Zcash (ZEC) moved back to the center of the crypto market after breaking above $1,000 intraday on Sept. 4, 2026. On Sept. 7, it rose as high as about $1,256.92 and closed around $1,146.61, up roughly 41% from its Sept. 2 close of about $814.84.
CoinDesk reported on Sept. 4 that ZEC was up about 94% over the previous month and more than 2,300% over the past year. The same report cited liquidation data showing about $36.6 million in leveraged ZEC positions wiped out over 24 hours, with shorts accounting for about $34.5 million. Forced short covering may have amplified the move, but the figures only show that a squeeze was part of the market action. They do not prove that the entire rally came from short liquidations.
As traders debated whether Zcash could become a "better Bitcoin," F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun pushed back on Sept. 8, arguing that the recent rise was driven more by "narrative buying" than by usage. In his view, a higher market-cap ranking does not mean the project has earned a position that matches that ranking in real demand. He pointed to Zcash’s initial distribution, developer funding, governance conflict and security history.
The argument around Zcash now has two clear sides. One is built on a stronger privacy thesis promoted by prominent investors and institutions. The other reopens longstanding concerns raised by veterans of the mining sector. At the center is a simple question: what exactly is the market paying for?
Who has backed Zcash, and why
Over the past year, several well-known investors and firms publicly backed or took positions in Zcash, including Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert, Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, Multicoin Capital and Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant. Their reasoning has not been identical, and their positions have not remained static.
Barry Silbert: privacy assets could absorb part of Bitcoin’s capital base
Barry Silbert has been one of Zcash’s clearest advocates. At Bitcoin Investor Week in New York in February 2026, he said capital equal to 5% to 10% of Bitcoin’s could eventually move into privacy assets such as Zcash. He said he still favored Bitcoin, but saw privacy coins as an asymmetric opportunity.
That thesis does not require Zcash to replace Bitcoin. It only assumes that financial privacy becomes a separate allocation category that can attract some capital that would otherwise remain concentrated in BTC. Even so, the 5% to 10% figure was his forecast. It was not evidence of actual completed flows, and it was not a promise that all of that capital would go into ZEC.
Institutional access has also changed. Grayscale’s website shows that ZCSH was upgraded to an exchange-traded product on Aug. 25, 2026. That gives investors a way to get ZEC exposure through brokerage accounts, but the existence of the product does not itself mean there are sustained net inflows, and it does not directly show growth in on-chain privacy payments.
The Winklevoss twins: privacy as a scarce asset, then a treasury allocation
Support from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss has mixed ideology with capital deployment. Speaking about Cypherpunk, Tyler said privacy is a prerequisite for personal freedom and autonomy, and that as more of life moves online, privacy is becoming increasingly scarce. In September 2026, Tyler quoted a Cypherpunk video and wrote that AI is accelerating the loss of social privacy and that "Zcash is the antidote."
The treasury angle is more concrete. In November 2025, Cypherpunk Technologies, backed by Winklevoss Capital, announced a Zcash treasury strategy. At that time, it had already spent about $50 million to buy 203,775 ZEC at an average cost of roughly $245 per coin. Those figures describe holdings at the start of the strategy. They should not be treated as current balances.
For supporters in this camp, ZEC is not only a payments token. It is also a long-term privacy asset. A public company treasury turns that idea into an executable buying strategy.
Arthur Hayes: a privacy bull who later exited over the Orchard issue
Arthur Hayes once put Zcash near the center of his privacy investment thesis. In a May 2026 interview with The Rollup, he linked ZEC with NEAR, saying ZEC would be one of the first assets people think about when they want privacy, while NEAR’s cross-chain transaction tools could help move that value around. He tied the broader need for privacy to surveillance capacity from AI, large technology companies and governments.
Hayes also said at the time that even though he saw a higher possible upside in NEAR, his Zcash position was larger because higher upside usually comes with higher risk.
That stance changed in June. On June 5, 2026, Hayes said publicly that he had sold his entire ZEC position because of the Orchard vulnerability. He said that even if unauthorized issuance was unlikely, the inability to rule it out cryptographically undermined the thesis for him. He also said he could reconsider buying back if those doubts were shown to be unfounded. As a result, his bullish comments from May cannot be used as a direct guide to his position in September, and his June disclosure cannot be stretched into proof that he still holds zero ZEC now.
Tushar Jain and Multicoin: from privacy as a feature to privacy as an investable asset
Multicoin’s change in stance stands out. In 2019, the firm argued in a published piece that privacy should be a feature of valuable crypto assets, and that users should not need to sell BTC or ETH and take the risk of holding a different token simply to get privacy.
By May 2026, co-founder Tushar Jain said publicly that Multicoin had built a large ZEC position starting in February of that year. His argument was that Bitcoin may resist freezing at the protocol level, but if outside parties can still link assets to real holders, those holders may face off-chain pressure. In that case, a privacy-preserving store-of-value asset has separate demand.
At least in Multicoin’s framework, privacy had shifted from an extra feature to a trait strong enough to justify a standalone investment case.
Naval Ravikant: Zcash as insurance beyond Bitcoin
Around October 2025, Naval Ravikant summarized another version of the bullish case in a single line: "Bitcoin is insurance against fiat, Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin." That was not a claim that Bitcoin must fail. It read more like an argument for keeping a second path open when BTC cannot fully meet every need.
Taken together, these views reflect one common bet: the more wealth sits on public ledgers and the better data analysis becomes, the more valuable financial privacy may be. Still, there is a gap between saying privacy has value and saying ZEC deserves its current price. Usage, security and market acceptance still have to do the proving.
Wang Chun’s criticism: does the “better Bitcoin” story hide older problems?
Wang Chun’s first objection goes to the relationship between market value and fundamentals. He argued that Zcash being close to networks such as Solana and Hyperliquid in market-cap ranking does not mean it has comparable real usage. A privacy narrative can attract buying, but it does not automatically solve problems that have built up over time.
Initial distribution and the Founders’ Reward
His first challenge concerns fairness in distribution. During Zcash’s first four years, 20% of block rewards went to the Founders’ Reward, which was allocated to founders, employees, advisors, early investors and related parties. In total, that amounted to about 2.1 million ZEC, or roughly 10% of the 21 million supply cap. The mechanism was disclosed before launch. The dispute is whether it fits the ideal of a fair monetary asset often invoked by supporters.
One distinction matters here. Those tokens were distributed gradually through block production rather than pre-mined in a single batch before launch. After the original Founders’ Reward ended, Zcash continued to fund development at the protocol level through mechanisms such as a development fund, but the beneficiaries and governance rules changed. It is not accurate to write this as early investors continuously taking the same percentage forever.
The dispute also has a practical side. Taking part of the block reward to fund development can provide a budget for long-term engineering. It also turns the questions of who decides where the money goes and who deserves it into ongoing governance issues.
Governance conflict at ECC
The second challenge is governance. In January 2026, the team at Electric Coin Company (ECC) resigned en masse after a conflict with the board of Bootstrap, the nonprofit above it. Then-CEO Josh Swihart said changes in working conditions made it impossible for the team to perform effectively, while Bootstrap attributed the dispute to governance and legal issues.
That did not mean developers abandoned Zcash. Swihart said clearly at the time that the team would form a new company and continue development, and that the protocol itself would not be affected by the personnel changes. The episode points to a serious fracture in governance relationships, but it does not support describing Zcash as an abandoned network.
The Orchard vulnerability and supply credibility
The third point, and the one that touches monetary credibility most directly, is the Orchard privacy pool vulnerability.
According to disclosures from Shielded Labs, security researcher Taylor Hornby discovered a serious flaw on May 29, 2026. The issue had existed since Orchard went live in May 2022. In theory, it could have allowed an attacker to create undetectable counterfeit ZEC inside the privacy pool in unlimited quantity. Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) then coordinated an emergency response across the ecosystem, and the emergency handling was completed on June 2, 2026.
Because of the privacy design and the nature of the flaw, the team could not determine through cryptographic methods alone whether exploitation had happened before the patch. Its assessment was that prior exploitation was unlikely. For an asset built around a fixed supply cap, that problem is not only about transaction privacy. It also affects how holders can know they have not been silently diluted.
Still, potential unauthorized issuance and proven unauthorized issuance are not the same thing. Existing disclosures cannot be rewritten as confirmation that someone actually printed unlimited ZEC.
On July 28, 2026, Zcash activated the Ironwood upgrade, which introduced a new privacy pool and restricted the old Orchard pool. Funds leaving the old pool must pass through a publicly accounted turnstile mechanism so that the amount of ZEC exiting cannot exceed the amount that had legitimately entered earlier. That helps constrain and verify circulating supply integrity, but it does not justify the conclusion that the historical flaw was never exploited.
This is where Wang Chun’s criticism lands most sharply. If supporters want to frame Zcash as a more trustworthy private form of money, then they have to answer questions about distribution history, governance stability and supply security at the same time. Simply dismissing all of those concerns as a failure to understand privacy does not settle the issue.
Can privacy demand support independent monetary value?
The dispute points to the next test for Zcash: whether privacy demand can become durable usage. The things worth watching are not limited to price and balances in privacy pools. Wallet use, persistent private transaction activity, payment scenarios and tool usability matter as well. Moving assets into a privacy pool may show a preference for privacy, but it is not the same thing as proving payment activity is growing.
The second test is whether security repairs can build long-term trust. Ironwood offers a concrete response path to the vulnerability, but independent review, fund migration and the record of later operation will say more than any endorsement from a famous investor. For a project marketed partly as money, supply credibility is itself a core fundamental.
The third test is the quality of institutional demand. Investment products and corporate treasury strategies lower the barrier to gaining ZEC exposure, and they may also make buying more concentrated. The market still has to separate long-term allocation to privacy assets from short-term momentum chasing, and it also has to distinguish investment demand inside brokerage accounts from actual usage demand on-chain.
Zcash’s rally has put the privacy-asset narrative back in the spotlight. But endorsements, exchange-traded products and treasury purchases are not the same thing as proof of growing payment demand on the network. Whether Zcash can support lasting monetary value still depends on usage, supply security and governance strong enough to earn trust.