zcash

The cryptocurrency asset ETP issuer 21Shares has listed the first European Zcash exchange-traded product (ETP) on the pan-European exchanges in Paris and Amsterdam, with the code ZCASH and an annual management fee of 2.5%. This product physically holds ZEC, with BitGo serving as the custodian.ZCASH is traded in euros in Paris and in dollars in Amsterdam, with an initial issuance of 5,000 shares, each with a net asset value of $20.04, and an asset management scale of approximately $100,000. Grayscale's Zcash ETF ZCSH has an asset scale close to $890 million and will complete a 1-for-3 share split on September 30.

The privacy blockchain project Zcash plans to implement the NU7 upgrade, which will stop accepting the fourth version of transactions that spend funds from the Sprout pool after the upgrade. If ZEC is not transferred out before the upgrade, holders may lose the ability to spend the related funds. This proposal will not destroy the Sprout pool funds, and access may be restored in the future, but the proposal warns that funds left in the pool may also become permanently unspendable.Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox has forwarded the relevant reminder. The NU7 upgrade is scheduled to activate on the testnet on October 6, and Zcash expects to decide on October 20 whether to activate it on the mainnet as planned on November 5. The upgrade will also reduce the target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds and maintain the network halving cycle.

On Tuesday, European asset management firm 21Shares launched the first physically-backed ETP tracking Zcash on the Euronext Paris and Euronext Amsterdam exchanges, allowing investors to gain exposure to ZEC through brokerage accounts without directly holding the cryptocurrency. 21Shares also introduced an ETP tracking ETHFI, which is the governance and utility token of the decentralized finance protocol Ether.fi, providing crypto-financial services such as staking. Both ETPs are physically-backed with an annual management fee of 2.5%, higher than most Bitcoin and Ethereum investment products in Europe.The launch of the Zcash ETP closely follows Grayscale's introduction of the Zcash ETF in the United States, which is listed on the NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH. Zcash has recently performed strongly, with prices briefly surpassing $1500, and a nearly 1100% increase over the past year, leading to heightened market interest in it as an alternative to Bitcoin. Grayscale's research director Zach Pandl believes that Zcash may benefit from a "latecomer advantage," helping it overcome Bitcoin's entrenched network effects.The popularity of Zcash has also spread to the mining sector. Fortitude Digital Mining told Cointelegraph that the company mined about 28% of the total ZEC in the first half of 2026, with its focus on Zcash based on the network's proof-of-work model, supply cap, and privacy features.

The Zcash Foundation issued a statement indicating that it was previously unaware of the "ZRC-20" and CASH token-related matters. This project belongs to a third-party private project and is not an official Zcash token standard or protocol feature. It also reminds users to conduct thorough research before interacting with any tokens.

Grayscale Zcash ETF (ZCSH) is applying for a 3-for-1 forward split, which is expected to take effect on September 28. This move aims to lower the share price to enhance liquidity, as the fund's price had become too high due to significant increases.

The firmware vulnerability of the hardware wallet Coldcard in 2021 led to insufficient randomness in some recovery seeds. Since July 30, attackers have transferred approximately 1,600 to 1,800 Bitcoins from affected wallets, involving thousands of addresses, with a valuation exceeding 100 million dollars. Coldcard manufacturer Coinkite stated that it must be assumed that someone is using AI to review its public firmware. This vulnerability has existed for about five years, and whether AI was involved in the related attacks has not been confirmed.Shielded Labs researcher Taylor Hornby used Claude Opus 4.8 audit agent to discover a vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard shielded pool circuit that began in 2022, which could generate an unlimited amount of counterfeit ZEC without detection during testing. Developers completed the fix within a few days, and no theft of coins has been confirmed.Blockchain analysis company Chainalysis statistics show that the on-chain write volume carrying malware instructions and command control information has increased from an average of about 2.06 times to 11.1 times daily, a growth of 440%.

According to Arkham monitoring, the Zcash whale address t1Lyq transferred approximately $362.56 million worth of ZEC last night, with $15 million deposited into Coinbase, marking the first recharge to the trading platform by this address in 10 months.Ten months ago, this batch of ZEC was worth approximately $163.88 million. Arkham stated that the whale has realized a paper profit of about $361 million from holding ZEC since 2025.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Zcash ETF (ticker: ZCSH) launched by Grayscale announced a 3-for-1 forward share split for the fund. This split will not change the total value of shareholders' investments.

The Zcash development team plans to activate the NU7 mainnet upgrade on November 5, after various organizations and engineering teams have reached a consensus on the upgrade content and expected timeline. Zcash developer Sean Bowe stated that the upgrade will be activated on the testnet on October 6. The team plans to finalize the mainnet upgrade and activation block height after evaluating the performance of the NU7 testnet on October 20.The upgrade will shorten the target block interval from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, disable version 4 transactions, and integrate a network sustainability mechanism. The selected network sustainability mechanism will retain the Zcash halving cycle, with the previously removed supply being reintroduced starting February 2031. NU7 does not introduce a new transaction format, resulting in limited impact on wallets, but full nodes, indexers, and block explorers may need adjustments.

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi commented on the controversy surrounding the Zcash development fund, stating that the Zcash community has positioned itself as "the crypto version of Bitcoin" and has refused to continue adding more features to the protocol. To become a reliable store of value, Zcash ultimately needs to achieve protocol finality, but it still needs to advance Tachyon, quantum resistance, and comprehensive formal verification required to address AI network attacks, making it unsuitable for finality in the next one to two years.The development fund has played a necessary role during the phase of lacking private funding to support Zcash development, and under current rules, it will expire in 2028. However, as the price of ZEC has surged significantly, the scale of the fund has expanded by an order of magnitude; once the fund exceeds 100 million dollars, it will inevitably move towards institutionalization and face the risk of the allocation mechanism being politicized.He advocates for the continued retention of the development fund at this stage to complete the remaining technical work before protocol finality, but this round should be the last round of the development fund. Once Zcash meets the conditions for finality, the fund should gradually wind down rather than continue seeking new funding projects; future development needs can be spontaneously funded by holders and ecosystem supporters, similar to Bitcoin.In terms of governance, Haseeb does not support voting solely by token holders, believing that a store of value asset requires policy predictability, and pure token governance is too volatile. He supports limited participation by holders and believes that committee governance, while flawed, may be a more feasible solution. Haseeb also disclosed that Dragonfly holds ZEC and that he himself is a ZODL investor, but ZODL will not directly benefit from the development fund.

According to CoinDesk, the mining company Fortitude, focused on Zcash mining, has appointed former Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton as CEO and plans to go public on Nasdaq through a merger with HeartSciences. Andrea Childs will serve as COO.In the first half of 2026, Fortitude is expected to produce approximately 28% of the total ZEC output for the same period, with second-quarter revenue of $20.9 million. The implied valuation of the merged company may be at least $400 million.

According to The Block, Grayscale's research director Zach Pandl stated that the approximately $58,000 low reached around June 30 remains his assessment of the bottom of the current bear market phase, and Grayscale is currently advising clients to allocate Bitcoin.Pandl mentioned in an interview with The Block during the Avalanche summit in New York that they have maintained the view that $58,000 is the bottom of this bear market phase for the past few months. This assessment echoes the comments made by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who stated on September 10 that Bitcoin has bottomed out in the current cycle and expects a sustained upward trend for the next two years.Pandl stated that Grayscale uses a three-part framework to assess whether clients should allocate Bitcoin, including long-term structural trends, market cycle phases, and macro context. He believes that all three conditions are currently met, thus giving clients the "green light" to allocate Bitcoin. As of Thursday morning, Bitcoin was above $76,000, up 0.8% in 24 hours, but still down about 39% from its historical high of approximately $126,000.Pandl also compared Bitcoin with Zcash, noting that Grayscale has offered investment products for Zcash for about nine years. He believes that Zcash occupies an "underutilized and unexplored design space," rather than directly competing with Bitcoin, and pointed out that as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, privacy issues are receiving more attention, with Zcash providing investors a way to express their views on personal and financial privacy.

Privacy token Zcash (ZEC) rose about 20% in 24 hours, with Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang revealing that the company has invested in ZEC. ZEC supports shielded transactions that hide addresses and transaction amounts using zero-knowledge proofs, with a price of about $1,338 on Thursday.Huang disclosed in a post that Paradigm is both an investor in the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) and a holder of ZEC tokens. He described Zcash as "a privacy complement to Bitcoin" and supports its developer fund backed by inflationary funds, believing that long-term funding support remains important in the context of AI network capabilities and the development of quantum computing. He also supports combining Zcash token voting with other forms of governance to reduce its unpredictability as a monetary asset.Today's increase of over 10% has led to a cumulative rise of about 160% for ZEC over the past month, while Bitcoin has risen 18.2% during the same period. Paradigm's investment in the Zcash ecosystem has been publicly disclosed, with ZODL announcing the completion of over $25 million in seed funding in March, with participants including Paradigm, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and Winklevoss Capital. As ZEC rises, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points to 3.75%-4%, marking the first rate hike of 2023, with the overall cryptocurrency market trending upward.

Paradigm founder Matt Huang commented on Zcash via Twitter. He stated that all blockchain ecosystems face the long-term funding challenge for public goods, and funding developer funds through inflation is a relatively elegant mechanism; how funds are allocated can be discussed and continuously improved. In the context of accelerating AI network attack capabilities and advancements in quantum computing, developer funds remain very important.Regarding governance, Matt Huang mentioned that as Zcash is increasingly accepted by more users as a complementary asset to Bitcoin for privacy, voting solely based on the amount of tokens held will bring uncertainty and may limit its long-term trust as a monetary asset. The project is better off combining token-based voting with other forms of governance.

Zcash holders voted overwhelmingly to support speeding up transaction times while retaining the Bitcoin-like halving mechanism. This governance vote was for Zcash's next major network upgrade, NU7, with nearly 2.4 million ZEC participating in the vote, accounting for about two-thirds of the approximately 3.6 million eligible ZEC at the time of the snapshot. The results were calculated based on ZEC weight, with each eligible ZEC representing one vote.Among them, 99.9% of participating ZEC supported reducing the block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, 98.9% supported retaining the Bitcoin-like halving mechanism, 96.6% supported postponing the fee reissuance of the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) until February 20231, and 99.3% supported launching NU7 as soon as possible, giving up any unrealized features before the deadline of September 30.This vote was limited to holders of ZEC in Zcash's latest privacy transaction pool, Ironwood. The ballots were encrypted and split into 16 parts for counting, making it impossible for validators to reconstruct the specific holders' votes and balances. Previously, a sentiment survey in February for NU7 only attracted 7.25% of circulating ZEC to participate. The voting results themselves will not directly change the network; the relevant features still need to be implemented, tested, and included in the final upgrade.

According to CryptoSlate, the voting in the Zcash community regarding the NU7 network upgrade will close on September 14. The core issue is to replace the periodic halving with a smooth issuance curve, and another issue is whether to shorten the block interval from 75 seconds to 25 seconds.This proposal does not change the total supply cap of ZEC, only adjusts the pace of new coin release; the vote is advisory in nature, and even if passed, development and deployment still need to be completed. ZEC recently reached a new high since 2018, currently priced at $1,093.21, ranking 10th by market capitalization.

Zach Pandl, the research director at Grayscale, pointed out that Zcash, as a Bitcoin-like digital currency with privacy features, currently has lucrative mining profits. Although Bitcoin network miners earn about $35 million daily, far exceeding Zcash's approximately $2 million, the daily revenue per mining machine for Zcash is about twice that of Bitcoin, with revenue per megawatt-hour approximately four times that of Bitcoin, even surpassing some AI/high-performance computing cloud services.Driven by the strong performance of token prices, Zcash's overall mining activity has increased more than 2.5 times this year, forming a virtuous cycle of "price increase --- mining increase --- network security enhancement --- supporting price." Pandl believes that at the current valuation, Zcash mining remains attractive and continues to strengthen its network security.

Pine Analytics released the Zcash Q3 2026 report. Ironwood was activated on July 28 at block 3,428,143, and within five weeks, holders migrated 87% of their Orchard balance, with the new pool holding 3.84M ZEC as of August 31. The shielded supply increased by 9.9% to 4.86M ZEC, with the shielded ratio rebounding from 26.3% to 28.7%, recovering 440K from the 745K unshielded ZEC in June.The price of ZEC rose from $407 on June 30 to $836 on August 31, an increase of 106%. Grayscale ZCSH converted to a spot ETF, with assets growing from $155 million to $346 million. Mining difficulty rose by 35%, reaching an all-time high, with two corporate miners committing approximately $65 million in hash power. NU7 has no mainnet height yet, and holders will vote until September 14 to decide whether to launch before September 30 with a 25-second block time and smooth issuance; there are still 470K ZEC remaining in Orchard.

Bitfinex Alpha report shows that Bitcoin has been consolidating in the range of $77,100 to $81,300 over the past 20 trading days, with the current price close to the key support level at the lower end of the range. If it breaks above $81,300, the volume vacuum above may drive the price quickly up to $86,500. The options market has shifted protection to contracts expiring on September 18 ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision.The report also points out that while Bitcoin's volatility has decreased, altcoins are performing actively, with all 29 major cryptocurrencies rising last week, Polkadot up 43%, and Zcash up 42%. The open interest in altcoin perpetual contracts has surpassed Bitcoin for the first time this week, a situation that historically often accompanies market correction risks.