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Zcash has had one of the best results of the year, outperforming big guns like BTC and ETH during the recent market crash.
But behind the scenes, it doesn’t appear that the user base has reached its stratospheric rebound.
Zcash’s privacy model makes it difficult to evaluate adoption through standard blockchain metrics. The chain supports both transparent and protected transactions, and only the transparent side of the network can be directly observed.
An increasing share of activity now occurs within protected groups, where addresses, quantities and flows become invisible to public analysis. That means the transparent metrics primarily capture exchange activity rather than the entire Zcash user base.
The only notable increase in visible performance came from Zerdinales, a wave of signups that temporarily pushed daily transactions above 70,000. However, transparent senders remained in a narrow range of 8,000 to 14,000 throughout the event, suggesting that the increase was driven by a small group of returning actors rather than broad growth in new users.
Protected activity cannot be measured directly, but it is unlikely to represent a sevenfold increase in transparent performance on its own. Once the wave of registration passed, transactions returned to previous ranges.
Behind the scenes, Zcash has been steadily migrating to the Orchard protected pool. The protected supply has increased from approximately 1.2 million to more than 4 million ZEC in recent years, and the proportion of fully protected transactions has reached record levels.
Zashi’s unified addresses, automatic shielding, and default private UX appear to be driving more flows toward the protected group. These trends point to real adoption by the private sector, even if they leave almost no trace on transparent charts.
If there was a big spike in interest in privacy coins as a category, Monero would probably show that too.
XMR remains the dominant pure privacy asset, and its transaction counts capture all usage because every Monero transaction is private but still counted at the protocol level.
However, Monero’s throughput has remained in its usual range of 20,000 to 30,000 daily transactions, with no parallel increase in activity. That stability reinforces the idea that ZEC’s move is not part of a sector-wide shift toward privacy, but rather a Zcash-specific rotation driven by its liquidity profile, reduced visible supply, and an improved protected UX narrative.
Zcash and Monero are not directly comparable because their privacy designs differ, but neither shows an expansion in measurable users.
Transparent Zcash data shows no clear increase in new participants, while protected activity remains intentionally hidden. Now that approximately 30% of the supply is in protected addresses that cannot be held on exchanges, the resulting supply reduction is causing the price to move faster than the visible network can explain.
Until those private-side trends can be corroborated by user behavior, merchants are likely paying a significant premium for ZEC.
Market movement
BTC: Bitcoin is trading near $86,800 after recovering from its Nvidia-driven rally above $93,000.
ETH: Ethereum is hovering around $2,850 after falling below $2,900 as FG Nexus selling added pressure.
Gold: Gold is trading at around $4,077 after regaining its pre-NFP gains, sitting around 7% below its October high but still heading towards a year-over-year rise of more than 50%.
Nikkei 225: Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 1.58% as higher inflation in October bolstered expectations for BOJ rate hikes and officials raised fresh concerns about the yen’s weakness.
Elsewhere in Crypto
- Crypto Lobbyists Blast Trump on How to Get Things Done During Congressional Uncertainty (CoinDesk)
- Ray Dalio owns Bitcoin. He’s still nervous about quantum computing and central bank adoption. (Decipher)
- MegaETH to Open Pre-Deposit Window for Million USD Stablecoin Next Week (The Block)
