This article is reprinted with permission from Baihua Blockchain, author: Cathy, copyright belongs to the original author.
In early October 2025, Zcash (ZEC) saw its price surge over 242% in just two weeks, and an astonishing 570% increase within a month. The price of ZEC broke through $230 for the first time since 2022, reaching over $285 at its peak, with a market cap briefly exceeding $4 billion.
This was not an ordinary market rally, but a grand narrative about "privacy" making a strong comeback in the crypto world. More notably, the entire anonymous coin sector was ignited, with a total market cap increasing by 17.4% within a week, reaching $12.2 billion. So, what exactly triggered this "privacy revival"?
Zcash's resurgence was not due to a single factor, but rather a chemical reaction resulting from several converging forces.
Wall Street's Entry Ticket
It all began when asset management giant Grayscale announced the launch of a Zcash trust fund. The Grayscale trust acts like a "cryptocurrency purchase package" tailored for Wall Street institutional investors, allowing qualified investors with substantial capital but regulatory constraints to indirectly hold ZEC by purchasing trust shares, without worrying about complex issues like private key management and wallet security.
The signal significance of this news far exceeded its direct capital inflow. It announced to the entire market: "Wall Street is paying attention to Zcash and has rolled out the red carpet for it." The expectation of institutional capital entering became the first spark igniting ZEC's price.
Reverse Stimulation from Tightening Regulations
A seemingly contradictory phenomenon is that the increasingly tightening global regulations have instead fueled the rise of anonymous coins. At that time, the European Union was intensely discussing the "Chat Control" bill, proposing to use artificial intelligence to monitor users' private information on a large scale. Meanwhile, new anti-money laundering (AML) regulations in the EU were also on the horizon, planning to ban the use of anonymous crypto accounts and anonymous coins starting in 2027.
This sounds like bad news, but the market gave a completely opposite interpretation. Former White House advisor Thor Torrens pointedly noted: "Surveillance and censorship are not diminishing, but intensifying. Privacy will only become more valuable." This reflects a "bad news is good news" logic— the stricter the regulations, the stronger the demand to escape them.
Strong Endorsement from KOLs
Venture capitalist Naval Ravikant posted a highly shareable tweet on social media: "Bitcoin is insurance against fiat, Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin." This statement quickly went viral, positioning Zcash as an essential tool for hedging against the privacy risks of Bitcoin's transparent ledger.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs, described a crypto world without privacy as a "dystopian nightmare," praising Zcash for its "stronger privacy and scalability design," even giving a price prediction of $1,000.
The backing of these heavyweight figures completely reversed Zcash's sentiment indicators on social media, turning it positive for the first time in months. A perfect storm orchestrated by institutions, regulations, laws, and KOLs was thus formed.
In this collective celebration of anonymous coins, one detail stands out: the once-dominant Monero (XMR) performed poorly, with a weekly decline of -1.94%. Behind this is a tale of technical routes, security trust, and market narratives.
Zcash's Smart Choice: Optional Privacy Model
Zcash's core technology is "zk-SNARKs" (zero-knowledge proofs), which allows transactions to be verified while fully encrypted. However, Zcash's "smartest" design lies in its "optional privacy" model—users can freely choose to conduct fully transparent transactions or completely anonymous "shielded transactions."
This flexibility is interpreted by the market as a potential path to regulatory compliance. For institutions like Grayscale, an anonymous coin that allows for "transparency" is clearly more acceptable than a "black box" where all transactions are forced to be anonymous. Coupled with the Electric Coin Company (ECC) team’s ongoing efforts to enhance wallet usability and plans to transition to proof of stake (PoS) in the future to improve interoperability, Zcash presents a positive, professional, and future-embracing image to the market.
Monero's Dilemma: A Trust Crisis Shaking Its Foundations
While Zcash was surging, Monero found itself embroiled in a serious security controversy.
In August 2025, a mining pool named Qubic claimed to have successfully launched a "51% attack" on the Monero network, resulting in a "blockchain reorganization" of six blocks.
Although researchers later pointed out that this was more of a PR stunt using a "selfish mining" strategy rather than actual 51% network control, the damage was done. This incident exposed potential centralization risks in Monero's network hash power, shaking its foundation as the safest anonymous coin.
When investors had to choose between the two anonymous coins, one side was Zcash, which had just received Wall Street's endorsement and was on a roll, while the other was Monero, dealing with a network security crisis. The balance of capital would clearly tilt towards Zcash.
Zcash's explosion is just the beginning. After capital flowed into ZEC, it began searching for the next "potential stock" within the sector. Thus, we saw some smaller, more elastic anonymous projects also experiencing astonishing increases over the past month: Railgun (RAIL) rose 245%, PIVX increased by 42%. Even the veteran anonymous coin Dash (DASH) saw a 43% weekly increase and a 90% monthly increase.
This clearly indicates that the market is undergoing a thematic capital rotation. As large-cap stocks like Bitcoin enter a correction phase, smart money begins to seek new narratives with high growth potential, and "privacy" evidently became the hottest choice at that time.
From a technical perspective, mainstream anonymous coins each have their strengths: Zcash, with its zero-knowledge proof technology and optional privacy model, has gained the strongest institutional appeal; Monero insists on default privacy and asset fungibility; Dash emphasizes fast transaction speeds and low fees. However, in this round of market activity, it is clear that Zcash, with its regulatory flexibility and institutional recognition, has the upper hand.
This event resembles a successful roadshow for the concept of "institutional-level privacy." It tells us that projects like Zcash, which possess top-notch technology, offer compliance options, and receive institutional recognition, may continue to be the preferred choice for mainstream capital entering the anonymous track. In contrast, projects like Monero, which adhere to a "hardcore" privacy route, must address their own security and decentralization challenges.
For each of us in the crypto world, this "privacy revival" poses a profound question: In an increasingly transparent and monitored digital age, how much are we willing to pay to protect our financial privacy?
The market movement in the fall of 2025 may just be the first public market pricing of this question. As Wall Street begins to roll out the red carpet for privacy assets, it may be telling us: privacy has never been as valuable as it is today. And this revaluation of value has only just begun.
Related: Zcash (ZEC) recovers to pre-crash highs after the crypto market crash
Original article: “From $60 to $268: Zcash's Comeback and the 'Second Spring' of Privacy Coins”
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