The Myth of Zcash's Hundredfold? No, It's an Idealistic 'Revenge'

Do the right thing and leave the rest to time.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

On the K-line chart, the only two points exceeding $1500 are just a few centimeters apart on a mobile phone, yet ZEC has taken nearly 10 years to get here.

This 'antique' reached a peak of 25 BTC/ZEC on Bitfinex at its launch, and even saw an outrageous price of 3299.99 BTC/ZEC on Poloniex (the 'nominal price' equivalent to over $2 million), when Bitcoin was only around $700.

However, that frenzy lasted shorter than the current Meme coins. From the sixth day after its launch, on November 2, 2016, until September 14 of this year, ZEC never again exceeded $1500.

Just a year before its return to the peak, its price hovered around $40.

Ten years later, Bitcoin has increased by hundreds of times. EOS has come and gone, Terra has exploded, and one star project after another has been elevated to the altar, only to quietly retreat. Meanwhile, some 'zombie' coins from years ago, which were 'technically good but had no hope for price', still hide in the corners of exchanges, occasionally pulling a few green candles with the market before silently dropping back.

Among them, Zcash, which carries the predictions of a group of utopian enthusiasts from America in the last century, after falling to a historical low of less than $16 in July 2024, has clawed its way back from the grave, achieving nearly a hundredfold increase in two years.

The Obsession of Cypherpunks

In the 1990s, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn worked at David Chaum's DigiCash.

The gears of fate began to turn the moment Zooko stepped into DigiCash. This 'blonde kid' with long hair in his youth would later become a well-known cryptographer and co-founder of Zcash, also proposing the famous trilemma known as the 'Zooko Triangle': a naming/identification system in a network protocol cannot simultaneously be memorable, decentralized, and secure.

Young Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (far left)

David Chaum, who founded DigiCash, can be considered the patriarch of cypherpunks. In 1983, he published a paper titled 'Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments', where the core blind signature technology allows banks to confirm payments without knowing what you purchased. Six years after the paper was published, Chaum established DigiCash, launching the first true 'digital cash' eCash in human history while also helping traditional banks facilitate privacy payments.

On May 27, 1994, DigiCash processed the first real electronic cash transaction. Subsequently, banks like Mark Twain Bank, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse adopted the technology to experiment with small anonymous payments, with thousands of users and hundreds of merchants participating at its peak.

However, this product, which was 20 years ahead of Bitcoin's birth, was too advanced for a market that struggled with credit card transactions. On the day the company went bankrupt in 1998, Zooko was present. This seed was buried in his heart for nearly twenty years.

After DigiCash closed, Zooko did not give up and turned to MojoNation, a decentralized network that allowed strangers to rent hard drives and bandwidth from each other, with a token called Mojo circulating in the system. This project also ended in failure, but Zooko's faith in a form of digital cash that could not be watched by anyone never wavered.

When Bitcoin's mainnet officially launched in 2009, Zooko was among the first to cheer for it. However, after the initial excitement faded, he noticed a fatal flaw: Bitcoin's ledger is completely public, allowing anyone to see how much money you have in your wallet and who you have done business with.

Bitcoin is a better eCash, but it is still not the perfect currency in Zooko's eyes.

The 'Apocalyptic Six Riders' of Zcash

The cryptography community, like Zooko, is constantly searching for the 'perfect' answer.

In 2013, cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University proposed the Zerocoin protocol, which evolved into the Zerocash paper the following year. The core of the paper is the zk-SNARKs algorithm, which has been mentioned and used countless times in the current Web3 industry, allowing 'everyone to verify the legality of transactions, yet no one knows the content of the transactions' for the first time to move from theory to practice.

The concept of zero-knowledge proofs was not originally proposed by Zerocash, but Zerocash was the first to achieve a practical design that simultaneously realizes decentralization and end-to-end encrypted privacy. Zooko later stated in multiple interviews that he felt 'extremely excited' upon seeing this paper. In 2015, Zooko teamed up with the authors of the paper to establish the company Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which later changed its name to Electric Coin Company, now the operating company of Zcash (ECC).

Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant signed a check for $715,000 at the company's inception. In subsequent funding rounds, 17 investors raised about $3 million, including Barry Silbert from Digital Currency Group and Pantera.

With everything in place, the countdown to Zcash's mainnet launch began. Zooko and ECC prepared for the most ceremonial 'opening ceremony' in cryptocurrency history for the launch of Zcash.

zk-SNARKs require a set of public parameters, and the process of generating these parameters produces a kind of 'toxic waste'; whoever gets it can print coins without anyone knowing. You can think of this set of parameters as Zcash's 'initial password'; whoever holds the password can forge zero-knowledge proofs to mint or double-spend ZEC, essentially having free rein on this chain.

On the launch day, a total of six people participated in the parameter generation ceremony for Zcash. The three identified participants included Zooko himself, Zcash technical advisor Andrew Miller, and Coin Center research director Peter Van Valkenburgh. To prevent targeted attacks, Zooko also invited three anonymous individuals.

One participant, known as Moses Spears, was later revealed to be Derek Hinch, a security engineer at NCC Group, which was secretly hired to both honestly execute the ceremony and attempt to 'attack' it from within for security validation; another participant known as Fabrice Renault was later revealed to be Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd, whom Zooko specifically invited because he was skeptical about the entire ceremony. Zooko believed that having critics participate would actually increase credibility.

As for the last anonymous participant, John Dobbertin, his identity was only revealed six years later in 2022.

In October 2016, six people spread across three continents took turns generating their segment of parameters on physically isolated computers, destroying the random numbers along with the hardware once completed. Some wrapped their machines in electromagnetic shielding to prevent signal leakage, while others burned their computers. As long as one of the six was honest and one of the six segments was destroyed, Zcash's ZK system would be secure.

On October 28, 2016, Zcash's mainnet went live. Economically, Zcash almost copied Bitcoin, with a total supply of 21 million coins and approximately four-year halving. In fact, because Zcash's average block time is two and a half minutes, the block reward was also designed to be 12.5 ZEC. However, to reduce early risks, Zcash chose to let the block reward linearly increase to 12.5 ZEC over the first 20,000 blocks.

Due to the slow-start mechanism, the supply of ZEC in the market was extremely limited, causing the price to skyrocket. However, as supply was released, the price halved again and again within days, dropping below $50 by early 2017. In addition to the 'lack of supply', the ECC team also included 'private goods': for the first four years, 20% of the reward for each block went directly to the founding team, employees, advisors, and early shareholders, totaling 2.1 million coins over four years, accounting for a full 10% of the total supply.

During the days when ZEC's price climbed back to four digits, F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun shared a chat record on X from six years ago where Zcash members confused EST and EDT time, followed by a post criticizing the practice of directly distributing part of the block rewards to the early team. Although the price rose, it could not be compared to the contemporaneous hype surrounding Hyperliquid.

Unreliable and chaotic, this was indeed the early color of Zcash. And this seemed to foreshadow the bumps along the way.

From Glory to Obscurity

In September 2017, Snowden tweeted that Zcash's privacy technology made it the most interesting Bitcoin alternative.

By 2017, Snowden had already obtained asylum in Russia. Although it had been four years since the first exposure of the U.S. government's large-scale collection of citizens' privacy in 2013, its influence was already sufficient for the still stumbling cryptocurrency at that time.

In that era when faith was still being discussed, Snowden's endorsement instantly boosted the faith factor. In January 2018, at the peak of the bull market, ZEC touched around $800.

Snowden suddenly commented on Zcash, and many initially thought that the application of zero-knowledge proofs in cryptocurrency aligned with Snowden's advocacy for privacy rights. However, in 2022, the YouTube account Zcash Media released a video in which Snowden personally admitted that he was "John Dobbertin," who participated in the Zcash launch ceremony.

Later, according to a report by Fortune magazine and Zooko's recollections, Zooko became interested in Snowden after hearing his privacy-related speech at Bard College. Subsequently, Zooko connected with Snowden through Marcia Hofmann, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In the fall of 2016, the two had a video call using highly encrypted and physically isolated methods, during which Zooko gave Snowden the pseudonym "John Dobbertin," honoring the German cryptographer Hans Dobbertin.

After their communication, Snowden agreed to participate in the Zcash launch ceremony on the condition that he would not receive any compensation or hold any shares, purely for the public good.

With privacy advocates on stage and a crypto bull market celebration, this became the last highlight moment before Zcash's resurgence this year.

However, Zcash was still too ahead of its time. The early zk-SNARKs took nearly a minute to generate a private transaction on a high-memory computer. Most users opted for convenience and directly used transparent addresses for transactions. It was ironic that the world's most private currency and its most private features went unused.

Even more disheartening was that the chain that first adopted ZK technology saw little use, yet its technology fed others. Vitalik praised zk-SNARKs, and in 2017, Ethereum validated zk-SNARK proofs for the first time during the Metropolis upgrade. The spark of zero-knowledge proofs spread throughout the industry, and the brief period when zero-knowledge proofs dominated headlines due to ZK Rollup saw the igniter left frozen in place.

Winter Has Arrived, But Is Spring Far Behind?

What followed was an eight-year-long three-layer strangulation.

The first layer came from regulation. In 2018, after the Coincheck massive theft incident, Japan's Financial Services Agency pressured Coincheck to delist XMR, Zcash, and DASH. In 2019, OKEx's Korean site followed suit, and in November 2020, ShapeShift delisted them, followed by Bittrex in January 2021.

The logic was simple: exchanges did not want to attract trouble, and privacy coins became negative assets on compliance reports. In February 2024, Binance directly delisted XMR, causing a stir in the entire sector. ZEC, due to retaining transparent addresses and view keys, barely maintained a sliver of compliance survival space. This design compromise, which seemed like a blemish at the time, later turned out to be a lifeline.

In August 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a subpoena to the Zcash Foundation. Then-SEC Chairman Gary Gensler was challenging countless cryptocurrencies to "prove they are not securities," and Zcash was no exception.

The second layer came from the price itself. ZEC peaked at $800 in 2018, only to drop to around $30 in 2019. During the 2021 bull market, where Bitcoin and Ethereum reached new highs and even Dogecoin soared, ZEC only rebounded to over $300, failing to even touch half of its previous high. For a crypto project, not rising during a bull market is the harshest death sentence.

By July 2024, ZEC had fallen to a historic low of $15.91, dropping out of the top fifty by market cap. That year, it was declared dead countless times, with the audience at conferences dwindling year by year, and its ranking in market software continuously declining. Old holders joked that they were archaeologists, guarding a relic waiting for it to appreciate. Once considered "the most interesting Bitcoin alternative," it became an archaeological object in the crypto world.

The third layer came from internal strife. The expiration of founder rewards triggered a prolonged governance battle over how to distribute the development fund and to whom, leading to endless community disputes. ECC cut staff to save costs, and finances became tight. In December 2023, Zooko stepped down as CEO, handing the reins to Josh Swihart. Thus, the first era of Zcash came to an end.

While the price was dead, the engineering did not stop.

On October 29, 2018, the Sapling upgrade was activated, reducing the generation time for shielded transactions from nearly a minute to just a few seconds, making mobile wallets possible for the first time. On May 31, 2022, the NU5 upgrade replaced trusted setup with Halo 2 recursive proofs, eliminating the need for the ritual of burning computers, and unified addresses hid three funding pools within a single address.

Then came the new Zebra node and the Zashi mobile wallet, which launched in early 2024, offering default privacy and easy usability. Privacy finally transformed from a geek toy into something ordinary people could easily access with a scan, with the proportion of private transactions peaking at nearly sixty percent.

Changes quietly reflected on-chain. The amount of ZEC in the shielded pool rose from 5% of the total supply a few years ago to over 4.5 million coins by Q4 2025, accounting for about 28% of the total supply. On November 23, 2024, the second halving occurred, cutting the block reward to 1.5625 coins, with only about 1,800 new supplies added daily to the network.

They spent eight years finally transforming a conceptual race car into a mass-produced vehicle capable of highway speeds.

The ignition began on October 1, 2025. Naval Ravikant, one of the 17 investors from ten years ago, wrote on X: "Bitcoin is the insurance of fiat currency, and Zcash is the insurance of Bitcoin."

He added that Bitcoin's public ledger makes it impossible for even Satoshi Nakamoto to use Bitcoin with peace of mind. This statement was like a match thrown into a dry pile of firewood, causing ZEC to surge from $54 to over $156 within a week, and a month later, it reached $700.

Initially, people thought this was just another moment of reflection brought on by a big shot's endorsement, but the developments exceeded most people's expectations.

Arthur Hayes's family office, Maelstrom, began accumulating ZEC starting in Q3 2025, making it their second-largest holding after Bitcoin. He publicly stated he would sell Bitcoin to make room for privacy positions and even set target prices of $1,000 and $10,000.

The long-suspended sword also fell at this time. The SEC's investigation that began in August 2023 concluded in January 2026 without taking any action. In the same month, a false alarm occurred when all ECC staff collectively left due to a split with the parent organization's board, quickly forming ZODL and securing over $25 million in investments from Paradigm, a16z, and Coinbase Ventures within three months.

For other projects, internal strife is almost equivalent to an obituary, but for the rising ZEC, cutting losses and establishing a new path was not entirely bad news.

Meanwhile, the channels on exchanges began to open one by one.

In April this year, Robinhood listed ZEC, providing retail investors in the U.S. with an investment channel.

On May 6, ZEC surged nearly 30% in a single day, triggering over $46.7 million in short positions.

Grayscale had established a Zcash trust as early as 2017, and on August 25, 2026, this trust officially converted into a spot ETF listed on the NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCS, marking the first time a privacy coin entered U.S. stock accounts. The publicly traded company Cypherpunk Technologies even made ZEC a treasury asset. This company, formerly a cancer drug firm named Leap Therapeutics, changed its name in November 2025, going all-in on the privacy sector, and with the support of the Winklevoss brothers' capital, it aggressively acquired assets, holding over 323,000 coins by August 2026, accounting for 1.92% of the circulating supply.

The Pricing of Privacy

Zcash's ten years have actually only answered one question: How much is a right idea worth when born at the wrong time? The answer is $15.91. But what if it were born at the right time?

Ten years ago, everyone knew privacy was important, but because Web3 was still too early and ZK was too "heavy," it simply did not meet usable standards. Today, the rapid finality of ZK has made ZKsync a preferred choice for tokenizing RWA in its early days, while Brevis's ZK Data Coprocessor + Pico ZKVM technology calculates gas costs/rebate amounts off-chain and then generates zero-knowledge proofs for on-chain verification, achieving trustless liquidity incentives and rebate distribution for Uniswap V4 Hook.

Although Zcash is merely a "currency" that allows for private transfers and is unrelated to these advanced applications, privacy, bolstered by Web3, has genuinely become one of the demands, regardless of whether the scenario is white or gray.

For a long time after its inception, Bitcoin also served as a medium for gray transactions, and even today, it still does. Zcash has endured for ten years to reach this stage, but this is also the most authentic dream of the cypherpunks who shouted in the 1980s, "The strong want freedom, and the weak want privacy."

After nearly half a century of trials, having gone through skepticism, internal strife, and regulatory scrutiny, privacy is no longer a fleeting moment at the end of every bull market in Web3, but has become a firework ignited by Web3, blooming in the night sky.