Zcash's 2,000% Run: Who Bought, Who Sold and What Could Go Wrong

While Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP fell over the past year, a coin many had written off went up more than 2,000%, according to the video. That coin is Zcash, a privacy coin designed so that nobody, the government included, can see who you’re paying.

The names behind the run include a Silicon Valley investor, one of crypto’s best-known traders, the Winklevoss twins and Grayscale. One of them sold everything right before the biggest leg of the move. Here is how it unfolded, what makes Zcash different, and the risks the price charts leave out.

How did the Zcash rally start?

It started with one social media post. On October 1 last year, Zcash traded around $74 and few people talked about it. Then Naval Ravikant, the investor known for early bets on Uber and Twitter, posted about it. More than 4 million people saw the post, and Zcash jumped more than 60% in a single day.

Arthur Hayes, who co-founded one of the biggest crypto exchanges, later described how he got involved. He was sitting next to Naval at a dinner during a crypto conference, Naval kept making the case for Zcash, and Hayes said he “bought a few million bucks on the spot.” He admitted he bought after Naval’s post had already moved the price. In one interview, Hayes said Zcash could quickly reach 10 to 20% of Bitcoin’s value.

One detail many posts left out: according to the video, Naval was an early investor in 2015 in the company that went on to build Zcash. A crypto news site called that a conflict of interest. The video says that doesn’t make him wrong, but it means the most famous post in the story came from someone with a stake from the start.

What makes Zcash different from Bitcoin and XRP?

Zcash can hide who paid whom. Every Bitcoin payment sits on a public ledger, and so does every XRP payment. With the right tools, anyone can follow money from wallet to wallet, and coins that come from a bank account can be traced back to it.

Zcash lets users send a shielded payment, where the sender, the receiver and the amount are all hidden. According to the video, Edward Snowden helped launch Zcash in 2016 under a fake name.

The video stresses that XRP and Zcash do different jobs. XRP was built as a compliant bridge for banks and payment firms, which is why its payments are public by design. But nobody can freeze native XRP held in a self-custody wallet, which the XRP Ledger’s own documentation states. In the video’s words, XRP moves money through the system in the open; Zcash moves money without anyone watching.

Why did Arthur Hayes sell everything?

A bug shook his thesis. Hayes’s pitch was that Wall Street had taken over Bitcoin and couldn’t touch privacy coins. By May, he said Zcash would be his second-biggest holding, arguing that big tech, big government and AI tracking everything makes provable financial privacy necessary.

Four days after that interview aired, a security researcher found a bug in Zcash’s main privacy pool that could have let someone create counterfeit Zcash. It was patched within days. Developers said they think it is very unlikely anyone used it, but that nobody can prove cryptographically that nobody did. For a coin whose promise is “trust the math,” that was a serious problem.

Zcash dropped about 30%, and Hayes sold everything. About three months later, Zcash broke above $1,000 for the first time since its 2016 launch. Hayes posted a chart joking about it, and the video says there is no evidence he bought back in.

What changed in Washington?

The political backdrop shifted toward financial privacy, though Donald Trump has never mentioned Zcash, according to the video. The timeline it gives:

1. At a Nashville speech, Trump promised there would never be a CBDC (a central bank digital currency, where the government can see every payment) while he is president, and pledged to defend self-custody.
2. Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road marketplace.
3. Three days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order banning federal agencies from creating a CBDC.
4. In December, asked about a Samurai Wallet developer heading to federal prison over the privacy app, Trump said, “I’ve heard about it. I’ll look at it.”
5. SEC Chair Paul Atkins warned that treating every wallet and transaction as something to report would turn crypto into a “financial panopticon.”
6. In January, the SEC closed its investigation into the Zcash Foundation without taking action.

Who is buying Zcash now?

Large, well-connected buyers. The Winklevoss twins, who backed Trump’s campaign with Bitcoin, built a company called Cypherpunk that now holds over 323,000 ZEC, about 1.92% of the total supply. In August, it launched a mining fleet that runs about 18% of the network.

Wall Street arrived too. On August 25, Grayscale turned its Zcash trust into an ETF charging 2.5% a year. It started with about $34 million from the old trust and passed $400 million within nine days. The video notes that Grayscale’s own parent company also put money in, so part of that demand came from inside the same corporate family.

What are the risks?

The video lists several the hype accounts tend to skip:

Risk	What the video reports
Team turmoil	In January, the entire team at the company that built Zcash walked out over a dispute with its board.
Limited real privacy	About 71% of all Zcash sits in public addresses, so most of it isn’t private.
European rules	From July 2027, Europe bars its licensed exchanges from handling privacy coins.
Legal risk for privacy tools	The two Samurai Wallet founders were sentenced to five and four years in federal prison.
Volatility	Zcash fell about 30% in a matter of days this year.

The same US government that closed the Zcash Foundation investigation still sent privacy developers to prison, which the video says shows how unsettled the fight over financial privacy remains.

The lesson from Arthur Hayes

The video’s main point isn’t about whether to own Zcash. It says it is not calling Zcash the next XRP or a scam, and it isn’t telling anyone to buy or sell either coin. The point is about planning.

Hayes had one of the best reads in crypto on Zcash and still sold at the worst moment, because his plan for getting in had no plan for what to do if something broke. The video compares that with XRP holders who sold after the SEC sued Ripple and then missed the recovery.

The host also shares his own 2017 experience: he turned about $20,000 into over $150,000 across many altcoins and gave it all back, because he had coins he believed in but no plan for when the story changed. The video’s framework from the investors in this story:

1. Treat each coin as a deliberately sized position, not an all-in bet.
2. Own assets that do different jobs, because money rotates between sectors.
3. Decide on profit-taking and exit plans before buying.
4. Decide in advance what you’ll do if the thesis breaks, such as a bug, a hack or a legal change.

What to watch next

For Zcash, the signals to watch are ETF flows, whether the share of coins held in shielded addresses grows, how the project’s development team situation is resolved, and how exchanges respond as Europe’s July 2027 deadline approaches. The video’s broader point applies to any coin: the 2,000% chart shows what happened, not what happens next.