Privacy-focused Bitcoin alternative Zcash went on a tear Friday, surging some 33% in a matter of hours and triggering over $51 million in short position liquidations.
The token surged to nearly $735 Friday afternoon, up from $536 just a day earlier. It has since settled to $666 as of this writing, still up 25% over the past day.
That rapid price action made Zcash-related positions the third-most liquidated in crypto on Friday, behind only dominant mainstays Bitcoin and Ethereum. Over $59 million worth of Zcash positions have been liquidated, including longs, per data from CoinGlass, compared to $150 million in liquidations for BTC and $146 million for ETH.
Zcash, until recently a fairly obscure cryptocurrency, has been on a near-nonstop streak for over a month. The token, which had hovered around $40 for over three years, began pumping in early October and hasn’t let up since. In just five weeks, its price has ballooned by a factor of 10.
According to data from CoinGecko, Friday’s peak was the highest price registered since January 2018. Even so, at its current price, Zcash remains 79% below the all-time high mark of $3,191 set back in 2016.
Analysts have argued in recent weeks that Zcash’s recent rally is thanks in large part to growing anxieties about Bitcoin’s privacy and decentralization in a moment of unprecedented corporate and political embrace of the world’s top cryptocurrency.
Zcash, created in 2016 via a fork of Bitcoin’s codebase, encourages anonymous transactions with a system of zero-knowledge proofs. It is the largest privacy focused crypto token by market capitalization, with a current valuation of about $11 billion.
Though Zcash has consistently climbed in price for the last several weeks, today’s surge could have been at least in part influenced by the outcome of a closely watched trial in the United States pertaining to privacy and crypto software development.
On Thursday, Keonne Rodriguez, a developer of the privacy-focused Bitcoin app Samourai Wallet, was sentenced to five years in federal prison, after he pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitter.
That sentence — the maximum possible Rodriguez could have received — was requested by President Trump’s Department of Justice, which has in other contexts pledged to protect the rights of crypto developers.
