Zcash hits 8-year high, flips Monero to become top privacy coin at $6.2B

Some of the leading privacy coins are defying the gravity of the digital asset market, signaling growing investor demand for privacy-focused cryptocurrencies.

Zcash (ZEC) surged to an over eight-year high of $388 on Friday after rising 7.6% in the last 24 hours, according to data aggregator CoinMarketCap. With a $6.2 billion market capitalization at the time of writing, ZEC flipped Monero (XMR) to become the most valuable privacy-focused cryptocurrency.

ZEC’s 45% weekly rise bucked the broader crypto market downturn, which continued its consolidation after a much-awaited tariff deal between the US and China failed to materialize on Thursday. 

The rally suggested renewed investor appetite for privacy-focused coins, which are designed to conceal user transaction details.

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Privacy coins such as Zcash and Monero obscure sender, receiver and transaction details, offering greater anonymity than pseudonymous cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC). While Bitcoin transactions are traceable onchain, privacy tokens are designed to mask wallet addresses and transaction histories.

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Arthur Hayes’s $10,000 ZEC prediction

The rise to the eight-year high came days after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes predicted a ZEC token rally to $10,000, further bolstering buzz around the token.

Zcash rallied from $272 to a peak of $355 in the hours after Hayes’s bullish prediction on Sunday, Cointelegraph reported.

While demand for the token is steadily increasing, whales — large holders of cryptocurrency — have been offloading the Zcash token.

ZEC tokenholders rose by 63% to 1,968 over the past week, but whale wallets have sold a net total of $702,000 in ZEC tokens, according to crypto intelligence platform Nansen.

“Crazy to see how $ZEC has pulled a 10x in just two months, completely decoupling from the market and ignoring overall sentiment,” according to Simon Dedic, founder and managing partner at Moonrock Capital.

“I want to emphasize that this isn’t some shitcoin, it’s a multibillion-dollar asset. That makes this kind of performance even more remarkable,” he wrote in a Friday X post.

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