The Bitcoin vs Zcash debate intensifies as ZEC reclaims $700 level

The debate between the Bitcoin (BTC) and Zcash (ZEC) communities intensified on Sunday as the price of Zcash recovered to over $700, after falling to a low of $598 on Saturday.

“The ‘Bitcoin only, everything else is a scam’ crowd is going to get really twisted trying to figure out what to say about Zcash,” the CEO of investment firm Bitwise, Hunter Horsley, said in an X post, which ignited a firestorm of responses.

“No, we’re pretty comfortable calling this obviously coordinated pump and dump of a VC coin a scam,” Bit Paine said in response, referencing Zcash’s 1,500% rally since October.

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of remote procedure call (RPC) node provider Helius and a vocal Zcash supporter, agreed with Horsely and characterized the Bitcoin community’s criticism of the privacy coin as conspiracy theories.

Zcash broke past eight-year highs in October and flipped Monero (XMR) to become the top privacy coin by market capitalization, boasting a market cap of over $11.2 billion at the time of this writing and reviving the privacy conversation in the crypto industry.

Related: Truth behind comeback of privacy-focused protocol Zcash in 2025

Zcash rally revives conversation around privacy, as industry executives rally around it

Zcash is ranked as the 12th largest crypto by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap, close to breaking into the top 10 by unseating the Cardano network’s native token ADA (ADA), which has a market cap of over $17 billion at the time of this writing.

In November, Arthur Hayes, founder of the BitMEX crypto exchange, said that Zcash is now the second-biggest liquid investment held by Maelstrom, his family office, with BTC being the biggest liquid asset owned by the fund.

Leap Therapeutics, a biotech company, rebranded to Cypherpunk Technologies, a Zcash treasury company, on Wednesday, with backing from the Winklevoss Twins’ Winklevoss Capital, causing its shares to spike by over 170% on the news. 

The meteoric price rally also revived conversations about integrating privacy into the Bitcoin protocol through reactivating a Bitcoin opcode known as OP_CAT, which can enable privacy and other advanced features natively on the Bitcoin protocol.

Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash, and more