Zcash Storms into Top 20 Crypto as Price Rally Continues: Details

Privacy token Zcash (ZEC) has entered the top 20 cryptos by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data. Zcash now ranks as the 17th largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $8.53 billion, ahead of SUI and Hedera (HBAR).

Zcash, one of the oldest and best-known privacy coins, has steadily risen since September and is up over 700% since then. On a yearly basis, ZEC is up 1,236%, marking strong performance among major cryptocurrencies.

In the last few weeks, there has been a resurgence in the privacy narrative with tokens in this sector, especially rallying. Despite the market dip seen this week, Zcash went ahead to mark six straight days in green since Oct. 30, with today being the seventh.

At press time, Zcash was up 14.46% in the last 24 hours to $524 as most crypto assets traded in red, and up 46% weekly.

Why has Zcash soared?

In a recent analysis, Galaxy Research unravels the reason behind Zcash’s 8x surge over the past month. Zcash launched in 2016 as a Bitcoin fork, allowing users to shield transactions with zero-knowledge proofs and directly addressing the broader privacy limitations Satoshi acknowledged.

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, acknowledged the network’s privacy limits in the 2008 whitepaper.

However, for most of its life, ZEC has traded poorly, underperforming BTC and overshadowed by Monero. In a sudden comeback, the price of ZEC took a U-turn, outperforming the broader market and even overtaking Monero’s market capitalization.

Galaxy traced Zcash’s surge to a resurgence in the privacy narrative. As highlighted in a16z’s 2025 State of Crypto report, Google search interest in privacy-related terms has surged in recent months. Hyperliquid listed ZEC perps a few weeks ago, allowing traders on the popular decentralized exchange to take leveraged positions on the privacy coin.