Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, has continued its astonishing rise this week, even as market turmoil has hammered most other major cryptocurrencies and the broader equities market.
The privacy coin has surged 35%, to $664, since Thursday. In that same span, Bitcoin has fallen 2%, to $95,800, and Ethereum has held relatively steady.
The week-over-week numbers are even more stark. Over the past seven days, Zcash is up 23%, while Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen 6% and 7%, respectively.
Markets fell on Thursday over mounting fears the Federal Reserve would hold interest rates steady at a meeting next month.
The Fed’s rate cutting campaign has helped boost stock markets this year, and rate cuts are generally a boon to risk-on assets, such as crypto.
But traders are now pricing in a 44% chance the Fed cuts rates in December, according to CME’s FedWatch tool. That’s down from 66% a week ago and 94% last month.
The Zcash rally has been fueled by rising interest in privacy-preserving technology.
No cryptocurrency has performed as well as Zcash this year. It is up more than 1,000% in 2025. At the start of the month, it was the 33rd most valuable crypto asset in the world. Since then, it has surged to 12th place.
Monero, another privacy coin, has been the third-best performer in 2025, rising 125%.
In its recent State of Crypto report, venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz said the crypto industry had seen multiple privacy milestones in 2025.
Among those milestones were the Ethereum Foundation’s launch of a new 47-member “Privacy Cluster,” Zcash’s new Zashi wallet, and an uptick in the usage of a privacy programming language created by Aztec, the developer of a privacy-focused layer 2 blockchain.
Aztec began selling its new token on Thursday via Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auction.
This week, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the brothers behind US crypto exchange Gemini, launched a Zcash-focused digital asset treasury, Cypherpunk.
They purchased $50 million of the cryptocurrency on Wednesday, according to DefiLlama data.
“Privacy’s become a rare, vanishing commodity,” Tyler Winklevoss said on X. “We feel strongly that Zcash could become a meaningful percentage of Bitcoin’s market capitalisation just on the merits of it being a privacy hedge or insurance policy to Bitcoin’s transparency alone.”
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at [email protected].
