Zcash Surges 30% With $46.7 Million in Short Liquidations

Zcash rose nearly 30 percent to $543 on Tuesday, extending its multi-month rally and taking its 30-day gain to more than 110 percent. The price move triggered about $62 million in futures liquidations across roughly 5,000 traders, with almost $60 million coming from short positions and just over $3 million from longs.

This made ZEC-tracked futures the second-largest source of liquidations behind bitcoin. The rally followed disclosure that Multicoin Capital had been accumulating a significant ZEC position since February. The firm pointed to Zcash's shielded transactions as offering protection against growing government efforts to scrutinize and tax visible crypto holdings.

A partner at the firm stated that bitcoin allows censorship-resistant transactions but remains transparent for balances, allowing tax authorities to seize known holdings. Roughly 30 percent of all circulating ZEC, or about 5 million coins out of 16.7 million, now sits in shielded addresses.

That share has risen from 8 percent in early 2024. The shielded pool uses zero-knowledge cryptography to hide transaction details such as sender, recipient and amount. Public ZEC transactions have remained flat at around 8,500 per day. Actual activity has shifted inside the shielded pool, where transactions do not appear on standard counters.

CoinDesk Research reported in March that Zcash had reached a point where privacy-preserving networks become dominant, driven by AI de-anonymization tools, quantum computing threats and quarterly trading volumes exceeding $100 billion.

ZEC crossed $1.3 billion in the past day.