Zcash's Year-Long Silence Finally Broken: Why Privacy Coins Are Having Their Moment Again

For all intents and purposes, the cryptocurrency industry has been largely indifferent to privacy for most of its existence. But 2024 changed that narrative dramatically.

The Numbers Tell the Story

ZCash (ZEC) has posted a staggering +734.36% gain over the past year, with a particularly explosive run that saw it surge over 700% since September alone. Today, ZEC trades at $404.07 with a $6.66B market cap and 16.49M coins in circulation out of a fixed 21M supply. The 24-hour trading volume stands at $11.90M, though this pales in comparison to the market activity when perpetual futures launched on Hyperliquid—open interest briefly reached $115 million, revealing just how much demand had been bottled up in this “forgotten gem.”

Yet this isn’t merely a price phenomenon. The real story lies beneath the surface in the blockchain data: shielded pools now contain over 30% of ZEC’s total supply for the first time ever, a psychological milestone that fundamentally changes how the network functions.

Why Privacy Suddenly Matters Again

The crypto world’s renewed focus on privacy stems from a broader shift in how participants perceive the industry’s trajectory. Bitcoin’s founder Satoshi Nakamoto identified the network’s lack of transaction privacy as a design limitation way back in the 2008 whitepaper. For years, that concern was largely ignored. Today, with privacy-focused mixers like Samourai facing regulatory crackdowns and their founders arrested, with Wasabi shutting down its CoinJoin features and blocking U.S. users in 2024, the question “how do I actually transact privately?” has become urgent.

What’s happening now is philosophical as much as technical. Prominent voices like investor Naval Ravikant have articulated a fundamental thesis: “Transparent cryptocurrencies cannot survive under harsh government crackdowns.” Meanwhile, critics dismiss the rally as artificially pumped, but the underlying debate—privacy as a human right versus regulatory transparency—has real teeth.

Zcash’s Technical Edge Over Its Rival

Zcash launched in 2016 as a fork of Bitcoin, built on academic research from Johns Hopkins University cryptographers who developed the Zerocoin protocol. Where it diverges from Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies is in its implementation of zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge), which allows users to prove transaction validity without revealing sender, receiver, or amount.

Monero, which entered the market earlier, uses ring signatures and provides mandatory privacy. Zcash chose optional privacy through shielded addresses. This design decision proved prescient: Monero faces far harsher regulatory scrutiny precisely because its privacy is enforced by default. The U.S. IRS even hired firms like Chainalysis to study Monero transaction tracing.

But here’s the technical advantage: Zcash’s zk-SNARK approach creates a substantially larger anonymity set when users employ shielded addresses, and critically, it’s quantum-resistant. Monero’s ring signature scheme is not.

The User Experience Breakthrough

For all intents and purposes, none of this technology matters if regular users can’t actually use it. That changed in March 2024 when Zcash’s official wallet, Zashi, launched with dramatically simplified shielding operations. More recently, integration with NEAR Intents—a cross-chain coordination layer—has abstracted away the technical friction entirely. Users can now seamlessly move from transparent blockchains like Ethereum into Zcash’s shielded pool and back without exposing address linkage, all through an intuitive interface.

The Orchard shielded pool, introduced in 2022 with the NU5 upgrade, holds over 4 million ZEC (roughly 25% of circulating supply). This represents the majority of approximately 4.9M total shielded ZEC. Meanwhile, transparent supply has declined from 14M to 11.4M ZEC since the year began—a clear signal of user migration toward privacy.

Infrastructure Remains the Weak Point

Zcash currently operates with 100-120 full nodes, up from a low of 60 earlier this year. Compare that to Bitcoin’s 24,000 nodes and Monero’s 4,000, and the challenge becomes apparent. Running a Zcash node demands substantially more computational resources because shielded transaction verification is cryptographically intensive. The multi-pool architecture and frequent protocol upgrades compound maintenance complexity.

However, developer Sean Bowe is advancing the Tachyon Project, a scaling solution designed to revolutionize shielded throughput without requiring a new protocol altogether. In architectural terms, Tachyon for Zcash resembles what Firedancer aims to do for Solana.

The Broader Cultural Shift

Zcash’s market resurgence reflects something deeper than hype. According to a16z’s 2025 State of Crypto Report, Google searches for privacy-related terms have surged. Critics of Bitcoin’s institutional evolution—dominated by ETFs and centralized custodians—see Zcash as the true “encrypted version of Bitcoin,” a return to early cypherpunk ideals.

The December launch of ZEC perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid crystallized this shift: it signals genuine market appetite for a privacy-focused asset among sophisticated traders and institutions alike. Spot price volatility intensified immediately, proving that liquidity infrastructure now exists for an asset that had been dismissed for years.

What Comes Next

From a protocol standpoint, Zcash hasn’t transformed overnight. But market perception has. The NU6 upgrade in 2024 implemented protocol-level funding vaults for decentralized treasury management. NU7 is in development. The roadmap shows a project that’s actively evolving its governance and technical stack.

Whether this momentum sustains depends on whether the market is rotating toward a genuine conviction about privacy, or whether the rally represents pure speculation. For now, one thing is clear: years of dormancy in Zcash’s market relevance have ended. The question of whether this surge catalyzes sustained network growth—more nodes, more shielded adoption, more institutional integration—remains open. But the conversation itself marks a turning point: in an increasingly transparent financial ecosystem, the ability to transact privately is no longer an afterthought. It’s become valuable again.