Some of Bitcoin’s oldest whales spent months privately urging early investor Dan Held to buy Zcash (ZEC) before the token’s rally past $1,000, he said in a recent interview.
Held, a former Kraken head of marketing who bought his first Bitcoin in 2012, said the messages came from investors with eight- and nine-figure net worths who have traded Bitcoin since 2013.
Whales Pitch Zcash to a Bitcoin Purist
Held said that over roughly three to six months, these investors pushed him to buy ZEC between $100 and $400. Many funded the trade by trimming a fifth to an eighth of their long term Bitcoin holdings.
Zcash has since crossed $1,000 last week, its first time above that level in nearly a decade, since it was launched. Rising Zcash ETF inflows into Grayscale’s ZCSH fund have added to the rally’s momentum.
Held said he still views the timing skeptically. He argued that crypto narratives typically form only after an asset has already moved, not before it. That pattern, he said, looks familiar in Zcash’s case as well.
Held Isn’t Convinced Yet
Held contrasted Zcash with Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million supply cap. He said the Zcash community accepted a tradeoff between privacy and supply auditability that Bitcoin’s community rejected.
He pointed to an episode from roughly six months to a year ago. Confusion over a possible exploit briefly made it unclear exactly how much ZEC was in circulation. Held said that kind of uncertainty would be intolerable for an asset marketed as digital gold.
Held added that he generally avoids buying whatever the market already loves. He said his best trades, including Bitcoin and SpaceX, came from assets nobody wanted at the time. On Zcash, he said, that is no longer the case.
Some Zcash short sellers have also been squeezed by the rally, a sign of how fast sentiment turned.
Whether the whales’ early timing proves right will likely take a full market cycle to judge.