Bearish bets on a symbol that institutional investors were quietly accumulating turned sour on Tuesday.
Zcash (ZEC) ripped nearly 30% over 24 hours to $543 in Asian hours on Tuesday, taking its weekly gain to 60% and its 30-day return to over 110%, per CoinGecko data.
Volume passed $1.3 billion over the past 24 hours, and the rally sparked nearly $62 million in total liquidations across roughly 5,000 traders. Of that, nearly $60 million were shorts, while longs lost just over $3 million, making ZEC-tracked futures the second-highest liquidator behind bitcoin in an unusual move.
The price increase came as prominent crypto fund Multicoin Capital revealed that it had built a significant ZEC position since February.
“Zcash is a return to the cypherpunk ideals crypto was founded on,” fund partner Tushar Jain wrote on X. He framed the thesis around California’s “asset seizures” — calling them a warning shot of what’s to come as governments globally move to demand more visibility over private holdings.
“Bitcoin is censorship resistant, no one can freeze your BTC or prevent you from using it,” Jain wrote. “But that does not prevent the state from confiscating known holdings through property taxes.”
California Initiative 25-0024 is a proposed one-time 5% tax on residents with over $1 billion in net worth, including unrealized gains. The initiative is expected to raise about $100 billion if passed.
Jain’s pitch is that bitcoin is good for transactions but transparent for balances, and a tax authority armed with a blockchain explorer can seize what it sees. ZEC’s shielded pool hides what it can’t do as a private asset for everyone.
About 30% of all circulating ZEC, or about 5 million coins out of 16.7 million, now sit at shielded addresses, up from 8% in early 2024, CoinDesk Research wrote in March.
The shielded pool uses zero-knowledge cryptography – proving something is true without showing how – to hide transaction details such as sender, recipient and amount.
Public ZEC transactions have remained flat at around 8,500 per day, which a casual observer might read as no real growth. But the actual activity happens inside the shielded pool, where transactions don’t appear on standard counters by design.
CoinDesk Research announced in March that Zcash had reached “crypto supremacy” — the point where privacy-preserving networks become dominant — on the back of three converging forces: AI tools that can anonymize users on transparent blockchains by tracking transaction patterns, quantum computers emerging as a credible threat to cryptography that secures most current and $0 billion trading wallets, like $0 billion. capital rotated against encryption-based privacy.
ZEC is trading at $543, up more than 1,400% year-to-date. The token still sits below its November 2025 high near $750, leaving room for the breakout to extend if current demand holds. The next resistance is the $600 to $650 zone where ZEC consolidated until the end of 2025.
What traders see from here is whether the hedged pool continues to expand along with the price movement. Previous ZEC rallies have coincided with capped supply growth that lagged with the move, suggesting speculative participation. This rally is happening along with record high foreclosed supply, which is closer to the signature on the chain of actual adoption.
