Zcash rose almost 5% on Monday to reach a session high just below $494, taking its market value back above $8bn and strengthening its position as the world’s leading privacy coin.
The cryptocurrency, known by its ticker ZEC, gained more than $20 during a six-hour rally on the afternoon of 3 August. Market data showed it climbing from slightly above $470 at 04:10 EST to almost $494 by mid-morning.
The move back through the $490 mark restored Zcash’s market capitalisation to more than $8bn. ZEC has now increased by nearly 8% since the start of the month, putting it among the strongest performers in the digital-asset market during August.
Although the wider cryptocurrency market was also rising, Zcash’s outperformance was linked to a significant development involving Nym. The network has adopted Zcash’s new Ironwood shielded pool, allowing users to make direct, end-to-end shielded ZEC payments for Nym’s network services.
The integration was described as a major development for privacy-focused decentralised finance, as demand for greater confidentiality continues to grow across the digital-assets industry.
Privacy has become an increasingly prominent issue as cryptocurrencies have moved from experimental technology towards broader use. Will McEvoy, chief investment officer at Cypherpunk, described privacy as crypto’s “last frontier” while discussing the sector’s development from proving that digital money could work to delivering scalable, practical systems.
“First we had to prove that cryptographic money could workthat was Bitcoin,” McEvoy said on X. “Then Vitalik said, ‘It’s sort of weird that this isn’t programmable,’ and Ethereum came. Then Solana said, ‘This also has to be scalable.’”
McEvoy also addressed what he called a widespread misunderstanding that Bitcoin is inherently private. The official Bitcoin X account has described the cryptocurrency as “traceable digital gold”.
He said privacy had been a central objective for some of the earliest figures in the sector. Hal Finney supported anonymity, while Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto recognised that zero-knowledge technology could eventually produce a stronger form of Bitcoin. At that time, however, the technology was not sufficiently advanced.
“ZK was super early then. Zcash didn’t exist, there was no production deployment of ZK-SNARKs. But now we have the tech,” McEvoy wrote.
He added that privacy was becoming more important as digital rights came under pressure from the institutionalisation of cryptocurrencies, the processing of data by artificial intelligence systems and mandatory age-verification requirements.
Zcash has also made progress with its decentralised governance plans through the launch of a retroactive grants programme. The initiative moves treasury decisions away from closed committees and towards direct voting by coinholders. It is intended to create a privacy-focused funding model similar to Optimism’s RetroPGF, while operating entirely within Zcash’s shielded pool.
ZEC’s rise helped push the combined market capitalisation of privacy coins above $30bn. Other notable gainers included NEAR, which increased 2.4%, ZK, up 4.5%, and NOCK, which rose 5.3%.
Those advances were partly offset by declines elsewhere in the sector. ZANO fell 5.5% and ZBT dropped 6.5%, while COTI, the strongest performer the previous week, lost 10.2%. XMR, one of only a small number of privacy coins to record a positive return over the previous seven days, slipped 0.3%.
Zcash activated its Ironwood network upgrade on Tuesday. The update replaced the vulnerable Orchard shielded pool with a hardened system designed to…
