Building the Zcash Thesis in 2026

Last year, after being dormant since 2017, ZEC made a historic 1,200% run from $56 to $700 in just 41 days. 

Ever since, ZEC price action has shown basically zero strength, and seemed poised to creep slowly back toward irrelevancy, with its previous action all feeling like a short-term, insider-cabal pump with no longevity.

Just a flash in the pan. 

Yet in May 2026, here we are again. ZEC is up 80% in the last 30 days, and is now just 20% off its highs. 

The hot ball of crypto money has pumped plenty of bullshit in the past – a single pump isn’t really a signal. However, a second run in price deserves some attention. 

And, after looking around, I’ve discovered a pretty substantial narrative building behind ZEC that is worth sharing. I like ZEC! 

So, What’s the Deal? 

There’s strong resonance between the current demands of the market, and what ZEC has to offer, leading people (myself included) to reconsider what ZEC looks like in the long-term. 

The Institutionalization of Bitcoin 

The institutionalization of Bitcoin appears to be going fantastically. 

• Spot BTC ETFs collectively hold 1.25M BTC
• Strategy alone holds 820k BTC
• Governments and Central Banks hold almost 500,000 BTC (that we know of)

All in all, that's about 12% of Bitcoin held by the world's largest and most powerful institutions. This is what success looks like for BTC, and this was always the plan. Congrats to Bitcoin! 

But unsurprisingly, people are simultaneously feeling like Bitcoin has lost its sharp edge versus the powers that be. Bitcoin is no longer rebellious. The vibes aren’t really cypherpunk anymore. Bitcoin is no longer for escaping government debasement, it’s for improving the Sharpe ratio of boomer retirement portfolios. 

The Privacy Narrative

But you know what is cypherpunk? And also what the rest of crypto lacks? Privacy. 

Zcash’s privacy is top-notch. Zcash has been on the frontier of applied cryptography, and Zcash culture has been privacy-first since inception. 

This is not something that Bitcoin, or even Ethereum, is capable of providing at scale. That can change with Ethereum in the future, but today Zcash essentially has a monopoly on privacy. 

Monero is another option, and it is also doing very well – up 250% since Jan 2024, but it hasn’t captured the same level of excitement and narrative power that Zcash has – for a variety of reasons (weaker privacy, more politically dubious, quantum vulnerability, poor liquidity & onramps, etc.)

The growing conversation around wealth taxes and capital controls is giving narrative tailwinds to privacy and ZEC. 

• The Netherlands has introduced a wealth tax on unrealized gains, and California is in discussions about doing the same. 
• NYC's self-proclaimed socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani has spooked the city's wealthy, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin among them, to threaten moves elsewhere amid the threat of new taxes.
• Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz moved from Washington to Florida after Washington implemented an income tax. 
• A clip from AOC is rocketing around the internet saying that it’s fundamentally “impossible to earn a billion dollars” ethically.

The growing global interest in socialist policies, wealth taxes, and capital controls are all narrative tailwinds for ZEC. You’ll never be able to escape these things with Bitcoin – BTC is more auditable and traceable than the traditional financial system. 

We just recorded an episode with Ari Redbord from TRM Labs, where he said how much surveillance agencies love the idea of finance moving onchain, because of how easy it has been for them to surveil it – yikes!

If people truly want to escape these policies, it’s going to be ZEC, not BTC, to do that job. At least, that’s the narrative. In its early years, Bitcoin had this narrative too. If ZEC takes the crown as cypherpunk money, it will likely follow in Bitcoin’s same institutionalization path.

Financial Privacy in the Age of AI

Every increase in surveillance capabilities induces more demand for privacy technologies. 

That’s the narrative in a report from Grayscale on the subject. The framing they use is that we're entering a third major wave of financial privacy scrutiny – following the 1970s digitization of banking and the early 2000s internet banking boom – driven this time by AI, which threatens to supercharge financial tracking and erode the confidentiality that has long been central to how money functions.

ZEC’s Path Towards Institutionalization 

A core reason why ZEC is bullish: it has a credible path towards institutionalization. 

One day, ZEC too might put on a suit and be paraded down Wall Street as the hot new crypto product to be sold to diversify people’s portfolios. 

Unlike Monero, which has been branded as a ‘criminal-coin’, ZEC’s brand is “compliant-privacy,” and is more agreeable to the regulatory apparatus. 

Monero's privacy is mandatory and universal; there is no transparent or auditable part of Monero. 

Meanwhile, Zcash is a hybrid model. It allows users to shield their ZEC, but it also allows exchanges to list and custody, unshielded ZEC. On the open market, ZEC is traded and sold as the transparent, auditable, non-shielded version. Regulators can work with the transparent version

A Grayscale ZEC ETF is possible because the custodian can hold and audit transparent ZEC. Coinbase Custody's support for ZEC at the end of 2025 showed regulated custodians can hold, report, and audit transparent ZEC balances.

Monero’s privacy-by-default model creates existential problems when it comes to institutional compliance, and under MiCA in Europe, Monero faces systematic delistings from exchanges. XMR isn’t even listed on Coinbase or Binance for similar reasons. 

Monero gets the cypherpunk purity points. ZEC gets the listings, the custody, the ETF pipeline, and eventually, the Wall Street suit.

Quantum Preparedness

Bitcoin's quantum vulnerability is an opportunity for every other crypto-money with a credible path to overcome it. 

When a Bitcoin public key is exposed onchain, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will one day be able to brute-force the private key from it. Hundreds of billions of dollars in BTC sit in this exposure window, with no clean migration path.

Zcash's shielded addresses – its core privacy feature – prevent public keys from ever hitting the chain in the first place. You can't attack a key you can't see. This doesn't make Zcash fully quantum-proof today: transparent ZEC addresses carry the same exposure as Bitcoin, and only ~30% of circulating ZEC currently sits in shielded pools. But that 30% is at a record high and growing.

But most importantly, Zcash has a concrete quantum timeline: quantum-recoverable wallets are shipping Soon™, and full post-quantum architecture is targeted to be ready within 12–18 months. The narrative is that Zcash will be quantum-ready, and Bitcoin might not be. 

For the market, the logic is asymmetric: if Zcash executes, it captures quantum-flight capital from Bitcoin. Even if Bitcoin fixes its own problem first, Zcash still trades on privacy fundamentals. Mapping that to BTC’s $1.6T market cap compared to ZEC’s $10B, and traders see an asymmetric opportunity. 

The meme price target for ZEC has emerged as “10% of Bitcoin” – or $160b market cap. But that’s just the meme: those in the ZEC trade want people to benchmark ZEC to BTC. 

Supply, Distribution, Hardness

ZEC has had absolute dogshit price performance since it peaked at $880 in January 2018.

Today, this fact is working to its advantage...