Edited by | Wu Shuo Blockchain
TL;DR:
· On September 4, 2026, ZEC broke through $1,000 during intraday trading, and on September 7 it reached a high of about $1,256.92. On that day, the close was up roughly 41% versus September 2. At the time, about $34.5 million worth of ZEC short positions were liquidated over the prior 24 hours, which could further amplify the rally.
· Investors such as Barry Silbert, the Winklevoss brothers, Multicoin, and Naval have publicly supported or built positions in Zcash. The core logic is that financial privacy is becoming increasingly scarce, and the growth of public ledgers and AI data analysis may drive demand for privacy assets.
· Institutional allocations have extended into investment products and company treasuries: Grayscale’s ZCSH was upgraded to an exchange-traded product on August 25, 2026; Cypherpunk, backed by Winklevoss Capital, when it launched its treasury strategy, had already invested about $50 million to buy 203,775 ZEC.
· Arthur Hayes previously treated Zcash as an important target for privacy investment, but on June 5 he disclosed a full sell-off due to the Orchard vulnerability issue, while also keeping open the possibility of buying back again. His prior bullish statements cannot directly represent his current holdings.
· On September 8, Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, criticized that Zcash’s rise was mainly driven by “narrative-driven buying.” He argued that market-cap rankings cannot replace real usage demand, and questioned its initial allocation, development-funding mechanism, governance, and security history.
· In Zcash’s first four years, 20% of block rewards were allocated as the Founders’ Reward, totaling about 10% of the eventual maximum supply; in January 2026, the ECC team collectively resigned due to a governance dispute, but then continued developing Zcash rather than abandoning the project.
· The Orchard vulnerability theory suggests it could theoretically lead to an issuance of undetectable fake ZEC; the relevant emergency response was completed on June 2. Ironwood, enabled on July 28, constrains circulating supply by limiting the old pool and publicly accounting for funds moved out, but it cannot be used to assert that the historical vulnerability was never exploited.
· Whether Zcash can support long-term monetary value still depends on whether privacy demand can be converted into sustained usage, and whether supply security and governance can earn trust; celebrity endorsements, investment products, and treasury buying in and of themselves do not equal growth in on-chain payment demand.
On September 4, 2026, Zcash (ZEC) broke through $1,000 intraday; on September 7 it peaked at about $1,256.92 and closed at about $1,146.61, up roughly 41% from the approximately $814.84 close on September 2. Zcash again became one of the most closely watched assets in the crypto market.
According to CoinDesk’s report on September 4, ZEC was up about 94% over the past month at the time, and over 2,300% over the past year.
Behind the rally are both renewed attention to privacy assets and leverage trading that fanned the flames. CoinDesk’s cited data in the above report said that in the past 24 hours, the scale of ZEC leveraged position liquidations was about $36.6 million, of which shorts accounted for about $34.5 million. Buying pressure created by shorts being forced to cover may further amplify the rally. However, these figures only show that a short-squeeze factor existed in the market, and cannot be used to conclude that all of the increase came from a short squeeze.
As the market hotly debated whether Zcash could become a “better Bitcoin,” on September 8 Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, published a post criticizing that the recent rally was driven more by “narrative-driven buying.” He said that an increase in market cap does not mean the project has already earned a position commensurate with its ranking. He pointed the finger at Zcash’s initial allocation, development funding, governance conflicts, and security history.
On one side is the privacy narrative continuously reinforced by prominent investors; on the other is the historical problem being resurfaced by veteran mining figures. The core of this debate is what value the market is truly buying into.
Who is backing Zcash—from crypto investors to institutional investment channels
Over the past year, multiple well-known investors and institutions have publicly supported or positioned for Zcash, including Barry Silbert (founder of DCG), the Winklevoss twins (co-founders of Gemini), Arthur Hayes (co-founder of BitMEX), Multicoin Capital, and Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant. Their bullish rationales differ in emphasis; some support has also materialized as token investments and company treasury positions. But none of the parties’ stances and holdings are always unchanged.
Barry Silbert: privacy assets may take on part of Bitcoin’s capital.
Barry Silbert, founder of DCG, is one of Zcash’s most prominent supporters. In February 2026, in New York at Bitcoin Investor Week, he said that in the future, funds on the order of 5% to 10% of Bitcoin’s capital scale could rotate into privacy assets such as Zcash. He still looked favorably on Bitcoin, but believed privacy coins offered another asymmetric opportunity.
This logic does not require Zcash to completely replace Bitcoin. As long as financial privacy creates an independent demand for asset allocation, it could attract some of the funds that were previously concentrated in BTC. However, the 5% to 10% is his prediction—neither an already-realized flow of funds nor a promise that all the money will go to ZEC.
Institutional investment channels are also changing. The Grayscale website shows that ZCSH was upgraded to an exchange-traded product on August 25, 2026. It gives investors a route to gain exposure to ZEC through a securities account, but the listing of a product itself cannot be equated with ongoing net inflows, nor can it directly prove growth in on-chain privacy payment demand.
The Winklevoss brothers: viewing privacy as a scarce asset and betting on it through company treasuries.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of Gemini, provide support that combines both ideology and capital action. Tyler, when discussing Cypherpunk, emphasized that privacy is a prerequisite for personal freedom and autonomy, and as life shifts online, it becomes increasingly scarce. In September 2026, Tyler cited a video from Cypherpunk and commented that AI is accelerating the loss of societal privacy—“Zcash is the antidote.”
In November 2025, Cypherpunk Technologies, backed by Winklevoss Capital, published its Zcash treasury strategy. At that time it had already bought about 203,775 ZEC with roughly $50 million, with an average cost of about $245 per coin. These figures reflect the holdings at the time the strategy was launched and cannot be treated as the latest data today.
For this kind of supporter, ZEC is not only a payment tool, but also a privacy asset that can be held long term. The company treasuries of listed companies turn this viewpoint into an actionable buy strategy.
Arthur Hayes: previously bet on privacy demand, then fully exited due to the vulnerability issue.
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, previously placed Zcash at the center of his privacy-investment logic. In May 2026, during an interview on The Rollup, he linked ZEC with NEAR, arguing that the former is the asset people think of first when seeking privacy, while the latter’s cross-chain transaction tool can help facilitate the movement of assets. He connected this demand to the surveillance capabilities brought by AI, big tech companies, and governments.
Hayes also said at the time that even if his expectations for potential upside in NEAR were higher, his Zcash position would still be larger, because higher potential returns come with higher risk.
However, on June 5, 2026, Hayes publicly stated that due to the Orchard vulnerability issue he sold all of his ZEC holdings. He argued that even if the possibility of unauthorized minting was unlikely, he could not cryptographically rule out that risk, and it still shook his investment logic. He also said that if his concerns were proven unfounded, he would reconsider buying. Therefore, bullish statements from May cannot directly represent his position in September, and a June disclosure of exiting cannot be inferred as having zero holdings at present.
Tushar Jain and Multicoin: shifting from “privacy is only a feature” to holding privacy assets.
Multicoin’s shift is especially notable. In 2019, the firm published a piece arguing that privacy should be a feature possessed by valuable crypto assets, and that users should not be forced to sell BTC or ETH in order to obtain privacy—taking on the risk of holding another token instead.
But by May 2026, co-founder Tushar Jain had publicly stated that Multicoin had built up large ZEC positions since February of that year. He argued that while Bitcoin can resist protocol-level freezes, if outsiders can link assets to real holders, holders may still face off-chain pressure; therefore, privacy-protected store-of-value assets have an independent need.
This means that, at least in this institution’s view, privacy has evolved from being an add-on feature into an attribute sufficient to support a standalone investment thesis.
Naval Ravikant: Zcash is an insurance policy beyond Bitcoin.
Around October 2025, Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant summarized another bullish logic in one sentence: “Bitcoin is an insurance against fiat currency; Zcash is an insurance against Bitcoin.” This does not equate to claiming that Bitcoin is destined to fail; it is more like preserving an alternative path for needs that BTC cannot sufficiently satisfy.
Taken together, the supporters’ shared bet is this: the more assets there are on a public ledger, the stronger the data-analysis capabilities, and the more valuable financial privacy becomes. But moving from “privacy has value” to “ZEC deserves today’s price” still requires verifying, in the middle, through usage demand, security, and market acceptance.
Wang Chun’s rebuttal: Does “a better Bitcoin” hide the historical problems?
Wang Chun’s criticism first targets the relationship between market cap and fundamentals. He argued that being close in ranking to Solana and Hyperliquid does not mean Zcash has real usage demand comparable to those networks. A privacy narrative can attract buyers, but it does not automatically solve a problem that a project has been accumulating over the long term.
His first challenge was about allocation fairness. In the first four years after Zcash went live, 20% of block rewards were set aside for the Founders’ Reward, allocated to relevant parties such as the founders, employees, advisors, and early investors. In total this corresponded to about 2.1 million ZEC—10% of the 21 million supply cap. This mechanism had been made public before launch; the controversy was whether it aligned with the “fair money” idea emphasized by supporters.
Here it needs to be distinguished: these tokens are distributed gradually as blocks are produced; they were not pre-mined by minting all at once before launch. After the original Founders’ Reward ended, Zcash continued to provide protocol-layer funding to the ecosystem through mechanisms such as a development fund. However, the beneficiaries and governance rules changed compared with the earlier period, so it cannot be simply written as early investors always taking a cut at the original proportions.
This disagreement also has a real background in resource allocation: taking money from block rewards to support development helps provide budgets for long-term R&D. At the same time, it turns “who has the authority to decide where the funds go, and who should receive rewards” into an ongoing governance issue.
The second challenge concerns organizational governance. In January 2026, the Electric Coin Company (ECC) team collectively resigned after conflicts arose with the parent nonprofit organization, the Bootstrap Board. The then-CEO, Josh Swihart, said changes in working conditions prevented the team from carrying out its duties effectively. Bootstrap, in turn, attributed the dispute to governance and legal issues.
However, this does not mean developers collectively abandoned Zcash. At the time, Swihart clearly stated that the team would form a new company to continue developing the protocol, and that the protocol itself would not be affected by the personnel changes. Therefore, this incident can show that there was a serious fracture in the governance relationship, but it cannot be used to describe Zcash as a project with no one maintaining it.
The third, and most direct, challenge to currency credibility is the Orchard privacy pool vulnerability.
According to disclosures from Shielded Labs, on May 29, 2026 a security researcher, Taylor Hornby, discovered a serious vulnerability. The issue had already existed since Orchard was enabled in May 2022, and theoretically could allow an attacker to mint unlimited, undetectable fake ZEC within the privacy pool. Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) subsequently coordinated an emergency fix across the ecosystem, which was completed on June 2, 2026. Due to the nature of the privacy design and the vulnerability, the team could not determine whether an exploit had occurred before the fix using cryptography alone; their assessment was that the likelihood of prior exploitation was low.
For a currency that emphasizes a fixed maximum supply, this issue is not only about whether transactions are kept confidential, but also about how holders can verify that they have not been subject to covert dilution. The potential risk of additional minting and the actual occurrence of minting are two different things; existing disclosures cannot be rewritten into “it has already been confirmed that someone can mint unlimited coins.”
On July 28, Zcash activated the Ironwood upgrade, introducing a new privacy pool and restricting the old Orchard pool. Funds moving out must pass through a turnstile mechanism with publicly accounted verification, ensuring that the total amount of ZEC leaving the old pool does not exceed the total amount that was previously legitimately flowed in. This helps verify the integrity of circulating supply, but it cannot be used to assert that historical vulnerabilities were never exploited.
Wang Chun therefore proposed a question that supporters cannot answer with gains alone: if you want to position Zcash as a more trustworthy private currency, you must also explain its allocation history, governance stability, and supply security. It is obviously insufficient to put all of these questions under “not understanding privacy” in order to settle the dispute.
Can privacy demand support the value of an independent currency?
From the disagreements above, what Zcash needs to prove next is first whether privacy demand can translate into sustained usage. What is worth watching is not only the coin price and the asset balances in privacy pools, but also wallet usage, the continuity of privacy transactions, payment scenarios, and the tool experience. When holders move assets into privacy pools, it can indicate their privacy preference, but it cannot directly be equated with an increase in payment activity.
Second is whether security fixes can build long-term trust. The activation of Ironwood provides a concrete path to address the vulnerability, but independent review, fund migration, and post-incident operational records are still more convincing than any one-time celebrity endorsement. For projects that attract investors by their currency attributes, supply credibility is itself a fundamental aspect.
Finally, it comes down to the quality of institutional demand. Investment products and company treasuries lower the threshold for gaining exposure to ZEC, and may also concentrate buying pressure. Going forward, it is necessary to distinguish whether funds are allocated to privacy assets for the long term, or whether they are chasing periodic price increases. It is also important to differentiate investment demand inside securities accounts from actual usage demand on-chain.