21Shares listed Europe’s first physically backed Zcash ETP on September 22 on the Pan-European Exchanges in Paris and Amsterdam. The trading code is ZCASH, and the underlying $ZEC token is custodied by BitGo. The same batch also launched a product tracking the governance token ether.fi, ETHFI.
The product details are more interesting than the news headline. First, the annual management fee is 2.5%. By contrast, mainstream European Bitcoin and Ethereum products mostly fall in the 0.2% to 1% range—2.5% is clearly a “niche premium.” Second, the launch size is so small it’s a bit awkward: 5,000 units, each with a net asset value of $20.04. The initial day’s volume was about $100,000. This isn’t an allocation product—it’s a placeholder.
The market reaction was actually very hot. $ZEC is up more than 2,700% since the start of the year. After the ETP was listed, it surged to around $1,680 at one point (the first time since 2016), then pulled back to about $1,522, with a roughly 6.6% drop on the day. The market cap is close to $27.5 billion, ranking among the top ten crypto assets. There’s also an on-chain data point that’s even more telling: in the shielded pool there are about 4.91 million ZEC, or about 29% of total supply.
My take is this: the compliance channel for privacy coins really is opening. On August 25, the U.S. already had ZCSH listed on NYSE Arca; now Europe has followed. The path seems to be “first ETF, then ETP.” But the real signal that institutions are truly moving in isn’t that another ETP exists—it’s two things: the shielded-pool share continues to rise, and the custodian puts $ZEC into the standard service catalog. As for that 2.5% fee, in essence it’s pricing in “regulatory uncertainty.” As uncertainty declines, the fee should naturally come down. Conversely, if a year from now the product’s size is still only in the tens of millions of dollars, that would suggest institutions are buying the “privacy narrative,” not “privacy as an asset.”
Here’s a practical question for you: would you be willing to pay a 2.5% annual fee for a privacy narrative? Or would you rather hold the wallet yourself, take on custody of the private keys and compliance risk? How would you weigh the two?
#21Shares launches Europe’s first physically backed Zcash ETP
The product details are more interesting than the news headline. First, the annual management fee is 2.5%. By contrast, mainstream European Bitcoin and Ethereum products mostly fall in the 0.2% to 1% range—2.5% is clearly a “niche premium.” Second, the launch size is so small it’s a bit awkward: 5,000 units, each with a net asset value of $20.04. The initial day’s volume was about $100,000. This isn’t an allocation product—it’s a placeholder.
The market reaction was actually very hot. $ZEC is up more than 2,700% since the start of the year. After the ETP was listed, it surged to around $1,680 at one point (the first time since 2016), then pulled back to about $1,522, with a roughly 6.6% drop on the day. The market cap is close to $27.5 billion, ranking among the top ten crypto assets. There’s also an on-chain data point that’s even more telling: in the shielded pool there are about 4.91 million ZEC, or about 29% of total supply.
My take is this: the compliance channel for privacy coins really is opening. On August 25, the U.S. already had ZCSH listed on NYSE Arca; now Europe has followed. The path seems to be “first ETF, then ETP.” But the real signal that institutions are truly moving in isn’t that another ETP exists—it’s two things: the shielded-pool share continues to rise, and the custodian puts $ZEC into the standard service catalog. As for that 2.5% fee, in essence it’s pricing in “regulatory uncertainty.” As uncertainty declines, the fee should naturally come down. Conversely, if a year from now the product’s size is still only in the tens of millions of dollars, that would suggest institutions are buying the “privacy narrative,” not “privacy as an asset.”
Here’s a practical question for you: would you be willing to pay a 2.5% annual fee for a privacy narrative? Or would you rather hold the wallet yourself, take on custody of the private keys and compliance risk? How would you weigh the two?
#21Shares launches Europe’s first physically backed Zcash ETP