If you've been scrolling through English Crypto Twitter recently, chances are you've seen ZEC all over your feed.
Big names like Naval, Arthur Hayes, Mert Mumtaz, Balaji, and Cobie have been appearing one after another in the same discussion, coupled with Multicoin Capital publicly announcing a significant position, and multiple privacy panels at Consensus Miami. The social media mentions of ZEC have reached the highest point since the end of the 2025 bull run in the past week.
The price has taken off ahead of the narrative. At the time of writing, ZEC is trading at around $580, with a price increase of over 110% in the past 30 days and a YTD increase of over 1500%. With a market cap exceeding $9.5 billion, it has surpassed the longstanding privacy coin Monero (XMR) and risen to the top 20 on CoinGecko.
On May 6th, ZEC saw a nearly 30% daily surge, triggering over $62 million in short liquidations, with shorts accounting for $46.7 million.
So the question is: What is driving this surge?
Multicoin Capital: "Bitcoin Can Resist Censorship, But Can't Stop Property Taxes"
The most direct catalyst comes from Multicoin Capital.
On May 6th, Tushar Jain, the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Multicoin, publicly stated during a Consensus Miami panel that the company has held a significant position since February this year. While he did not disclose the specific size, he provided a clear investment thesis.
In a subsequent lengthy post on the X platform, Jain wrote: "Bitcoin can resist censorship, and no one can freeze your BTC or stop you from using it. But this does not prevent the government from seizing known holdings through property taxes."
His direct argument references California Initiative 25-0024, which proposes a one-time 5% wealth tax (including unrealized gains) on residents with net assets exceeding $1 billion, estimated to raise about $100 billion.
Jain's core argument is this: Bitcoin is the hedge reserve asset, but its on-chain balance is entirely transparent, allowing a tax authority holding a blockchain explorer to see everything. ZEC's shielded pool uses zero-knowledge proof technology to hide the sender, receiver, and amount, making on-chain assets invisible to external observers.
“We believe that there is a clear product-market fit for truly private, censorship-resistant, and confiscation-resistant assets, with demand accelerating,” Jain wrote, “Zcash is the purest way to express this thesis in the public markets.”
For Multicoin, this is a clear pivot.
In 2019, the fund argued in a post that “privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a standalone product,” believing that users should not sell BTC or ETH to buy ZEC for privacy.
Seven years later, this public stance seems to have starkly contradicted its prior conclusion.
KOL Collective Endorsement; Arthur Hayes Calls for ‘10% of BTC Price’ for ZEC
The seeds of this ZEC narrative were actually sown in the second half of 2025.
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant (also an early Zcash investor), Solana infrastructure company Helius founder Mert Mumtaz, as well as Balaji Srinivasan, Cobie, and other crypto industry KOLs have been actively voicing support for ZEC since last fall.
In October of last year, Naval tweeted, “Bitcoin is the hedge reserve asset, Zcash is the hedge on Bitcoin.”
Hayes' statement is more aggressive. At Consensus 2026, he explicitly stated that the long-term target price for ZEC should be “10% of the Bitcoin price.” Based on the current BTC price of around $80,000, this corresponds to a ZEC target price of approximately $8,000, representing over a 13x increase from the current price. Tyler Winklevoss also endorsed a $9,700 target price thesis for ZEC this week to capture offshore wealth.
These alpha leaks may not necessarily serve as investment advice, but their concentrated occurrence indicates one thing: the top funds and top volume in the English-speaking crypto community are both tilting towards the privacy track.
The Anti-Quantum Narrative at Consensus Miami
If Multicoin and Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) provided the catalyst for the financial and narrative aspect, the technical roadmap release at Consensus Miami gave the market a fundamental story.
Josh Swihart, Founder and CEO of the Zcash Open Development Lab, announced during the privacy track session on May 8 that quantum-recoverable wallets would go live within a month, and Zcash plans to achieve full post-quantum security in 12 to 18 months.
The reasoning here is: the ECDSA signature algorithm, currently used by most cryptocurrencies, will become vulnerable once quantum computers mature. A more dangerous scenario is the so-called "harvest now, decrypt later" strategy, where adversaries record encrypted data now and decrypt it later once quantum hardware is available.
For a privacy coin whose value proposition is entirely based on transactional data confidentiality, this is a survival-level threat.
Swihart also revealed that since the integration of ECC wallets with Near Intents Cross-Chain Swap functionality last October, between $6 to $7 billion has flowed in and out through that channel, with the primary exchange targets being the dollar and USDC. Zcash's privacy pool currently holds around 30% of circulating ZEC, reaching its historical peak.
Institutional Entry Signals: Grayscale ETF, Robinhood Listing, Foundry Mining
In addition to Multicoin's heavy position, ZEC is also accumulating more institutional-grade catalysts.
Grayscale has filed for a ZEC spot ETF, which is currently awaiting SEC approval. Grayscale has previously stated that ZEC's upside potential is closely tied to the "Financial Privacy Repricing in an AI-Driven World."
Robinhood recently launched ZEC trading, opening up the retail side entrance. Foundry (a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group) announced the launch of a large-scale ZEC mining pool operation, making it the second asset supported by the company after Bitcoin, further endorsing ZEC's mining security and institutional acceptance.
On-chain data shows that, driven by tightening compliance rules on trading platforms and increasing concerns about data tracking, retail investors' interest in privacy coins is on the rise.
In March of this year, CoinDesk Research released a report stating that Zcash has reached the threshold of "Encryption Supremacy," driven by three forces converging: AI tools that can de-anonymize users on a transparent blockchain by tracking transaction patterns, the increasing real threat of quantum computing to current wallet security, and quarterly transaction volumes surpassing $100 billion.
However, the entire team behind Zcash has left
The aforementioned catalysts paint a bullish picture, but one fact should not be overlooked: the core team behind Zcash has all departed.
In January of this year, Electric Coin Company (ECC) CEO Josh Swihart and the entire ECC team collectively resigned due to governance conflicts with the Bootstrap Project's board, categorizing this departure as a "constructive discharge."
ECC is the core organization that created and maintained Zcash, and the team's departure means that this chain is now operating without its original engineering team.
Therefore, the current narrative around ZEC is much more driven by speculative fervor than fundamentals. Calls from key opinion leaders, fund holdings, Consensus panels—all these are stories of capital and attention, but on-chain transaction volume shows no significant growth.
Because transactions in the privacy pool are designed to be invisible, you cannot use on-chain data to distinguish between "real adoption" and "speculative fund hoarding".
However, the lack of fundamentals is also the norm for most coins. In this current "old coins" revival market, ZEC is one of the most eye-catching, but likely not the last.
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