Zcash has climbed to its highest level since 2018, briefly reaching about $855, as traders responded to Grayscale’s latest move to convert its Zcash trust into a US exchange-traded fund.
The privacy-focused cryptocurrency was trading at approximately $818.77 at 13:00 EDT on Saturday, up by more than 22% over the previous 24 hours. The increase extended a rally that had already lifted ZEC by more than 30% over the previous week, according to The Block’s price data.
Zcash has a market capitalisation of about $13.8bn, making it the 12th-largest cryptocurrency. Its intraday peak of roughly $855 was the highest recorded on The Block’s Zcash Price page since 2018.
The latest surge came after Grayscale submitted its fifth amended registration statement on Friday. Under the proposal, the existing Grayscale Zcash Trust would be renamed The Zcash ETF and would charge an annual sponsor fee of 2.5%.
If approved, the fund would become the first US investment vehicle to track the price of ZEC directly. Exchange-traded funds linked to other alternative cryptocurrencies, including Solana, XRP, Litecoin, Doge, BNB and Hyperliquid, have already been launched, according to The Block’s Crypto ETF tracker.
However, the performance of those products has varied. Data from SoSoValue shows that XRP ETFs attracted $40m in net inflows during the past week, while Solana ETFs received $28m. Bitcoin funds brought in nearly $2bn over the same period.
Trading in Zcash derivatives was particularly strong during the latest price move. ZEC futures recorded more than $9.5bn in volume in the 24 hours to Saturday, according to Coinglass, compared with $1.06bn on spot exchanges.
Open interest in ZEC futures stood at $1.8bn. That figure is equivalent to about 13% of the cryptocurrency’s total market capitalisation.
A previous amendment from Grayscale also revealed that a subsidiary of its parent company, Digital Currency Group, was considering buying 200,000 ZEC through the trust. The proposed holding was valued at about $164m at current prices.
The discussions were non-binding, meaning Digital Currency Group could ultimately acquire more shares, fewer shares or none at all, The Block reported on Wednesday.
Saturday’s gains represented a substantial recovery from Zcash’s sharp fall in June. The token dropped by as much as 60%, from approximately $630 to $250, after developers disclosed a critical counterfeiting vulnerability affecting the network’s Orchard shielded pool.
Developers subsequently fixed the flaw and reactivated Orchard through the NU6.2 network upgrade. At Saturday’s high, ZEC had more than tripled from its June low and was trading about 35% above its level before the sell-off.
Despite the recovery, Zcash remains approximately 75% below its all-time high of $3,191.93, recorded on The Block’s price page.
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