The two digital assets promised what Bitcoin couldn’t, true transactional anonymity, but they took very different paths to achieve it. Monero made privacy mandatory, encrypting every transaction by default. Zcash made it optional, allowing users to choose between full transparency and complete privacy.
For years, that choice seemed to hurt Zcash. Monero’s uncompromising design earned it the loyalty of cypherpunks, darknet users, and privacy maximalists who viewed ZEC’s “opt-in” model as a compromise.
However, as regulatory scrutiny tightened and exchanges began delisting privacy tokens, Zcash’s hybrid model has evolved from a weakness to a weapon.
The shift marks not just a leaderboard reshuffle but a deeper narrative reversal. The very architecture that once made Zcash controversial, its balance between privacy and compliance, is now attracting institutional money, ETF links, and mainstream legitimacy.
Using advanced zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), Zcash allowed users to fully encrypt sender, receiver, and amount data while still proving validity to the network.
However, the protocol introduced a novel flexibility which allowed users to opt for transparent (T-address) or shielded (Z-address) transactions. That optionality alienated privacy purists, but it made the project easier to regulate because crypto exchanges could list ZEC, as it wasn’t fully anonymous by default.
On the other hand, Monero, created in 2014, went the opposite direction. It enforced privacy across the board through ring signatures and stealth addresses, making every transaction opaque and untraceable. For years, this gave Monero dominance in the privacy sector, making it a currency immune to chain analysis.
Zcash, meanwhile, continues to trade freely on compliant platforms, and that accessibility now matters more than purity.
The attackers allegedly reorganized six blocks and orphaned dozens of others, effectively rewriting parts of the blockchain’s recent history.
A few weeks later, independent monitors reported another 18-block reorganization, the largest in Monero’s history. Although no double-spend occurred, the events revealed structural fragility.
For investors and exchanges, this confirmed long-standing fears: Monero’s commitment to anonymity made it harder to secure and audit.
Zcash, by contrast, had quietly built a more modern governance and upgrade framework through ECC, the Zcash Foundation, and Zashi, its consumer wallet project.
That stability, combined with a perception of regulatory friendliness, created the perfect backdrop for Zcash’s return.
Amid this climate, investors rediscovered ZEC. The token surged nearly 200% in a month and 1,000% year-on-year, reaching a seven-year high of $478 before a minor correction to $461. Unlike past speculative pumps, this move had institutional depth behind it.
Market participants interpreted these inflows as early signs of a “regulated privacy trade”: exposure to cryptographic privacy without the legal baggage of Monero.
Moreover, Zcash’s latest momentum is rooted in genuine technical progress.
The plan introduced ephemeral addresses for every swap via the NEAR Intents protocol, automatic address rotation once funds are received, hardware resync capabilities for Keystone wallets, and multisig Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH) support to better safeguard developer funds.
Together, these improvements streamline how users interact with ZEC through the Zashi wallet, which debuted earlier this year. Once criticized for its complex privacy workflows, Zcash’s interface now functions with the ease of mainstream crypto wallets, thereby removing a significant usability barrier.
Perhaps most notably, over 30% of the total ZEC supply now resides in shielded pools, indicating that privacy usage is catching up with market speculation.
As more transactions move into these encrypted channels, Zcash’s overall anonymity set expands, strengthening both its privacy guarantees and the network’s long-term resilience.
