Bearish bets on a token that institutional investors were quietly accumulating turned sour on Tuesday.
Zcash ($ZEC) ripped nearly 30% over 24 hours to $543 in Asian hours Tuesday, taking its weekly gain to 60% and its 30-day return to over 110%, per CoinGecko data.
Volume crossed $1.3 billion in the past day and the rally triggered nearly $62 million in total liquidations across roughly 5,000 traders. Of that, almost $60 million was shorts while longs lost just over $3 million, making $ZEC-tracked futures the second highest liquidations behind bitcoin in an unusual move.
The price surge came as prominent crypto fund Multicoin Capital disclosed it had been building a significant $ZEC position since February.
“Zcash is a return to the cypherpunk ideals crypto was founded on,” fund partner Tushar Jain wrote on X. He framed the thesis around California’s “wealth seizures” – calling those a warning shot for what comes next as governments globally move to claim more visibility over private holdings.
“Bitcoin is censorship-resistant, no one can freeze your BTC or stop you from using it,” Jain wrote. “But that doesn’t stop the state from seizing known holdings through wealth taxes.”
The California Initiative 25-0024 is a proposed one-time 5% tax on residents with over $1 billion in net worth, including unrealized gains. The initiative is projected to raise around $100 billion, if passed.
Jain’s pitch is that bitcoin is good for transactions but transparent for balances, and a tax authority armed with a blockchain explorer can seize what it can see. $ZEC‘s shielded pool, by design, hides what it cannot – boosting its appeal as a private asset for everyone.
Roughly 30% of all circulating $ZEC, or about 5 million coins out of 16.7 million, now sits in shielded addresses, up from 8% in early 2024, as CoinDesk Research wrote in March.
The shielded pool uses zero-knowledge cryptography – that proves something is true without showing how – to hide transaction details such as sender, recipient, and amount.
Public $ZEC transactions have stayed flat at around 8,500 per day, which a casual observer might read as no real growth. But actual activity is happening inside the shielded pool, where transactions don’t show up on standard counters by design.
CoinDesk Research published in March that Zcash had reached “encryption supremacy” — the point where privacy-preserving networks become dominant — on the back of three converging forces: AI tools that can de-anonymize users on transparent blockchains by tracking transaction patterns, quantum computing emerging as a credible threat to the cryptography that secures most current crypto wallets, and quarterly trading volumes exceeding $100 billion as capital rotated toward encryption-based privacy.
$ZEC trades at $543, up more than 1,400% on the year. The token still sits below its November 2025 high near $750, leaving room for the breakout to extend if the current demand holds. The next resistance is the $600 to $650 zone where $ZEC consolidated through late 2025.
What traders watch from here is whether the shielded pool keeps expanding alongside the price move. Past $ZEC rallies have coincided with shielded supply growth that lagged the move, suggesting speculative participation. This rally is happening alongside record-high shielded supply, which is closer to the on-chain signature of actual adoption.
