On September 4, the price of Zcash (ZEC) briefly rose above $1,000, the highest since 2018. The token is up about 20.75% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
At press time, ZEC is trading at $1,002.
The privacy-focused coin’s market capitalization stands at $16.9 billion. At press time, ZEC ranks tenth by market capitalization.
The rally coincided with a broader market rebound. Overnight on September 4, bitcoin tested $82,000, and Ethereum broke above $2,500. Within the privacy-coin segment, Zcash is outpacing the largest assets; the group’s 24-hour reading is up 15.02%, according to CoinMarketCap.
Activity is also concentrated in derivatives. According to CoinGlass at press time, 24-hour ZEC futures volume exceeded $8 billion versus $694 million on the spot market. Open interest reached $2.3 billion.
Grayscale lists Zcash ETF on NYSE Arca
One event preceding the latest leg of the rally was Grayscale’s exchange-traded product launch. On August 25, The Zcash ETF under the ticker ZCSH began trading on NYSE Arca.
The Zcash ETF — Built by Grayscale (Ticker: $ZCSH) begins trading today @ZcashETF.
The world’s first Zcash ETF offering exposure to $ZEC, now accessible from brokerage or investment accounts.
Why $ZEC?
⟶ Zcash shares key features with Bitcoin: a 21 million… pic.twitter.com/nuaR2HBTWx
— Grayscale (@Grayscale) August 25, 2026
According to Grayscale, this is the first U.S.-listed exchange-traded product dedicated solely to Zcash. The company also calls ZCSH the world’s first ETP with spot exposure to ZEC. As of September 3, ZCSH had $414.7 million in assets and held 428,613 ZEC.
In parallel, the company amplified the investment thesis around privacy. In a published report, Grayscale analysts linked advances in AI to potential growth in demand for tools that protect financial data.
“Privacy is not a niche feature of money, but part of what allows it to work,” the paper says.
Analysts said artificial intelligence could reduce the cost of and scale matching public blockchain addresses with information from external sources. Against this backdrop, Zcash’s private transaction features could see additional demand, Grayscale said.
Pools
Amid the price rally, the amount of coins within Zcash’s shielded infrastructure remains high. According to ZecStats on September 4, the four pools hold about 4.86 million ZEC — 28.8% of the outstanding supply of roughly 16.91 million ZEC.
Over the past seven days, net inflows into the shielded pools totaled about 57,000 ZEC.
Fully shielded transactions use zero-knowledge proofs and allow hiding the sender, recipient, and amount. Zcash also supports other transaction types, so not every transaction hides all three parameters.
On August 29, the Zakura team introduced a set of libraries that, in certain scenarios, cuts private transaction preparation from more than three seconds to under 200 ms.
On June 5, ZEC fell 48% to $302.48 after a critical vulnerability was found in the protocol. The bug allowed infinite and undetectable creation of counterfeit coins.
After an emergency fix, on July 28 developers activated Ironwood. The upgrade introduced a new shielded pool to replace Orchard and a turnstile mechanism to verify supply integrity during fund migrations.
In August, Cypherpunk Technologies announced the launch of mining unit Cypherpunk Mining, which will mine Zcash with equipment totaling about 4.2 GSol/s. The firm estimates this is roughly 18% of the anonymous cryptocurrency’s network hash rate.
