zcash

According to Fortune, Bitcoin mining pool giant Foundry has officially launched a new mining pool for the privacy coin Zcash.Foundry CEO Mike Colyer stated that this move aims to respond to the growing demand from large institutions for privacy coins. Currently, the mining pool has attracted several institutional miners, with its output accounting for nearly one-third of the newly added Zcash on the entire network.Zcash achieves transaction privacy based on zero-knowledge proof technology while supporting selective disclosure to meet compliance requirements, making it more favored by institutions compared to its competitor Monero.Boosted by this news, the price of Zcash has increased by over 75% in the past 30 days, with a current market capitalization of approximately $6.3 billion. Foundry currently controls about 31% of the global Bitcoin hash rate, making it the largest Bitcoin mining pool operator in the world.

The Zcash core development team Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) founder Josh Swihart released the latest progress on Zcash, proposing a strategic direction centered on "post-quantum security, scalability, and user experience," and using the Artemis II lunar mission as a metaphor to emphasize achieving seemingly impossible goals through technological breakthroughs. The ZODL team stated that Zcash is entering the "Zcash IV" phase, which will build infrastructure similar to a "lunar base" to support the protocol and application security scaling to billions of users, while promoting the vision of privacy transactions without large-scale financial surveillance.On the product and technology front, ZODL continues to iterate, with its 3.3.x version now launched on iOS and Android, adding hardware wallet connection management, SDK upgrades, and multiple experience optimizations, while advancing key developments such as Keystone wallet functionality and address system upgrades (ZIP 316, UIVK/UFVK). Meanwhile, the Zcash core team has fixed multiple system issues and is advancing the development of the Zallet alpha version, while strengthening unified address standards and wallet interaction experiences, laying the groundwork for future scalability and performance improvements.In addition, ZODL disclosed that its application data continues to grow and participated in a stablecoin privacy summit to strengthen industry collaboration. However, due to upgrades in regulation and network restrictions, ZODL has temporarily removed its app from the Russian app store. The team emphasized that privacy is not an option but a fundamental need in the digital age, and will continue to accelerate delivery pace to promote the popularization of ZEC and ecological development in the future.

The privacy coin Zcash recently disclosed and fixed a critical security vulnerability that could have been exploited by malicious miners to transfer over 25,000 ZEC (approximately 6.5 million USD) from the deprecated Sprout privacy pool. Security researcher Alex "Scalar" Sol disclosed on March 23 that the vulnerability stemmed from the zcashd node skipping proof verification when processing transactions involving the Sprout pool.The official statement indicated that the vulnerability had existed since July 2020 but had not been actively exploited, and user funds remained safe at all times. The development team has released version 6.12.0 to complete the fix, and mainstream mining pools have completed the upgrade deployment within a few days. Additionally, the unaffected Zebra full node implementation has the capability to trigger a chain fork, providing extra protection in the event of exploitation.It was disclosed that although the Sprout pool closed to new deposits in November 2020, approximately 25,424 ZEC remained untransferred. Even if the vulnerability were exploited, Zcash's "turnstile" mechanism would prevent inflationary issuance, ensuring that the total supply would not be breached. This vulnerability was discovered with the assistance of AI, and the researcher will receive a total bounty of 200 ZEC (approximately 51,000 USD). It is worth noting that this is not the first time Zcash has encountered a significant vulnerability; as early as 2019, it had fixed a serious flaw that could lead to unlimited issuance.

F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun stated, "In 2015, I bought an apartment in Naklua, north of Pattaya, for 2,900 bitcoins. This was the first house I owned in my life. While many Chinese miners were still celebrating the early prosperity of the crypto market and had not yet faced the subsequent regulatory crackdown, I had already experienced true freedom for the first time in Pattaya. It was also here that I personally built and launched our Zcash mining pool.Yesterday, I sold this apartment for 7 bitcoins."

According to CoinDesk, Bitcoin mining pool operator Foundry Digital plans to launch a domestic Zcash mining pool in the U.S. next month, providing a mining platform built around compliance reviews, reporting standards, and operational controls for institutional and publicly traded company miners.Foundry CEO Mike Colyer stated that Zcash has evolved into an institutional-grade asset, but its mining infrastructure has not kept pace. He pointed out that institutional and publicly traded miners looking to gain exposure to Zcash previously lacked a compliance-specific infrastructure in the U.S. The mining pool will implement KYC and anti-money laundering compliance reviews for participants, with mining rewards distributed through transparent Zcash addresses rather than concealed ones, using a PPLNS payment model, and with no minimum hash rate threshold.Privacy coins have recently regained market attention, with ZEC rising over 670% in the past 12 months, XMR increasing by 72% during the same period, and DASH up by 51%. After Bitcoin's halving in 2024, mining profitability has tightened, with hash rate prices dropping from over $60 per PH to $30, prompting several large mining companies to explore other PoW networks to diversify their revenue sources. Colyer stated that this move is not primarily in response to declining Bitcoin profits, as Foundry's Bitcoin mining business remains solid, and the company is currently focused on both Bitcoin and Zcash chains.

According to official news, the Zcash Open Development Lab, founded by former Electric Coin Company CEO Josh Swihart, has completed over $25 million in funding. This round of financing was participated in by Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Maelstrom, Chapter One, Balaji Srinivasan, David Friedberg, Haseeb Qureshi, James Nicholas, and others.ECC launched its flagship Zcash wallet Zodl in 2024, setting a new standard for Zcash usability. Earlier this year, the original ECC team, including the wallet product team, joined ZODL as a whole to continue building the main user interface for Zcash, aiming to create Zodl as an open self-custody privacy financial platform, expanding ecosystem interoperability through collaboration, and driving privacy ZEC transactions into the global mainstream.The development of the Zcash protocol remains a core focus for ZODL. Engineers who previously designed, built, and maintained key systems for Zcash at ECC have joined ZODL, continuing to advance the protocol evolution with the same commitment and integrity, ensuring that technological advancements support real needs and drive Zcash's product-market fit.At the heart of the Zcash Open Development Lab is the development of an open, self-custodied private financial platform, aimed at expanding ecosystem interoperability through collaboration and pushing protected ZEC transactions into the global mainstream market.

According to market news, the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization performed as follows, with the top five gainers: Humanity Protocol (H) up 17.6%, current price $0.1695; River (RIVER) up 11.99%, current price $17.78; Kite (KITE) up 5.62%, current price $0.2834; MemeCore (M) up 4.51%, current price $1.49; Pi (PI) up 2.27%, current price $0.1979.The top five losers: Zcash (ZEC) down 8.6%, current price $212.49; Morpho (MORPHO) down 8.35%, current price $1.78; Ethena (ENA) down 7.4%, current price $0.1071; Pump.fun (PUMP) down 7.29%, current price $0.001906; Worldcoin (WLD) down 6.19%, current price $0.3867.

According to Cointelegraph, Dash is a Layer-1 blockchain protocol with privacy features, announcing the integration of Zcash's "Orchard" shielded pool into the Dash Evolution chain, which is a secondary layer on the L1 network that supports smart contract functionality.The integration will go live after the completion of a network security audit, expected to launch in March. Initially, the integration will support the basic transfer functionality of Zcash. The announcement stated that the transaction will transfer from one party to another on the Evolution chain, with subsequent upgrades adding Orchard's privacy features for tokenized real-world assets (RWA).

Gray's Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm stated at the Consensus Hong Kong conference:"If you have a business need to make large payments to vendors but don't want other companies or competitors to see this, which could expose your business information, you would want this transaction to remain private.Paying with Bitcoin doesn't necessarily achieve this because the blockchain is transparent. We've all seen accounts specifically tracking on-chain transactions on platform X. So you can imagine scenarios where this demand exists.And privacy-preserving tokens like Zcash are interesting because of 'selective disclosure'; you can choose to disclose information to a specific party, such as proving to the IRS that you have paid your taxes correctly, while maintaining privacy in everyday business or personal transactions.So, we think this is a very interesting currency. We already have a substantial Zcash trust, and we are working on converting it into an ETF, just like we have done for several other products."

According to The Block, Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of the American blockchain investment group Digital Currency Group (DCG), stated that in the coming years, 5% - 10% of Bitcoin funds will flow into privacy cryptocurrencies represented by Zcash.Silbert mentioned at the New York Bitcoin Investors Roundtable that while he is optimistic about Bitcoin as a core part of a diversified portfolio, he prefers to invest in transformative projects that have the potential for 100 to 1000 times returns. He believes that projects like Zcash and Bittenser could achieve 500 times growth. Silbert pointed out that the narrative of Bitcoin being seen as "anonymous cash" is no longer valid in the era of blockchain analytics companies like Chainalysis and Elliptic, and he is skeptical about Bitcoin's ability to achieve any privacy features. Notably, Grayscale, a subsidiary of DCG, offers a Zcash trust fund and is seeking to convert it into an ETF.

According to The Block, Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group, stated at the Bitcoin Investor Summit that 5% to 10% of Bitcoin's total supply will flow into privacy-focused cryptocurrencies in the coming years, and he believes that privacy coins are currently the most asymmetric return potential investment in the industry.Silbert expressed that he remains optimistic about Bitcoin as a core asset, but under the premise that the dollar does not fully collapse, Bitcoin no longer has the potential for 500x growth. He believes that projects like Zcash and the zero-knowledge proof-based privacy blockchain Bittensor have such potential and has allocated assets accordingly.He pointed out that the early narrative of Bitcoin as "anonymous cash" has become difficult to sustain after the widespread adoption of chain analysis technology, and it is also unlikely that the network will integrate native privacy features in the future. Silbert also mentioned that Zcash serves as a hedging tool against the potential technological risks that quantum computing may pose to Bitcoin.

Zcash (ZEC) has plummeted about 60% since its peak in November 2025, while Cypherpunk Technologies, the treasury company for the Zcash digital asset supported by the Winklevoss brothers, has stopped increasing its holdings since its last disclosure of purchasing ZEC on December 30 last year. The company was established in November 2025 and currently holds 290,062.67 ZEC, accounting for approximately 1.76% of the total supply, with a goal of holding 5%.Since the last purchase, the price of ZEC has dropped over 50%, currently trading at around $245. Based on an average purchase price of $334, Cypherpunk has an unrealized loss of $25.73 million, a decline of 26.5%. ZEC started its upward trend at the end of September last year, reaching as high as $700 in mid-November, but has since given back most of its gains.In contrast, other major DAOs are still actively increasing their holdings. Michael Saylor's Strategy has made 5 Bitcoin purchases in 2026, despite an unrealized loss of $4.36 billion. Tom Lee's BitMine has also made the same number of ETH purchases this year, with unrealized losses reaching $6 billion this week.

An independent core development team led by Zcash (ZEC) founder Zooko, Shielded Labs, announced that it has received a donation from Vitalik Buterin, aimed at supporting the development of Crosslink.It is reported that Crosslink enhances Zcash's existing proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism by adding a parallel finality layer, thereby preventing chain reorganization and rollback attacks. All block generation and economic activity still occur on the PoW chain, while the finality mechanism anchors blocks and provides stronger settlement guarantees. By ensuring that confirmed transactions are irreversible, Crosslink reduces the risk of double spending and increases the reliability of transaction settlements. In commenting on the donation, Vitalik stated, "Zcash is one of the most trusted cryptocurrency projects, always maintaining a focus on privacy. The Crosslink project by Shielded Labs will make Zcash more secure while reducing the security budget, thus supporting its long-term sustainability."

The Zcash Foundation has released its strategic priorities for 2026, which include:Unique consensus node implementation Zebra: Focus on enhancing performance, completing the NU7 ZIP implementation, and advancing the Z3 tech stack to replace zcashd;Continue to advance the FROST threshold signature scheme: Plan to release version 3, finalize ZIP-312, and introduce the distributed key generation (DKG) protocol;Privacy Assistance Initiative (SAI): Promote a "privacy by default" digital cash assistance model and explore zero-knowledge proof-based identity solutions, achieving a balance between compliance, accountability, and privacy protection.

Arthur Hayes published an article titled "Woomph" analyzing that the recent continuous depreciation of the yen and the decline in Japanese government bond prices are triggering "anomalies" in the global financial markets. He believes that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury may be forced to work together to directly intervene in the yen exchange rate and the Japanese government bond market by expanding their balance sheets, thereby injecting new liquidity into the global fiat currency system.He stated, "The yen is strengthening against the dollar, and Bitcoin prices are falling. I will not increase risk until it is confirmed that the Federal Reserve is printing money to intervene in the yen and Japanese government bond market. If there is a significant increase in foreign currency-denominated assets on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, it will be a good time to increase Bitcoin holdings." Before the yen's trend shows volatility, he has closed positions in high-leverage Bitcoin-related assets such as Strategy and Metaplanet; if his judgment is validated, he will re-enter the market.While waiting for policy clarity, his fund Maelstrom continues to increase its holdings in Zcash, while maintaining positions in other quality DeFi tokens; once the Federal Reserve confirms balance sheet expansion intervention, he will consider increasing positions in DeFi assets such as ENA, ETHFI, PENDLE, and LDO.

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes published an in-depth analysis in his latest article regarding the recent depreciation of the yen and the decline in Japanese government bond prices, which has caused "anomalies" in the global market. He believes this indicates that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury may soon collaborate to directly intervene in the yen and Japanese government bond markets through "money printing" to inject new liquidity into the global fiat currency system.Hayes specifically outlined the possible intervention path: the New York Fed creates dollar reserves and instructs primary dealers like JPMorgan to sell dollars and buy yen in the foreign exchange market to support the exchange rate, and may invest the acquired yen in Japanese government bonds to lower their yields. This operation will lead to an expansion of the "foreign currency-denominated assets" item on the Fed's balance sheet, essentially meaning that the Fed is taking on the interest rate risk of the yen exchange rate and Japanese government bonds through money printing.He analyzed the motives and consequences of this move: aimed at stabilizing the yen and lowering Japanese government bond yields to prevent Japanese investors from massively selling U.S. Treasuries, avoiding uncontrolled increases in U.S. Treasury yields, while enhancing the competitiveness of U.S. exports.This process will increase global dollar liquidity and may simultaneously boost the euro and yuan exchange rates. Hayes pointed out that this "non-QE" style of balance sheet expansion will ultimately provide upward momentum for risk assets, including Bitcoin. In terms of trading strategy, he stated that a rapid strengthening of the yen against the dollar is usually a signal for reducing risk assets. Bitcoin's decline due to the strengthening yen means he will not increase his risk exposure until it is confirmed that the Fed is intervening in the yen and Japanese government bond markets by expanding its balance sheet.He has closed positions in leveraged Bitcoin-related assets such as Strategy and Metaplanet, stating that he will re-enter if his judgment proves correct. In the meantime, his fund Maelstrom continues to increase its holdings in Zcash, while positions in other quality DeFi tokens remain unchanged. He indicated that if the Fed indeed expands its balance sheet to intervene in the currency and bond markets, he will increase his holdings in DeFi assets such as ENA, ETHFI, PENDLE, and LDO.

According to CoinDesk, the market shows that Bitcoin has fluctuated and consolidated after falling below $90,000. Analysts believe this decline aligns with the risk-averse sentiment in traditional markets, leading to an increase in risk aversion in the crypto market.Derivatives data shows that Bitcoin's 30-day implied volatility (IV) rose to 44.34 on Tuesday, while the open interest (OI) in the past 24 hours fell by 3.25% to $28.3 billion, indicating that traders with short positions took profits during this period. However, the funding rate generally remained positive throughout the sell-off.Additionally, Zcash's open interest decreased by 2.5%, while its price rose by 1.5%, indicating that holders of short positions have begun to reduce their bearish exposure since January 8.

Shielded Labs announced on platform X that it has received a donation of 3,221 ZEC from Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss, valued at approximately $1.2 million. The funds will be used to support core initiatives such as network sustainability mechanisms, Crosslink, and dynamic fees, aimed at enhancing the long-term security, sustainability, and scalability of the Zcash network.This is the second donation from Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss to the organization, following their initial donation in 2023 to support the establishment of the Crosslink task force. Shielded Labs is a Zcash support organization based in Switzerland, with its funding entirely sourced from donations, independent of developer funds and block reward operations.