ZEC has climbed 25x over the past year. And that surge has dragged an old argument back into the spotlight: could Zcash ever pass Bitcoin, and should it even try?
The debate is laid out in a Blockworks article by Jake Koch-Gallup, translated by Foresight News. He admits the thesis makes him uncomfortable. Fair enough. BTC is a big chunk of his own portfolio, and he owns no ZEC at all. But he still argues the idea is not nearly as ridiculous as it first sounds.
Zcash is framed as Bitcoin with privacy built into the protocol
The piece treats Zcash as basically Bitcoin with a privacy upgrade added in. BCH, BSV, and XEC are Bitcoin forks too, yet none of them has gotten anywhere near Bitcoin’s $1.7 trillion market capitalization.
Zcash, though, has something those forks lack: privacy baked straight into the protocol. The article says that matters. A lot. It even points to Satoshi Nakamoto himself. In a 2010 forum discussion, Satoshi wrote: "If a privacy-preserving solution is found, Bitcoin could be made into a better, simpler, and more convenient version." The article leans on that line to argue privacy was never some side issue in Bitcoin’s design debate.
The sticking point was double spending. Simple problem to state, nasty problem to solve. Every node has to see every transaction to make sure the same coin is not spent twice. The article says Satoshi could not figure out how to prove a coin had not already been spent without revealing the coin itself. He also said it was difficult to see how zero-knowledge proofs could fix that problem, and he asked the forum if anyone had ideas.
The article’s answer: Zcash.
From there, it asks the obvious question. If a network solves privacy while keeping Bitcoin’s technical base, should it command a higher valuation? Then the author pivots to why BTC is priced where it is now: first-mover advantage, the deepest liquidity in crypto, the most secure network, acceptance by banks and governments, and its digital-gold identity. By that measure, the article says, Zcash has almost none of Bitcoin’s edge.
And that is the core split in the piece. On the tech, the author says, ZEC ought to be worth more. In real-world market terms, though, it is not going to pass BTC.
Still. That does not mean it cannot narrow the gap.
ZEC is being repriced against BTC
ZEC’s market capitalization is $25.3 billion, or 1.49% of Bitcoin’s $1.70 trillion market value. Back at the start of 2025, that ratio was just 0.05%.
The related chart tracks daily data for ZEC’s circulating market cap as a share of Bitcoin’s circulating market cap. The high was 1.62% on Sept. 18, and the reading was 0.62% on Nov. 20. The source is Blockworks Research, using data through Sept. 23, 2026.
The author says 1.49% still feels cheap. For context, ETH sits at 19.4% of BTC’s value, BNB at 6.1%, and XRP at 5.7%. On that logic, he argues ZEC could be repriced toward the band where BNB and XRP trade.
So why would that suggest another 4x from here? The article’s argument is blunt: privacy is how money is supposed to work. Cash is private by default. Crypto flipped that on its head. Even after this rally, ZEC and XMR combined still make up only about 1.2% of the crypto market, which the author takes as proof that privacy is still being valued like a nice extra. Not a necessity. If the market starts treating it as essential, that gap could shrink fast.
Shielded pool growth is presented as evidence of real usage
The article also points to shielded ZEC balances. Another signal. Shielded ZEC hit 5.2 million in May, and the author sees that as evidence users are not just buying the token but actually using its privacy feature. Every coin added to the shielded pool makes transactions for everyone else in that pool harder to trace, so privacy gets stronger as usage grows.
Pair that with the same 21 million supply cap and the same halving structure Bitcoin uses, and the author says ZEC already looks very close to the upgraded form of Bitcoin that Satoshi once described.
The second chart shows how much ZEC is held in Zcash shielded pools, measured in millions of ZEC. The top reading was 5.19 million on May 11. It also flags the Orchard fix and the Ironwood launch. The listed sources are Blockworks Research and Zechub, with data through Sept. 24, 2026.
Bitcoin is also seeing proposals for shielded transfers
The article does not pretend ZEC has the field to itself. It says the newest threat may be coming from Bitcoin.
Alloc Init recently published a paper on Shielded Bitcoin, a proposal meant to bring private transfers to Bitcoin without a soft fork. The author says stronger privacy on Bitcoin would be a good thing, but he does not view it as a serious near-term threat to Zcash. Right now, it is still just a paper. Zcash, by contrast, has been running in production for about 10 years.
The piece also admits Zcash’s own history is not clean. At the end of May, a researcher discovered a forgery bug in Zcash’s main shielded pool that had been there for four years. After that became public, ZEC dropped more than 50%. The bug was fixed within days, and the article says there is no evidence it was ever used.
It also says Shielded Bitcoin still depends on a trusted setup, which is something Zcash spent years removing through engineering work.
The author also makes a simple point: privacy needs a crowd. Without enough usage, onchain investigators can line up deposits and withdrawals. Zcash’s shielded pool, on the other hand, already contains millions of ZEC.
Even Robin Linus, the creator of BitVM, is quoted as cautioning that the cryptography behind the proposal is highly experimental and may take years to gain trust. In the article’s framing, that gives Zcash a real first-mover lead.
The risks around ZEC remain in place
The article does not wrap up with a neat bullish pitch.
Instead, it runs through the risks. Only about 29% of ZEC is actually shielded, meaning most ZEC still moves with the same transparency as Bitcoin. About 81% of ZEC supply has been issued, versus 95% for BTC. Annual inflation is still about 4%. And 20% of block rewards goes to a development fund instead of miners.
The author also flags a structural risk. If privacy tools keep showing up on bigger chains, like RAILGUN and Zama on Ethereum, users may decide they do not need a standalone privacy coin at all.
Those risks, he says, do not break the bigger thesis. But they are enough to keep him out for now. If ZEC can capture some of the monetary premium now sitting in ETH, BNB, and XRP, and if it keeps advancing its technology, including possible quantum-resistant features, then he says he might, maybe, end up buying ZEC.
