Placeholder co-founder Chris Burniske said in a Nov. 20 interview with Real Vision’s Raoul Pal that he holds a core Zcash position he “will never sell,” explicitly likening it to his long-term Bitcoin stash, even as he cautioned that ZEC’s current rally is not yet a proven structural breakout.
For Burniske, the real signal won’t come from the current leg higher but from how ZEC behaves when liquidity compresses. “We are not going to know until or if we get a bear market and we see where these assets bottom.” His test is relative resilience versus peers: if “Dash and Monero […] go back to the bottom of their ranges but ZEC holds materially higher […] that is very strong signal to me.”
Despite that uncertainty, Burniske described a non-negotiable core holding. “I have an amount of Zcash […] that I will never sell. And I kind of treat it like an amount of Bitcoin that I will never sell.” He tied the reasoning to Bitcoin’s historical payoff curve: “The only way people did phenomenally well from Bitcoin […] is basically just being like never sell, right? The hodl mentality.” In his framing, that “portion of ZEC” is held outside cyclical trading logic.
Burniske pointed to ZEC’s long-term chart improvement as a positive development, though not a verdict. “I love that it’s cleared its 2021 highs and it had a monthly close higher than anything it had in 2021,” calling that “a point in the right direction.”
But he also noted the asset is “basically back at its 2017 highs,” underscoring how much of Zcash’s history has been spent in violent ranges. “It’s been this wildly volatile ranging asset,” he said, describing ZEC as a “problem child” in a market where “most crypto assets are value destructive” and only a small minority are “value creative.” For now, ZEC is “kind of a Schrödinger asset.”
In short, Burniske’s stance is two-layered: an untouchable core aligned with Bitcoin-style hoarding — “I will never sell” — and a refusal to treat the present parabolic move as confirmation. The decisive evidence, he argued, will be whether ZEC can keep its footing when the cycle turns and the privacy complex retests its real support.
He added that Zcash’s performance is especially notable in BTC terms. “Put another way, this late cycle price action from ZEC is not all that unique in USD terms, but it is unique in BTC terms. At the same time, you have to always respect that, for now, BTC sets the entire mood of the cryptoasset market on a medium-to-long term time frame,” he concluded.
At press time, ZEC traded at $674.82.
