Today ZEC hit a new all-time high again, topping out at $1697.45 and gaining 5.79% over the past 24 hours. Someone in the group asked me, “Can I still chase it?” It reminded me of the day I got liquidated—also a similar spike, where my 47,000 U went to zero.
Don’t rush to go all-in yet. I’ll break down this round of ZEC’s explosive surge for you—once you see what’s really going on, you can make a decision.
First piece of evidence: Garrett Jin’s $36.13 million short position and the 200,000 ZEC he held. On September 21, on-chain data shows that “BTC OG insider whale” Garrett Jin closed his roughly three-month ZEC short position, realizing a loss of about $36.13 million. Before that, the size of his short position was 37,999.54 ZEC, valued at about $59.33 million.
But what’s truly worth your attention is what happens after you close your position.
On September 20, Jiang Zhuo’er, founder of the Litecoin (Litebit) mining pool, publicly pointed out: Garrett Jin shorted ZEC and faced market skepticism—this may have been deliberately manufacturing a counterparty/bait to lure retail investors into going long. As his huge spot holdings “target” disappeared after he showed them, his roughly 200,000 ZEC (about 1% of total supply) may also become potential sell pressure. Jiang Zhuo’er’s exact words were: “Facing this kind of ‘market-maker coin,’ there is an information disadvantage versus the counterparty, so I personally will not participate in the trade.”
The phrasing from Wang Chun, a co-founder of F2Pool, is even more direct: he describes this round of the rally as “story coins.”
I don’t care whether you believe the idea of “market-maker coins.” You only need to ask yourself one question: Someone who has just closed a short position around $1445 is holding spot coins equal to 1% of the total amount. At $1697, would he be more inclined to keep pushing the price higher, or more inclined to distribute/sell off?
My view is: if you don’t know what your counterparty is thinking, don’t sit at his table.
Second piece of evidence: the Orchard vulnerability—lurking for four years, impossible to disprove cryptographically. On May 29, 2026, security researcher Taylor Hornby found a key forged vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard privacy pool. It allows an attacker to mint forged ZEC in unlimited quantities without being detected on-chain.
The vulnerability has existed continuously since the Orchard activation in May 2022, lurking for four full years. The fix was completed on June 2, 2026.
The technical details are like this: in an Orchard circuit, there’s a missing constraint module. It allows arbitrary incorrect values to be input during elliptic-curve multiplication operations, while the multiplication checks can still pass. Hornby used Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 AI model to write a complete exploit program. In a local environment, it successfully generated an unlimited quantity of forged ZEC that can’t be detected.
But what really keeps me up at night isn’t the vulnerability itself—it’s the four words: “cannot be disproven.”
Because Orchard is a fully protected privacy system, in cryptography there’s no method to prove that this vulnerability has never been exploited in the past four years. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox’s low-probability assessment is based on three facts: the vulnerability evaded scrutiny by the world’s top cryptographers for years; Hornby used the most advanced AI tools; and the patch speed was $extremely fast. But none of these are mathematical proofs.
The “turnstile-style accounting” mechanism being pushed forward by Shielded Labs aims to let anyone verify the completeness of Zcash’s supply. However, this proposal hasn’t been finalized yet and still needs to pass through the governance process.
Every ZEC you buy on the Binance exchange is, on the books, “real.” But whether that pool on the chain actually contains fake coins—so far, nobody has been able to prove it. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s a cryptographic uncertainty that the Zcash development team itself admits.
Third piece of evidence: the Foundation personally steps in to debunk the fraud. Another consequence of the explosive rise in ZEC is that scammers immediately moved in.
On September 22, the Zcash Foundation released an official statement clearly cutting ties with the ZRC-20 token standard and the $CASH token, saying it had “no prior knowledge” of this, characterizing it as a “private project, not the official Zcash token standard or protocol functionality.” The ZRC-20 standard submitted no Zcash improvement proposals, made no changes to consensus, and balance tracking relies entirely on off-chain indexers.
On-chain analyst ZachXBT publicly accused the zkSNARKs NFT project on the Zcash chain of allegedly involving a “rug-pull”: the project raised about $17 million, has 10% allocated to the team and 5% in royalties, but “has no actual use cases whatsoever.”
When you see the Foundation having to issue a statement to debunk counterfeits itself, you can judge for yourself how high the scam density has become in this ecosystem.
My methodology: If you insist on touching ZEC, memorize these three rules first. I’m not here to persuade you to buy or not buy ZEC. I’m here to tell you how to survive in a market like this.
Rule one: per single trade, don’t exceed 5% of your total capital. No matter how bullish you are on ZEC—no matter how high KOLs shout, $5000 or $10000—your risk limit per trade is 5%. ZEC surged from $400 to $1697, up about 2800%, but falling back from $1697 to $1000 only takes one bearish candle.
Rule two: don’t chase longs near previous all-time highs. ZEC is currently in the price-discovery phase; on the 4-hour timeframe, the $1650–$1670 zone has been rejected twice already. If you absolutely must do it, wait for a pullback to around the EMA50 (about $1447) to look at the structure—not dance on the needle tip at $1697.
Rule three: trade only ZEC itself—don’t touch any “ecosystem tokens.” ZRC-20 isn’t an official standard, $CASH isn’t an official token, and zkSNARKs have been publicly accused of a rug-pull. The ZEC you buy in your exchange account and any “Zcash ecosystem project” you interact with on-chain are two completely different risk events.
The above is only my personal trading records and sharing of viewpoints and does not constitute any investment advice. The crypto market is highly volatile—make sure to do risk control strictly. Everyone has different risk tolerance—judge independently.
The world of money trading is very real. In ZEC’s story there are real technical narratives, institutional investors with real money, and clear regulatory endorsements. But there are also carefully designed counterparty arrangements, security ghosts that can’t be disproven, and scammers who come rushing in.
Knowing who you’re playing with matters more than knowing how high the price will go.
Commander-in-chief, salute.
