Zcash price holds near $1,407 as coinholders approve $8.39 million grants

What happened

Zcash coinholders approved $8.39 million in retroactive grants, funding 17 of 37 proposals in the Q3 2026 round. The funded proposals took 93.1% of the $9.01 million that applicants requested, according to OpenZcash.

Most of the largest awards went to security work. Coinholders approved $1.5 million for Taylor Hornby, the researcher who found a critical flaw in Orchard. Shielded Labs said in June that the discovery, made on May 29, came from a review of Orchard using standard security methods and Anthropic's Opus 4.8 model.

The bug sat in Orchard's zero-knowledge proof circuit and could have let an attacker mint counterfeit ZEC inside the shielded pool with no obvious onchain trace. The Zcash Foundation said the network disabled Orchard transactions at first, then switched on NU6.2 with a corrected circuit. Its analysis found no evidence that unauthorized value was created, and supply stayed intact under the network's turnstile accounting.

Other funded work included $1.95 million for ZODL's Q1 and Q2 core protocol development and $1.203 million for ValarGroup's Ironwood work. Formal verification of the Ironwood zk-SNARK circuit drew $738,942, and external audits took $599,000.

Why it matters

Participation rose sharply. About 2.18 million ZEC took part in the largest Q3 vote, against roughly 500,608 ZEC in Q1. Voting in the biggest round equaled 10.4% of Zcash's fixed 21 million coin supply.

In an Oct. 1 post, Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox said the grants paid back people who kept working on the network through this year's security crisis. He called the vote proof of the network's coinholder-directed funding and governance, and described that system as 'capture-resistant.' The reports note that this assessment of the model is his own view.

Approval does not mean immediate payment. Grants above $50,000 go through compliance checks before keyholders coordinate payouts, according to the report.

The token trades near $1,407 after September's rally, with short-term momentum cooling below recent highs. ZEC moved between $1,382 and $1,458 in the past 24 hours, beneath the $1,600 to $1,700 area reached during September. A move back toward $1,500 to $1,600 would bring it into the zone where sellers appeared in September.

What the data shows

CoinGecko put ZEC's 24-hour range at $1,382 to $1,458. The 14-day RSI reads 55.45, below a moving average near 64.49. The MACD line sits around 120.13, under a signal line near 153.14.

Onchain Lens reported that one whale withdrew 2,000 ZEC, worth about $2.82 million, from Binance. The coins went to a main wallet now holding roughly $66.19 million in ZEC.

What is still unclear

• The reports give no date for when keyholders will coordinate payouts of the approved grants, though awards above $50,000 need compliance checks first.
• The claim that Zcash's funding system is capture-resistant comes from co-founder Zooko Wilcox, who described it in a post, the reports flag this as his own assessment.
• Chart levels such as the 21-day and 55-day EMAs come from a trader who posts as that1618guy, not from network data.

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