Bitcoin has struggled over last year, losing almost 25%, even as traders gear up for what could be Wall Street crypto game-changer.
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The bitcoin price has slumped to around $80,000 per bitcoin, down from an all-time high of $126,000 in October last year, though a 30% rally from its recent lows as spurred bets on a $16 trillion “supercycle.”
Now, as crypto braces for two massive earthquakes, a privacy-focused rival to bitcoin called zcash seen its price skyrocket, with some early adopters hailing it as bitcoin’s successor.
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The bitcoin price has struggled over the last year, with zcash leaving it in the dust.
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“[Zcash] feels like bitcoin circa 2013,” Barry Silbert, a former crypto billionaire and founder of crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) pioneer Grayscale Investments, told the Wall Street Journal.
Zcash, a fork of bitcoin that Forbes revealed was co-created in 2016 by the notorious whistle-blower Edward Snowden, has surged by more than 1,100% over the last year, helped by some of the biggest names in bitcoin and crypto backing it.
Zcash now has a market capitalization of just under $9 billion, a fraction of bitcoin’s $1.6 trillion.
Earlier this month, crypto investment company Multicoin Capital revealed it has built a “significant position” in zcash due to the cryptocurrency’s privacy features protecting holders from the risk of public ownership by obscuring transaction details and user identities.
“Multicoin has bought a significant position in Zcash to express that thesis,” Tushar Jain told a crypto conference in comments reported by Coindesk.
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The zcash price has rocketed higher, climbing as the bitcoin price falls over the last year.
Forbes Digital Assets
Zcash is designed to enable private, shielded transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography, with many embracing it as onchain stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to the U.S. dollar that can be monitored and frozen by companies and governments—become widely used.
Last year, the billionaire Winklevoss twins of Facebook-founding fame revealed they were backing a crypto treasury company called Cypherpunk Technologies that would buy and hold zcash, now holding more than 300,000 zcash coins worth around $150 million, and donated funds to the development of the bitcoin rival.
The huge zcash price rally, which has seen it more than double over the last three months, was sparked by Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant naming it as “bitcoin insurance” late last year.
“Bitcoin is insurance against fiat. Zcash is insurance against bitcoin,” Ravikant posted to X.
Zcash, which was changing hands for around $75 in October last year, exploded higher in the final few months of 2025, fueled by its reputation as ‘encrypted bitcoin.’”
“Privacy is increasingly viewed as a necessity rather than a feature, renewing ideological demand for private, self-sovereign transactions,” Nansen Senior Research Analyst Jake Kennis told The Block at the time.
“On the technical front, Zcash’s zero-knowledge architecture, the Zashi wallet enabling shielded transfers, and Solana integration all improve usability and accessibility. Its bitcoin-like tokenomics, a fixed 21 million supply, proof-of-work consensus, and upcoming halving that will reduce new issuance combined with zk-SNARK-enabled privacy, position it as an ‘encrypted bitcoin.'”