.
zk-SNARKs require a set of public parameters. The process of generating parameters will produce a kind of "toxic waste". Whoever gets it can print coins out of thin air without anyone noticing. You can understand this set of parameters as the "initial password" of Zcash. Whoever masters the password can forge a zero-knowledge proof to issue additional ZEC or double-spend ZEC. In short, they can do whatever they want on this chain.
On the day of launch, a total of 6 people participated in Zcash’s parameter generation ceremony. The three people with real names include Zooko himself, Zcash technical advisor Andrew Miller, and Coin Center research director Peter Van Valkenburgh. To prevent targeted attacks, Zooko also invited three anonymous people.
The participant under the pseudonym Moses Spears was later revealed to be NCC Group security engineer Derek Hinch. NCC Group was secretly hired to not only perform the ceremony honestly, but also to try to "attack" the ceremony from the inside for security verification. The participant under the pseudonym Fabrice Renault was later revealed to be Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd. Zooko specially invited him because he was skeptical of the entire ceremony at the time. Zooko believes that having critics personally involved adds credibility.
As for the last anonymous participant, John Dobbertin, his identity was not revealed until 6 years later in 2022.
In October 2016, six people spread over three continents conducted air relay. Each person used a physically isolated computer to generate his or her own parameters. After calculation, the random numbers were destroyed along with the hardware. Some people put electromagnetic shields on machines to prevent signal leakage, and some people directly set fire to their computers. As long as one of the six people is honest and as long as one of the six parameters is destroyed, Zcash's ZK system is safe.
On October 28, 2016, the Zcash mainnet was launched. In terms of economic model, Zcash almost copies Bitcoin, with a total supply of 21 million, which will be halved in about four years. Even because Zcash’s average block time is two and a half minutes, the block reward is designed to be 12.5 ZEC. However, in order to reduce early risks, Zcash chose to let the block reward linearly climb to 12.5 ZEC in the first 20,000 blocks.
Because of the slow-start mechanism, there are very few ZECs on the market, and the price has been skyrocketing. As supply was released, the price halved and then halved within a few days, falling below $50 by early 2017. In addition to "out of stock", the ECC team also brought "private goods": in the first four years, 20% of the rewards for each block flowed directly to the founding team, employees, consultants and early shareholders. After four years, 2.1 million coins were produced, accounting for a full 10% of the total.
In the days when the price of ZEC reached four digits again, F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun posted on X the chat records of Zcash members confusing EST and EDT times 6 years ago. He then posted a post complaining about the behavior of sending part of the block rewards directly to the early teams. Although the price has increased, it is not comparable to the popular Hyperliquid in the same period.
Unreliability and confusion were indeed the background of Zcash in its early days. And this seems to be doomed to be a bumpy road.
From high-profile to no one cares about
In September 2017, Snowden tweeted that Zcash’s privacy technology made it the most interesting alternative to Bitcoin.
In 2017, Snowden had been granted asylum in Russia. Although it has been four years since the U.S. government’s large-scale collection of people’s privacy was first exposed in 2013, its impact has been enough for the still-toddling cryptocurrency at that time.
In that era when faith was still being talked about, Snowden's recognition made the faith bonus instantly full. At the peak of the bull market in January 2018, ZEC touched around $800.
Snowden suddenly commented on Zcash. At first, many people thought that applying zero-knowledge proof to cryptocurrency was a blow to Snowden's advocacy of privacy. But in 2022, the Youtube account Zcash Media released a video in which Snowden personally admitted that he was the "John Dobbertin" who participated in the Zcash launch ceremony.
According to Fortune magazine and Zooko himself recalled, Zooko became interested in Snowden after hearing a privacy-related speech he gave at Bard College. Zooko then contacted Snowden through Marcia Hofmann, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF. In the fall of 2016, the two held a highly encrypted, physically isolated video call. Zooko gave Snowden the pseudonym "John Dobbertin," a name that paid tribute to the German cryptographer Hans Dobbertin.
After communication, Snowden agreed to participate in the launch ceremony of Zcash on the condition that he would not receive any compensation or hold any shares, and it would be purely for the public interest.
The privacy defender platform and the crypto bull market carnival have become the last highlight moment before Zcash rises again this year.
But Zcash is still too far ahead of its time. Early zk-SNARKs took nearly a minute to generate a private transaction on a large-memory computer. The vast majority of users want to save trouble and transfer money directly using transparent addresses. It is very ironic that the most private currency in the world has the most private functions that no one uses.
What’s even more worrying is that no one uses the chain that first adopted ZK technology, but its technology feeds others. Vitalik highly recommends zk-SNARKs. In 2017, Ethereum verified the zk-SNARK proof for the first time through the Metropolis upgrade. The fire of zero-knowledge proofs spread to the entire industry. During the days when zero-knowledge proofs briefly dominated the headlines because of ZK Rollup, the person who started the fire was frozen in place.
Winter is here, can spring be far behind?
After that, there was three levels of strangulation that lasted for eight years.
The first level comes from regulation. In 2018, the Japan Financial Services Agency put pressure on Coincheck after the huge currency theft case, and Coincheck delisted XMR, Zcash and DASH. OKEx Korea will follow up in 2019, it will be ShapeShift’s turn in November 2020, and Bittrex’s turn in January 2021.
The logic is simple. The exchange does not want to cause trouble, and the privacy coin becomes a negative asset on the compliance report. In February 2024, Binance directly delisted XMR, and the entire track was in turmoil. Because ZEC retains transparent addresses and viewing keys, it barely leaves a front-line compliance space. This design compromise seemed like a blemish at the time, but later turned out to be a life-saving straw.
In August 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a subpoena to the Zcash Foundation. The then SEC Chairman Gary Gensler was challenging countless cryptocurrencies to "self-certify that they are not securities," and Zcash was not immune.
The second layer comes from the currency price itself. It peaked at $800 in 2018 and dropped to around $30 in 2019. In the bull market of 2021, when everything surged, Bitcoin hit new highs, Ethereum reached new highs, and even Dogecoin went to the sky, but ZEC only rebounded to more than 300 US dollars, not even half of the previous high. For an encryption project, not rising even in the bull market is the most severe death sentence.
In July 2024, ZEC fell to a record low of $15.91, and its market value fell out of the top fifty. That year it was declared dead numerous times. The audience at the conference was getting smaller and smaller year by year. The ranking in the market software was declining. The old Holders mocked themselves as archaeologists, guarding an unearthed cultural relic and waiting for its value to increase. What was once "the most interesting alternative to Bitcoin" has become an archaeological object in the currency circle.
The third layer comes from within. The expiration of founder rewards triggered a protracted governance war. The community argued over how to distribute the development funds and to whom. ECC has cut staff to cut costs and is financially stretched. In December 2023, Zooko stepped down as CEO, handing the reins to Josh Swihart. This is the end of Zcash’s first era.
Although the currency price has died, the project has not stopped.
On October 29, 2018, the Sapling upgrade was activated, and the generation time of shielded transactions was reduced from nearly a minute to a few seconds, making mobile wallets possible for the first time. With the NU5 upgrade on May 31, 2022, Halo 2 recursive proof replaces trusted startup. There is no need to burn the computer anymore. The unified address hides three types of fund pools into the same address.
Then there is the new Zebra node, which is the Zashi mobile wallet that will be launched in early 2024. It is private by default and can be used with a few clicks. Privacy has finally changed from a geek toy to something that ordinary people can get started with by scanning a QR code. The peak share of privacy transactions was close to 60%.
Changes are quietly reflected on the chain. The number of ZEC in the shielded pool has climbed from 5% of the total supply a few years ago to more than 4.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, accounting for approximately 28% of the total supply. With the second halving on November 23, 2024, the block reward was cut to 1.5625 pieces, and the daily new supply on the entire network was only about 1,800 pieces.
It took them eight years to finally convert a concept racing car into a production car that can go high speed.
Detonation begins on October 1, 2025. Naval Ravikant, one of the 17 investors ten years ago, wrote a sentence on X: Bitcoin is the insurance of legal currency, and Zcash is the insurance of Bitcoin.
He also added that Bitcoin’s public ledger makes it impossible for Satoshi Nakamoto himself to use Bitcoin with confidence. This sentence was like a match thrown into a dry pyre. ZEC rushed from $54 to over $156 in a week, and touched $700 a month later.
At first, everyone just thought this was another flashback brought about by a big boss calling for orders, but the development of things exceeded most people's expectations.
Maelstrom, the family office of Arthur Hayes, began building positions in the third quarter of 2025, buying ZEC as its second-largest position after Bitcoin. He publicly talked about selling Bitcoin to make room for privacy positions, and also called out a target price of $1,000 or even $10,000.
The hanging sword that had been suppressed for many years also fell to the ground at this time. The SEC's investigation, which began in August 2023, concluded in January 2026 with no action taken. In the same month, there was a false alarm. All members of ECC ran away en masse due to a break with the board of directors of the parent institution, and turned around to establish ZODL. Within three months, they received more than $25 million in investment from Paradigm, a16z, and Coinbase Ventures.
For other projects, civil unrest is almost equivalent to the obituary of the project, but for ZEC, which is on the rise, cutting losses and setting up another company is not all bad news.
At the same time, the channels of the exchange are also opened one by one.
In April this year, Robinhood launched ZEC, providing investment channels for American retail investors.
On May 6, ZEC surged nearly 30% in a single day, detonating more than $46.7 million in short positions in one day.
Grayscale established the Zcash Trust as early as 2017. On August 25, 2026, the trust was officially converted into a spot ETF and listed on the New York Stock Exchange Arca under the code ZCSH. This was the first time that privacy coins entered US stock accounts. Publicly traded company Cypherpunk Technologies simply turned ZEC into a treasury asset. This company was formerly the anti-cancer drug company Leap Therapeutics. It changed its name to All in Privacy in November 2025. With the capital support of the Winklevoss brothers, it has been buying stocks all the way. By August 2026, it held more than 323,000 coins, accounting for 1.92% of the circulating supply.
The price of privacy
Zcash’s ten years have actually only answered one question. How much is a right idea, born at the wrong time, worth? The answer is $15.91. What about being born at the right time?
10 years ago, everyone knew that privacy was important, but because Web3 was still too early and ZK was too "clunky", it simply could not meet usable standards. Today, the fast finality of ZK made ZKsync the first choice for tokenized RWA in the early days. Brevis' ZK Data Coprocessor + Pico ZKVM technology calculates the gas cost/rebate amount off-chain, and then generates zero-knowledge proofs for verification on the chain, realizing Uniswap V4 Hook's trustless liquidity incentives and rebate issuance.
Although Zcash is just a "currency" that can be used for private transfers and has nothing to do with these advanced applications, privacy under the blessing of Web3 has truly become one of the needs, no matter the scene is white or gray.
Bitcoin has also played the role of a gray transaction medium for a long time after its birth, and it still does so today. It took Zcash 10 years to reach this stage, but this is also the truest dream of the cypherpunks who came from the 1980s and shouted "The strong want freedom, the weak want privacy."
After nearly half a century of baptism, and having gone through many tests of suspicion, infighting, and regulation, privacy is no longer a flash in the pan when Web3 is no longer hyped at the end of each bull market, but has become a firework triggered by Web3 that blooms in the night sky.