ZEC, the native token of the privacy-focused Zcash network, rose by more than 30% after Multicoin Capital co-founder and managing partner Tushar Jain said the crypto fund had built a “significant position” in ZEC since February.
“Zcash is a return to the cypherpunk ideals crypto was founded on,” Jain wrote on X. “California’s proposed wealth seizures are a warning. As the political trend to seize private wealth continues to grow, people and institutions will increasingly seek private assets to protect themselves.”
Jain added that Multicoin—which is known for its early investment in Solana—believes demand will grow for “truly private, censorship and seizure resistant assets,” and ZEC is the “cleanest way to express this thesis in public markets.”
The vote of confidence from Multicoin continued what has been a sudden revival of interest in Zcash, which first launched in 2016. The privacy-focused blockchain network had a lot of fanfare around its debut but has mostly languished since, running into technical issues and getting caught in regulators’ crosshairs.
Zcash allows users to encrypt the blockchain addresses of a given transaction’s sender and receiver, as well as the transaction amount, thus making transactions private. The network accomplishes this with the help of zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic process whereby a transaction can be marked as valid without revealing the contents of the message itself.
In late 2025, a number of crypto influencers, including BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz, and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, who was an early investor in the entity behind Zcash, began promoting ZEC as an important supplement to Bitcoin and other public blockchains, where all transactions can be traced back to specific wallets. That led ZEC to spike from around $50 in mid-September to a high above $700 by mid-November of 2025. ZEC was trading hands around $573 at the time of publication.
Many of Zcash’s public proponents make a similar case to Multicoin’s Jain, arguing that Zcash is important for the emphasis on individual freedom and suspicion of centralized authority that led to cryptocurrency’s founding. Since Zcash transactions are known only to sender and receiver, proponents argue, the network is akin to “digital cash,” where individuals can transact with no public footprint.
Jain’s advocacy for ZEC on social media centered on the “warning” made by a California ballot proposal that would levy a 5% wealth tax on billionaires in the state.
As with many other crypto tokens, Zcash’s fortunes have also been buoyed by the new regulatory outlook on crypto being offered by the Trump administration. In January, the nonprofit Zcash Foundation announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission had concluded a probe of the entity opened under the Biden administration in 2023.
