Good morning, Asia. Here’s what’s making news in the markets:
Welcome to the Asia Morning Briefing, a daily overview of top stories in US hours and an overview of market movements and analysis. For a detailed overview of US markets, see CoinDesk’s Crypto Daybook Americas.
Zcash has been one of the strongest performers of the year, outperforming majors like BTC and ETH during the recent market downturn.
But behind the scenes, the user base doesn’t seem to have caught up to its stratospheric rally.
Zcash’s privacy model makes it difficult to evaluate adoption through standard blockchain metrics. The chain supports both transparent and shielded transactions, and only the transparent side of the network can be directly observed.
A growing share of the activity now takes place within shielded pools, where addresses, volumes and flows become invisible to public analysis. This means that transparent metrics mostly capture exchange-oriented activity rather than Zcash’s full user base.
The only noticeable increase in visible throughput came from Zerdinals, a wave of subscriptions that temporarily pushed daily transactions to over 70,000. However, transparent senders remained in a narrow range between 8,000 and 14,000 throughout the event, suggesting that the increase was driven by a small cluster of repeat players rather than broad growth in new users.
Shielded activity cannot be measured directly, but it is unlikely to account for a sevenfold increase in transparent throughput alone. Once the subscription wave passed, transactions returned to previous ranges.
Behind the scenes, Zcash has been steadily migrating to the foreclosed Orchard pool. Shielded supply has increased from around 1.2 million to more than 4 million ZEC over the past several years, and the proportion of fully shielded transactions has reached record highs.
Unified Addresses, auto-shielding and Zashi’s default-private UX seem to push more flows into the shielded pool. These trends point to real adoption on the private side, although they leave almost no footprint on transparent charts.
If there was a broad increase in interest in privacy coins as a category, Monero would likely show it as well.
XMR remains the dominant pure privacy asset and its transaction count captures all usage because every Monero transaction is private but still counted at the protocol level.
Still, Monero’s throughput has remained in its usual 20,000 to 30,000 daily transaction ranges, with no parallel spike in activity. This stability reinforces the idea that ZEC’s move is not part of a sector-wide shift to privacy, but a Zcash-specific rotation driven by its liquidity profile, shrinking visible supply and an improved shielded UX narrative.
Zcash and Monero are not directly comparable because their privacy designs are different, but neither shows an expansion in measurable users.
The transparent data for Zcash shows no clear increase in new participants, while shielded activity remains deliberately hidden. With around 30% of the supply now in shielded addresses that cannot be held on exchanges, the resulting supply squeeze causes the price to move faster than the visible network can explain.
Until these trends on the private side can be confirmed by user behavior, traders are likely to pay a significant premium for ZEC.
Market movement
BTC: Bitcoin is trading near $86,800 after giving back its Nvidia-fueled rally above $93,000.
ETH: Ethereum hovers around $2,850 after falling below $2,900 as selling from FG Nexus added pressure.
Gold: Gold is trading at around $4,077 after giving back pre-NFP gains, sitting around 7% below the October peak but still on track for an annual gain of more than 50%.
Nikkei 225: Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 1.58% as warmer inflation in October reinforced expectations of BOJ rate hikes and officials expressed fresh concerns over yen weakness.
Elsewhere in Crypto
- Crypto lobbyists beat Trump to get things done amid congressional uncertainty (CoinDesk)
- Ray Dalio owns Bitcoin. He is still nervous about Quantum Computing, Central Bank Adoption. (Decrypt)
- MegaETH opens pre-deposit window for USDm stablecoin next week (The Block)
