Zcash rips nearly 40% after Multicoin reveals major stake built since February

Zcash jumped nearly 40% in 24 hours after Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain revealed that the firm has been quietly building a significant position in ZEC since February. The token spiked from roughly $432 to approximately $598 before cooling to around $564, still good for a 31% daily gain.

The catalyst wasn’t a protocol upgrade or a new partnership. It was a thesis: that governments are coming for your wealth, and privacy coins are the logical escape hatch.

The Multicoin thesis, decoded

Jain laid out his reasoning in a thread that reads like a cypherpunk manifesto filtered through a macro lens. The core argument is straightforward. Bitcoin is censorship-resistant, meaning nobody can freeze your coins or block transactions. But that resistance has a ceiling.

If the state knows you hold Bitcoin, it can still tax those holdings, or seize them through legal mechanisms. In English: Bitcoin protects your ability to transact, not your ability to hide what you own.

That distinction matters a lot more when politicians start floating wealth taxes. Jain pointed specifically to California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax, a bill that would slap a 5% annual levy on assets exceeding $1 billion. Proponents estimate it could generate $100 billion over five years. Whether or not the bill passes, Multicoin’s bet is that the political direction is clear enough to drive demand for assets that are genuinely private.

“We believe that truly private, censorship and seizure resistant assets have clear product-market fit and demand is accelerating. We believe $ZEC is the cleanest way to express this thesis in public markets.”

That’s Jain, essentially arguing that Zcash isn’t just a privacy tool for the paranoid. It’s a rational financial product for anyone watching the regulatory winds.

Multicoin reportedly started accumulating when ZEC was trading between $237 and $299 earlier this year. Even after the pullback from today’s highs, the firm is sitting on substantial unrealized gains.

The numbers behind the rally

Look, a 40% single-day move on a disclosure from one fund sounds like thin-market volatility. But Zcash is not some micro-cap meme coin anymore.

The token’s market capitalization now sits between $6.29 billion and $8.68 billion as of early May. Trading volume during the surge ballooned to between $597 million and $1.2 billion in a 24-hour window. That’s real liquidity, not a handful of whales pushing around an illiquid order book.

The broader trajectory is even more striking. Zcash has posted an 820% gain from 2025 levels. For context, Bitcoin and Ethereum both declined over the same period. Bitcoin dominance currently hovers around 60.4%, which makes ZEC’s outperformance all the more notable.

On-chain data tells a complementary story. By April, 5.18 million ZEC sat in shielded pools, representing roughly 31% of the entire circulating supply. That’s a record. People aren’t just buying Zcash. They’re actually using its privacy features, which is the whole point.

The Grayscale Zcash Trust also provides a regulated on-ramp for institutional capital that can’t or won’t touch the token directly. Its existence lends a layer of legitimacy that most privacy coins lack. Monero, Zcash’s closest competitor, has been delisted from multiple major exchanges precisely because it can’t offer that same regulatory bridge.

Privacy coins in a surveillance economy

Here’s the thing about the privacy coin narrative: it’s been around since Zcash launched in 2016. For years, the pitch was ideological. Cypherpunks wanted financial privacy as a matter of principle. The market mostly shrugged.

What’s changed is the macro backdrop. Wealth taxes are no longer fringe proposals. California’s bill is the most aggressive example, but similar discussions have surfaced across multiple jurisdictions. The European Union continues to tighten crypto surveillance requirements. The US Treasury has expanded its reporting mandates.

Multicoin’s argument is that these regulatory trends create genuine, measurable demand for privacy. Not from criminals trying to launder money, but from institutions and high-net-worth individuals who view financial privacy as a legitimate form of asset protection. The same way Swiss bank accounts functioned for decades before FATCA dismantled much of that infrastructure.

Whether you agree with that framing philosophically is beside the point. What matters for markets is whether capital allocators believe it. And when a fund with Multicoin’s reputation puts its money behind the thesis publicly, it tends to attract followers.

The competitive landscape within privacy coins also favors Zcash right now. Monero offers arguably stronger default privacy, but its regulatory status is toxic. Major exchanges like Binance and Kraken have delisted XMR in various jurisdictions. Zcash threads the needle differently. Its shielded transactions are optional, which means the token can coexist with compliance frameworks while still offering robust privacy for users who opt in.

That flexibility is exactly what institutional money needs. Funds can hold ZEC on regulated platforms, access it through vehicles like the Grayscale trust, and still make the argument that they’re positioned for a privacy-driven future.

What this means for investors

The obvious risk is that Multicoin’s disclosure triggered a reflexive pump that could easily reverse. A 40% move on a single fund’s announcement is inherently fragile. If the broader market turns risk-off, ZEC will give back gains faster than most tokens simply because momentum traders piled in.

There’s also the regulatory risk that cuts the other way. If governments succeed in banning or restricting privacy coins, the thesis collapses. The US has not moved to ban Zcash, but OFAC’s sanctioning of Tornado Cash in 2022 showed that privacy tools are squarely in the crosshairs. A similar action targeting ZEC addresses would be devastating.

That said, the structural demand argument has real teeth. The shielded pool data shows organic adoption, not just speculative positioning. The 31% of supply locked in shielded transactions suggests a user base that values privacy for its own sake, not just price appreciation. That kind of sticky demand creates a floor that pure speculation doesn’t.

Watch two things going forward. First, whether other institutional players follow Multicoin’s lead with public disclosures of their own. A second major fund announcing a ZEC position would validate the thesis and likely trigger another leg up. Second, monitor the California wealth tax bill’s legislative progress. If it advances, the privacy coin narrative gets a massive real-world catalyst. If it dies quietly in committee, one pillar of the investment case weakens.

The Grayscale Zcash Trust’s premium or discount to NAV is also worth tracking. A shift from discount to premium would signal that institutional demand is outpacing the available supply of regulated exposure, which historically precedes sustained price appreciation.

Bottom line: Multicoin made a bold, public bet that financial privacy is moving from ideology to necessity. The market’s immediate reaction suggests plenty of capital agrees. Whether that conviction holds depends less on Zcash’s technology and more on whether governments keep giving people reasons to want privacy in the first place. Based on recent legislative trends, Multicoin might not need to wait long.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.