Zcash is up 54% in a month as the privacy trade gets serious

@Zcash is trading near $614, up roughly 12% on the day and 54% over the past month. That run has lifted its market capitalisation to around $10 billion, making it the 11th-largest cryptocurrency and pushing it past Monero as the biggest privacy coin by market cap.

Regulatory Overhang Lifted

The move is not driven by momentum alone. Two structural catalysts have reset the investment case for $ZEC. First, the SEC closed a multi-year probe into the Zcash Foundation without recommending any enforcement action. The regulator formally ended a review that had begun more than two years earlier, with the foundation disclosing in January that no charges or corrective measures would be pursued. The probe had originated in August 2023, when the foundation received a subpoena as part of a broader SEC effort to assess whether specific digital asset offerings fell under federal securities laws. The closure fits into a wider shift in US crypto enforcement since 2025, with the agency dropping or settling a string of high-profile cases under new leadership.

Grayscale Files for First US Privacy-Coin ETF

The second catalyst is a landmark filing from Grayscale. Grayscale has filed to convert its Zcash Trust into the first US spot ETF tracking the privacy-focused cryptocurrency. The ETF aims to list on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH, with Coinbase serving as custodian and prime broker. If approved, it would be the first-ever regulated spot ETF for a privacy-preserving crypto asset.

On-chain activity points in the same direction. Shielded adoption, Zcash's version of encrypted transactions, has spiked in 2025, with roughly 30% of ZEC transactions now involving the shielded pool. That is up from around 8% in 2024, signalling growing real-world use of the network's core privacy features rather than speculative trading alone.

Taken together, the three factors, regulatory clarity, an institutional-grade product wrapper, and rising on-chain adoption, amount to a repricing of financial privacy. What regulators once treated as a liability is now being presented by one of the largest digital asset managers as something worth holding in a portfolio. Grayscale itself framed the rationale directly, saying it views ZEC as "a key contributor to a well-balanced digital asset portfolio" as privacy becomes foundational across crypto. Whether the ETF clears the SEC is still an open question, but the filing alone marks a turning point for how privacy coins are perceived by institutional capital.

Sources:
CoinDesk: Grayscale Files to List First Zcash ETF in the US
Crypto.news: SEC Closes Zcash Foundation Probe With No Enforcement Action
Unchained Crypto: Grayscale Files to List Zcash ETF