Zcash Hits Eight-Year High as Futures Bets Nearly Double

Zcash briefly reached $888—its highest price level since 2018—before pulling back to around $843, up nearly 7% over 24 hours and roughly 48% since August 20.

The privacy coin, which trades as ZEC, remains well short of a record all-time high of $3,191.93, set in October 2016 during the coin’s earliest days of trading when liquidity was thin. The coin dropped as low as $16 just two years ago and has been on a remarkable run since, appreciating by over 1,800% in the last year alone.

ZEC perpetual futures open interest nearly doubled from $962.5 million on August 19 to $1.8 billion Monday, while 24-hour volume reached $5.3 billion, according to crypto derivatives data platform Loris Tools. The average eight-hour funding rate was 0.0106%, meaning traders paid a premium to hold long positions.

ZEC futures let traders bet on Zcash’s price without owning the coin, often with leverage. Open interest tracks outstanding contracts, while positive funding signals stronger demand for long positions—raising the risk of a short squeeze if ZEC rises or long liquidations if it falls.

Interest in Zcash grew over the last year as investors searched for an alternative to Bitcoin with stronger privacy protections. Zcash, a type of privacy coin, makes it difficult to track transactions on the network by shielding balances, unlike traditional cryptocurrencies—such as Bitcoin or Ethereum—which are transparent by default.

Interest in the coin further grew after Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash Trust into an ETF in November. The proposal is still under review.

What bullishness the Grayscale news may have garnered was tested in June, when ZEC plunged from $635 to $309 after developers using Claude Opus 4.8 disclosed a flaw in its Orchard shielded pool that could have enabled undetectable counterfeiting.

Developers issued an emergency patch in June, then activated the Ironwood upgrade in July. Ironwood retired Orchard and introduced accounting safeguards designed to trap any counterfeit ZEC in the old pool. Developers could not determine whether the flaw had been exploited.

Winklevoss-backed Cypherpunk Technologies launched a Zcash mining operation in August that it estimates represents 18% of the network’s hashrate. The company holds about 323,394 ZEC, around $268 million, and aims to acquire 5% of the circulating supply.