Taiki Maeda said in a Sept. 18 podcast that Zcash (ZEC) could reach $20,000 if the token is repriced to 20% of Bitcoin’s market cap and Bitcoin (BTC) rises to $100,000. In his view, that math is not extreme.
The remarks were compiled by TechFlowPost from a roughly 32-minute episode on Maeda’s YouTube channel, HFA Research. TechFlowPost noted that Maeda holds positions in ZEC, Hyperliquid (HYPE), and LIT, and that some of those positions involve leverage. The outlet also said all price targets and return multiples mentioned in the video reflect Maeda’s personal views and do not constitute investment advice. Prices cited in the discussion, including ZEC moving from $800 to $1,500 and BTC at $100,000, were described as spoken figures from the September 2026 recording period.
Maeda says the market is in the early stage of a “violent bull market”
Maeda opened the episode with a direct market call. He said he still sees a lot of negative sentiment on his timeline, but does not see a bear market. Instead, he said the market is in the early phase of what he called a “violent bull market.”
His examples were spot holders and fundamentals-driven investors already seeing bullish conditions. Hyperliquid was nearing triple digits, Zcash had moved from about $800 two weeks earlier to nearly $1,500, and LIT had climbed from below $1 a few months ago to $5.
He described the broader setup as a K-shaped recovery. In that structure, most altcoins go to zero, while a small number of assets enter their own independent bull markets and do not need BTC to rise in order to work. He pointed to HYPE and LIT as examples of projects that route most revenue and profit back to the token.
Maeda also joked about what he called the “Taiki Maeda curse” on social media, the idea that any token he turns bullish on drops 30%. He said that after recently meeting LIT founder Vlad and posting a photo, LIT rose 20% instead.
Why he sees Zcash as one of the cycle’s biggest opportunities
Maeda said Zcash could be one of the biggest winners of this cycle and argued that a 5x to 10x move is entirely possible.
His reasoning starts with three long-running criticisms of Bitcoin: programmability, scalability, and privacy. In his telling, Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) addressed the first two and were rewarded by the market, while Zcash is the major asset focused on the privacy track. He said privacy should matter more as the market matures and argued that people will still care about it two or three years from now.
He also tied the thesis to quantum-computing concerns. Maeda said fears that quantum computing could eventually steal Satoshi’s coins reduce Bitcoin’s appeal as a long-term holding, while Zcash is clearly ahead of BTC on a quantum roadmap. He described Bitcoin as “ossified,” saying that quality is both a strength and a weakness, whereas Zcash represents a developer community willing to upgrade in response to challenges such as quantum computing.
The key valuation point in his framework is relative market cap. Maeda said Zcash currently sits at about 1.8% to 1.9% of Bitcoin’s market cap, and he believes that ratio can be repriced to 10%, 20%, or 30%. He framed Zcash as an undervalued “privacy version of Bitcoin” and as an alternative store-of-value asset relative to BTC.
How the $20,000 target is calculated
Maeda used market-cap ratios to BTC rather than a simple standalone price target. He laid out several scenarios.
- Bear-case scenario: ZEC reaches 5% of Bitcoin’s market cap. If BTC is at $100,000, ZEC would be about $5,000.
- Bull-case scenario: ZEC reaches 20% of Bitcoin’s market cap. If BTC is at $100,000, ZEC would be $20,000.
- Speculative peak scenario: 20%, 30%, and 40% are all possible, and he said he would not rule out 50%, while adding that investors should not get too “moon boy.”
To support that framework, he pointed to historical comparisons. Litecoin (LTC), he said, once peaked at 8% of Bitcoin’s market cap and stayed in a 3% to 6% range for about a year. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) briefly touched 40% of BTC in a spike, but its more durable range was 10% to 20% for nearly a year, a period when the market genuinely valued BCH at roughly 15% of Bitcoin. He also used a commodity comparison, saying silver’s market cap is about 13% of gold’s.
Maeda then made a cycle analogy. If Zcash is two cycles behind Bitcoin, as some people say, then Bitcoin itself reached $20,000 two cycles ago. In that framing, he asked why ZEC could not do the same.
One of the lines highlighted by TechFlowPost was: “If BTC gets to $100k and ZEC is 20%, that’s $20,000. Is that really so crazy? Bitcoin hit $20k two cycles ago, so why can’t ZEC?”
“Price is the fundamental”: the shielded-pool reflexivity argument
Another major part of Maeda’s thesis is reflexivity. He said Zcash has two types of addresses: transparent addresses, where balances are visible much like BTC, and shielded addresses, where activity becomes untraceable after entering the shielded pool.
His key observation was that over the past year, the amount of ZEC in the shielded pool has only gone up, while price has also only gone up. In his explanation, a larger shielded pool means stronger privacy. If the pool is worth only $100 million, a billionaire trying to hide $10 million, or 1% of net worth, would stand out. If price rises and the pool becomes larger, it can absorb wealth from higher-net-worth users more effectively.
That leads to the reflexive loop in his argument: a higher price allows the shielded pool to protect more wealth, which makes the product more useful, which attracts more use, which can then support a higher price. He summarized it this way: “Zcash gets more useful as it goes up. Price itself is the fundamental. It’s exactly the same as Bitcoin.”
Maeda said a move above $1,000 and above 1% of Bitcoin’s market cap would mean ZEC has crossed the chasm and that the parabolic phase is only beginning. If “reasonable BTC maximalists” start rotating 1% to 10% of their holdings from BTC into ZEC, he said, marginal capital could keep pushing the price higher.
He also warned that ZEC will probably surge and then fall 80% to 90% at some point, which is why profit-taking has to be planned in advance.
Risk, leverage, and why he prefers taking the most risk early
Maeda’s risk framework is deliberately counterintuitive. He said perceived risk is highest when actual risk is lowest.
His reasoning is that when people feel the market is dangerous, they are still sitting in cash and are too scared to buy back in. That means capital has not fully entered. Once BTC breaks $90,000 and everyone starts saying the bull market is back and piles in with leverage, that is when he thinks exposure should be reduced.
His operating philosophy is to take the most risk in the first 10% to 30% of a bull market and then gradually lower risk exposure. He said that is how he has handled ZEC: he added leverage at lower levels, and while the move higher has validated the trade, the use of leverage and the discomfort of buying when almost nobody else wanted it mean he now has to take profits with discipline.
One of the quotes highlighted in the article was: “When perceived risk is highest, actual risk is lowest, because everyone is still holding cash and is too scared to buy.”
The “next 2x rule” for taking profit
Because ZEC is, in his view, a store-of-value asset with no cash flow and a narrative-driven valuation, Maeda said timing entries and exits is difficult. His solution is what he called the “next 2x rule,” based on how hard it is for ZEC’s market-cap ratio to BTC to double from one level to the next.
- 1% to 2%: easy, and he said it happened in two weeks.
- 2% to 4%: not hard, just another doubling.
- 4% to 8%: harder, with 8% serving as the first profit-taking level because LTC once reached that mark and a pullback usually follows.
- 8% to 16%: each doubling gets more difficult.
His first target is 3% to 4% of Bitcoin’s market cap. He added that if BTC reaches $80,000 by year-end, that would imply a ZEC price of roughly $2,400 to $3,200. At that point, he said he would remove leverage, keep cash on hand, and continue holding the spot position for long-term capital gains treatment.
For the remaining position, Maeda said he believes ZEC can still reach 10% to 20% of BTC’s market cap. But he also cautioned that when someone becomes convinced that something must happen, that is often when the market punishes them. He pointed to traders last year who were certain Q4 would rally, went all-in on altcoins, and were wiped out.
He also mentioned that an NFT had recently been minted on Zcash and that a scalability effort called Project Tachyon could go live next year. In his view, investors should not buy it based only on what it is now, but on what it could become.
Trading style: concentrated bets, conviction, and strict risk control
In the final section, Maeda discussed trading style. He separated batting average, or win rate, from slugging percentage, or payoff. Social media, he said, tends to admire traders with high win rates, but high win rates often come with low payoff. If position sizes are too small, being right more than half the time still may not produce meaningful returns.
He described himself as a slugging-percentage trader: willing to lose small 90% of the time if the right 10% can produce outsized gains.
He summed up the method with a familiar line: “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch it very closely. It takes courage to be a brave pig.”
On his own ZEC trade, Maeda said he started building the position below $500 and bought the June bottom. The process was painful, but his conviction held. He then kept adding at $600, $700, and $800 because, in his view, once ZEC broke through the $700 to $800 area, the move would turn parabolic and the difference between buying at $500 and $480 would no longer matter much.
Even so, he said that despite remaining highly bullish, adding more around $1,500 feels uncomfortable. That discomfort, he said, is part of the mindset he wanted to communicate.
His closing advice was simple: average into winners, not losers. Selling what is rising to buy what is falling, he said, is like pulling flowers to water weeds.
Podcast details and disclosures
The speaker in the episode was Taiki Maeda. The source was his YouTube channel, HFA Research. The broadcast date was Sept. 18, 2026, and the runtime was about 32 minutes and 26 seconds. TechFlowPost listed the assets discussed as Zcash (ZEC), Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Hyperliquid (HYPE), LIT (Lider), Ethereum (ETH), and Solana (SOL).
TechFlowPost also stated that Maeda holds positions in ZEC, HYPE, and LIT, with some leverage involved. All targets and return multiples in the video were described as his personal judgment and not investment advice. TechFlowPost said its article was a compiled editorial piece and did not constitute any buy or sell recommendation.
