Several top privacy coins are withstanding the pressures of the digital asset market, indicating an increasing interest from investors in privacy-centric cryptocurrencies.
Zcash (ZEC) reached a remarkable eight-year peak of $388 on Friday, climbing 7.6% within the last 24 hours, as reported by data aggregator CoinMarketCap. With a market cap of $6.2 billion at the time, ZEC surpassed Monero (XMR) to become the leading privacy-focused cryptocurrency.
The 45% weekly increase of ZEC ran counter to the overall crypto market decline, which was still in consolidation after a much-anticipated tariff deal between the US and China did not come to fruition on Thursday.
This surge indicates a renewed investor interest in privacy coins, which are intended to hide user transaction information.
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Privacy coins like Zcash and Monero obscure transaction details such as sender, receiver, and amount, offering a higher degree of anonymity compared to pseudonymous cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC). While Bitcoin transactions remain traceable on-chain, privacy tokens are crafted to conceal wallet addresses and transaction histories.
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Arthur Hayes’s $10,000 ZEC forecast
The ascent to an eight-year high occurred shortly after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes forecasted a rally for the ZEC token to $10,000, generating additional buzz around the token.
Zcash surged from $272 to a high of $355 within hours following Hayes’s optimistic prediction on Sunday, as reported by Cointelegraph.
While demand for the token continues to grow, whales—significant cryptocurrency holders—have been selling off their Zcash holdings.
The number of ZEC token holders increased by 63% to 1,968 in the past week, but whale wallets have liquidated a net total of $702,000 in ZEC tokens, according to the crypto intelligence platform Nansen.
“It’s astonishing to see how $ZEC has risen 10x in just two months, completely decoupling from the market and disregarding general sentiment,” noted Simon Dedic, founder and managing partner at Moonrock Capital.
“I want to stress that this isn’t just a low-value coin; it’s a multibillion-dollar asset. This kind of performance is even more extraordinary,” he mentioned in a Friday X post.
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