Zcash (ZEC) is in the midst of an epic surge rally.
OKX data shows that ZEC officially broke through the $1,000 mark on September 6, peaking at $1,256.92. As of 14:00 today, it has slightly pulled back but still trades at $1,128.05. Calculated from the low of $251.39 during the Orchard vulnerability fallout in early June, ZEC has surged nearly 400% in just three months.
However, despite ZEC's meteoric rise in the secondary market, not everyone in the court of public opinion is buying it.
Wang Chun Blasts Zcash
At noon today, Bitcoin super OG and F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun (@satofishi) fired off multiple tweets, digging up Zcash's entire dark history and bluntly stating, "Blacklisting this team remains one of the best decisions I've ever made."
· Odaily Note: Regarding Wang Chun, his more widely known identity now is "the first astronaut set to fly to Mars." In May this year, SpaceX officially announced that Wang Chun would board the Starship to execute the first crewed interplanetary Mars mission. The mission plans a two-year deep-space flight, exiting the Earth-Moon system, skimming past Mars (without landing), and finally returning to Earth.
First, at 12:52, Wang Chun retweeted his own post from six years ago criticizing the Zcash team for failing to understand daylight saving time, questioning the team's professionalism.
"Six years ago, a member of the Zcash team emailed me, constantly confusing EST (Eastern Standard Time) with EDT (Eastern Daylight Time). Communication became completely impossible, so I blacklisted their entire company. Looking back six years later, it's still one of the best decisions I've ever made. Remember the BlockFi blunder back then? They were supposed to distribute $701.4 to users but instead transferred 701.4 bitcoins. Someone who can't tell EDT from EST will likely mix up BTC and USD too."
Then at 13:17, Wang Chun once again weighed in on ZEC, this time with even sharper rhetoric, arguing that ZEC is "unworthy of its position."
"Zcash's recent rally is purely narrative-driven. A large market cap doesn't mean a token deserves where it sits; being ranked next to Solana and Hyperliquid on the market cap charts doesn't mean Zcash can do what those two have done."
"Its launch was unfair from the start. In the first four years, 20% of every block reward was deducted as the 'Founders' Reward.' That money went to founders, employees, advisors, and early investors. The cumulative total reached 2.1 million ZEC, accounting for 10% of the 21 million hard cap supply. Bitcoin only rewards miners, but Zcash also had to feed a company and its backers. When that first cut was supposed to end, another similar 20% rake returned under the guise of a 'development fund.' A token that writes self-enrichment clauses directly into its block rewards has no right to be marketed as clean, neutral money."
"That rake didn't buy a real economic ecosystem. Privacy is its marketing hook, but using privacy features is optional. For exchanges and simple wallets, transparent addresses have always been the path of least resistance. For most of Zcash's history, the vast majority of tokens have been exposed in the open. 'Optional privacy' is just a marketing gimmick; 'privacy by default' is what the underlying protocol should be. Meanwhile, team governance has been mired in boardroom infighting: the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the Foundation, Bootstrap, brand ownership, wallet control, and who gets a slice of the pie. In January 2026, the entire ECC team resigned en masse, claiming they were pushed out. This isn't a trivial detail—this is the project's real operating reality. A core team that can't even coexist under one roof with its own nonprofit board is hardly 'decentralized'—it's a leadership structure that has already collapsed."
"Then comes the security mess the market is now trying to gloss over. In May 2026, a critical vulnerability in the Orchard pool was disclosed. The flaw had lain dormant for roughly four years. In theory, it could mint fake ZEC out of thin air without leaving a clear on-chain trace. And because the pool is privacy-preserving, no one can prove whether counterfeit coins were ever created. The 'Ironwood' upgrade in July shut down the old pool and forced tokens through a migration checkpoint. That's damage control, not a reason to justify a top-10 market cap ranking. A currency that can't verify its privacy supply the way Bitcoin can, and even had to undergo an emergency fix after a four-year vulnerability window, hardly qualifies as 'sound money.'"
"The conclusion is obvious: an unfair launch, team take rates misaligned with product strength, years of high-level palace intrigue, and a massive hole lurking in the privacy pool for four years—these are hardly the report card of a top-ten network, but rather the true portrait of a story coin that survives on narrative. You may dismiss Solana and Hyperliquid for your own reasons, but they at least carry real application demand; what Zcash carries is nothing more than an exchange listing and a short-squeeze frenzy. These two are fundamentally different. Conflating them is as absurd as mistyping 701.4 units of an asset in a transfer, or treating EST (Eastern Standard Time) and EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) as the same hour."
A Walk Through the Dark History
Simply put, aside from the professional issues on the timezone front, Wang Chun's tweet raised a total of four points of controversy regarding Zcash.
The 20% "Insider Treatment"
The earliest criticism of Zcash stemmed from its launch mechanism, which was starkly different from Bitcoin's. After the mainnet went live in 2016, for the first four years, 20% of each block reward did not go to miners but was allocated as a "Founders' Reward" to founders, early employees, advisors, investors, and related parties such as the Electric Coin Company (ECC). This portion ultimately accumulated to approximately 2.1 million ZEC, accounting for 10% of the total maximum supply.
More notably, after the Founders' Reward expired in 2020, the 20% block reward cut did not completely disappear. The Zcash community introduced a new Dev Fund via ZIP 1014, which continued to allocate 20% of block subsidies to Bootstrap, the Zcash Foundation, and Major Grants from 2020 to 2024.
Although the use of funds and governance structure differed from the original Founders' Reward, critics argue this still means Zcash has long maintained a "developer tax" mechanism distinct from Bitcoin's.
A "Privacy Coin" That Lets You Opt Out of Privacy
Zcash's second controversy stems from its core product positioning—privacy.
Zcash does not mandate privacy protection for all transactions; instead, it supports both shielded transactions and transparent transactions. Users can choose whether to use the privacy feature based on the support of their wallets and exchanges; in fact, some wallets and exchanges still only support transparent transactions. Zcash's official team has also explicitly reminded users that to maintain the privacy of transaction and financial history, they need to use wallets or services that enable shielded transactions by default.
This creates a controversial product positioning — Zcash indeed possesses unique privacy technology, but privacy is not a mandatory attribute at the protocol level. For users, not using the privacy feature is often more convenient; for exchanges and wallets, transparent addresses are also easier to support and regulate.
What Wang Chun referred to as the "optional privacy" issue is not fundamentally a denial of Zcash's privacy technology, but rather a question of whether Zcash, when a large volume of transactions on the network can still be conducted publicly, is sufficient to sustain its current valuation based on the "privacy coin" narrative.
Core Team's Public Feud Ends in a Split
If the first two issues belong to Zcash's historical design, then the ECC controversy that erupted earlier this year directly exposed contradictions at the project governance level.
In January 2026, the entire team of Electric Coin Company (ECC), Zcash's core development firm, collectively departed. ECC CEO Josh Swihart stated at the time that the team was forced to leave due to serious disagreements with the board of Bootstrap, the nonprofit organization responsible for governing ECC; Bootstrap, for its part, attributed the conflict to governance arrangements, legal constraints on nonprofits, and other issues.
This controversy ultimately did not bring Zcash to a halt — the former ECC team subsequently established a new company to continue developing Zcash, and by the end of February, Bootstrap announced that both parties had reached a resolution, with ECC gradually winding down operations and relevant technical assets being transferred.
But from an external perspective, a project whose core development team and governance body engage in public conflict, and even ends with the team "walking out en masse," hardly aligns with the image of a highly decentralized, maturely governed protocol. This has also become one of the key bases for Wang Chun's criticism that Zcash's reputation does not match its position.
The Orchard Vulnerability Lurking for Four Years
What truly put Zcash's "hard currency" narrative to the test was the Orchard vulnerability exposed in May this year.
On May 29, security researcher Taylor Hornby discovered a severe flaw in the zero-knowledge proof circuit of the Orchard privacy pool. According to Zcash's disclosure, the vulnerability theoretically could allow attackers to mint unlimited fake ZEC without being detected. What's more棘手 is that due to Orchard's inherent privacy features, even after the vulnerability was patched, there was no cryptographic way to prove whether anyone had actually exploited it to create counterfeit coins during the period it existed.
Zcash quickly took emergency measures, temporarily suspending Orchard-related operations, and re-enabled the fixed circuit through the NU6.2 upgrade, completing the entire emergency remediation process within days.
The problem is that for an asset built on scarcity, privacy, and the "digital cash" narrative, "theoretical unlimited issuance with no way to prove post-hoc whether it actually happened" is itself an extremely serious trust issue. This was the direct cause of ZEC being hammered down to around $250 in early June this year, and it remains the project's hardest-to-avoid "dark history."
Major Players Are Still Heavily Shorting
Beyond Wang Chun's public statements, another major player is also expressing bearish sentiment on ZEC with real money.
Garrett Jin, dubbed the "1011 insider whale agent," is currently the largest on-chain ZEC short seller. This morning, Garrett Jin closed out a bitcoin long position with a notional value of $106.18 million and instead increased his short position on ZEC.
Currently, Garrett Jin is shorting $45.11 million worth of ZEC with 3x leverage, with an average entry price of $576.3, still facing an unrealized loss of $22.2 million—yet Garrett Jin appears extremely resolute, having repeatedly added to short positions as ZEC's price continued to climb.
How Much Longer Can ZEC Rally?
Of course, neither Wang Chun nor Garrett Jin can single-handedly determine ZEC's price through bearish calls or short positions alone. In fact, having surged from $250 to over $1,200, ZEC has already proven that the return of the privacy narrative, capital chasing, and short squeezes are entirely sufficient to override fundamentals in the short term. As long as market sentiment continues to heat up, further upside for ZEC certainly cannot be ruled out.
But the problem is that after this nearly 5x surge, it's hard to explain ZEC's current price with "undervaluation" anymore. As the short squeeze gradually winds down (maybe it will take one more shot at Garrett Jin?), selling pressure from profit-taking grows, and the market ultimately has to return to fundamentals: Beyond the privacy narrative, what else does Zcash actually have to support a higher valuation? In particular, the launch mechanism, optional privacy, governance rifts, and the Orchard vulnerability mentioned earlier—these issues haven't simply disappeared because the coin price went up.
Therefore, rather than predicting whether ZEC's next stop is $1,500 or $2,000, it might be more worthwhile to observe how much premium the market is ultimately willing to leave for ZEC once hot money recedes and shorts are no longer forced to cover. That will also determine whether this surge is a genuine re-rating of a legacy privacy coin, or a super-cycle driven by both narrative and liquidity.
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