Zcash jumps 54% in a month as the privacy trade heats up

Zcash is changing hands near $614, up roughly 12% on the day and 54% over the past month. The move has lifted it to the 11th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, at about $10 billion, and pushed it ahead of Monero as the largest privacy coin. The rally is being driven by more than momentum. The SEC closed its investigation into Zcash in January, and Grayscale has filed to convert its Zcash Trust into what would be the first U.S. spot privacy-coin ETF. On-chain data also point to rising privacy usage: about 30% of the supply is now held in shielded pools, up from 8% in 2024. The broader shift is a repricing of financial privacy—from a regulatory risk to an attribute institutions are increasingly willing to hold.