Zcash, the privacy focused proof of work chain that spent the past month as crypto’s best performing large cap, is now dealing with the downside of that run: leveraged longs flushed out, an ETF that just posted its first week of outflows, and a cross chain rival opening new venues for ZEC sales.
ZEC traded around $1,276 on Saturday, down about 4.6 percent on the day after falling from its late September peak above $1,400. The asset rose as much as 125 percent in 30 days earlier this month, an advance that lifted its market cap to roughly $19.48 billion and pushed it into the top 10 crypto assets by value. But two data points from the past week point to cooling momentum. A liquidation cascade removed about $23.87 million in ZEC positions across leverage venues, and Grayscale’s spot Zcash ETF recorded $77.6 million in single day outflows, reversing the prior week’s inflows.
Across the full week the ETF lost $93.6 million, its first net outflow since launching in August. Selling pressure had been building through the week, with Thursday marking the largest 24 hour drop of the period at 6.4 percent, well before the weekend flush.
What the upgrade actually changes
Network upgrade NU7, targeted for mainnet on November 5 after a testnet go or no go decision on October 20, cuts Zcash’s block time from 75 seconds to 25, a threefold increase in throughput. The block reward will be reduced proportionally to keep the total issuance schedule unchanged. The testnet itself activates Monday, October 6, the same day Ethereum runs its Sepolia Glamsterdam test fork.
Ahead of that, the Ironwood fix that activated in July capped ZEC leaving the old Orchard pool after a counterfeiting scare. The current roadmap pairs this with post quantum security work through Project Tachyon and shielded pool accounting fixes that came with NU6.3.
THORChain opens a new venue for ZEC
THORChain, the cross chain exchange protocol, activated its Zcash liquidity pool Saturday after a network wide churn of validator nodes. Every THORChain node now tracks the Zcash blockchain. Native ZEC swaps have not opened yet, with the team holding back due to low pool depth, but the arrival marks the first time ZEC will trade natively against other chains without a centralized intermediary.
Zcash supporters asked whether the pool would support shielded transactions, an important question for a chain whose core value proposition is privacy. THORChain did not immediately answer. The integration work landed in the protocol’s v3.16.0 upgrade, which added Zcash specific UTXO handling, adjusted RPC logic and added ZEC to THORChain’s enshrined oracle. Network upgrade NU7 on November 5 will make shielded transactions cheaper.
The venue matters for a second reason too. ZEC spent years confined to a small set of exchanges, and some of them delisted the asset entirely as regulatory pressure on privacy coins grew in 2023 and 2024. A decentralized pool routes around that constraint, giving holders a new exit path that no exchange listing department controls.
Fundamental questions stay unresolved
Not everyone sees the rally as durable. F2Pool co-founder Chun Wang said in a recent interview that ZEC’s advance reflects narrative buying rather than stronger fundamentals, arguing that ETF demand, tight available supply and short covering had lifted the price faster than network activity had grown. Delphi Digital’s own on chain work shows the shielded pool grew from 11 percent to 30 percent of total supply in a single year, a stat bulls cite as evidence of real usage and skeptics read as evidence of concentrated speculative holding.
| Metric | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| ZEC price, Saturday | about $1,276 | down 4.6 percent in 24 hours, 13.9 percent on the week |
| 30 day gain | about 125 percent | top 10 by market cap at roughly $19.48 billion |
| ZEC ETF weekly flow | minus $93.6 million | first net outflow since August launch |
| ZEC ETF single day flow | minus $77.6 million | latest session, reversing prior week gains |
| Liquidations, Oct 3 | about $23.87 million | market wide leverage flush hitting ZEC longs |
| Ironwood fix | July 28 activation | caps counterfeit exposure from Orchard pool bug |
| NU7 target | November 5 | block time cut from 75 to 25 seconds |
A year in three numbers
ZEC spent late 2025 ranked near 82nd by market cap and traded below $50. Its market cap this weekend sits above $19 billion. Between those two data points sat an Orchard pool vulnerability that nearly broke the asset’s monetary integrity, the Ironwood fix that sealed it, a 2026 rally that put ZEC back in the top 10, and a Grayscale spot ETF that finally brought regulated US access to the token. That compressed timeline is unusual even by crypto standards, and it is why the current unwind has drawn so much attention from traders who watched a similar arc play out with other privacy coins a cycle ago.
The market cap figure itself sits awkwardly against a network with transaction volume and daily active addresses far below chains worth a fraction of that valuation. That gap is the reason skeptics keep calling the move top heavy, and each new venue for trading ZEC, whether a cross chain pool or an ETF redeem flow, now adds another exit route that did not exist earlier in the year.
Bulls counter that the upgrades are real and measurable. Faster blocks, quantum resistant transactions and a broader shielded pool all point toward something the network lacked during its first year hype cycle in 2016 and 2017: an architecture designed for sustained rather than speculative usage. Whether that matters at $1,276 or $1,076 is the question traders will answer over the next two weeks as the testnet goes live and the market decides whether this was a revaluation or a bubble.