Bitcoin spent the last two years becoming the asset that Wall Street wants. Now some of its first fans are quietly moving on.
Where they are going is Zcash. It is a 10-year-old coin that hides who sent a payment. It hides who got it. It hides how much it was.
It does that with math called zero-knowledge proofs - a tool that proves a payment is real without showing what is inside.
That niche corner of crypto is suddenly the hottest trade on the board.
Zcash is up about 1,200% in the past year. Its market cap is near $10 billion. That puts it in the top 15 coins by size.
The Winklevoss Twins Are Stacking ZEC
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are the Gemini founders. They are famous for their early Bitcoin bet.
Now they have built a public-market vehicle for Zcash. Much like Michael Saylor built one for Bitcoin.
Their move was to take Leap Therapeutics, a struggling Nasdaq-listed biotech, and rebrand it as Cypherpunk Technologies. The new firm then loaded up on Zcash with a $58.8 million funding round that the Winklevoss group led.
The firm now holds close to 290,000 coins. That is nearly 2% of all Zcash in the world. It is worth about $152 million.
The stated goal is to own 5%.
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Why Now
Tyler has framed his case around AI. As more of daily life moves online and gets watched, the case for private money goes up.
"If Bitcoin is digital gold, Zcash is an encrypted Bitcoin, or digital cash," he said.
The pile-on by big money is real. Grayscale has filed to launch a Zcash ETF. It would be the first of its kind for any privacy coin.
Tushar Jain of Multicoin Capital recently said his fund had been quietly buying Zcash since February.
Other privacy coins are getting pulled along too. Monero, Decred, and Ycash are all having a year.
Barry Silbert of Digital Currency Group has even called the moment "Bitcoin circa 2013."
Worth Noting
This is the part rule-makers do not love. The hidden payments that make Zcash useful to fans also make it a tough fit for the rules.
Each move up in price raises the heat on a coin that big exchanges have been slow to list. The bigger Zcash gets, the harder that talk gets.
Some U.S. and EU groups have flagged the coin in the past. The new ETF push could test how far Wall Street wants to go.
Bitcoin got onto Wall Street by going more open. Zcash is making the other bet.
So far, the trade is working. But the next leg up could hinge on what the rule books say. The bigger the position, the more it matters who is allowed to hold it - and where.
Either way, Zcash is no longer a side trade. It is now a top-15 coin with name-brand buyers. And the Winklevoss twins are still buying.
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