What’s driving ZEC’s 45% rally today?

ZCash (ZEC) outperformed other crypto assets, going beyond the general market recovery. The coin had a unique set of trading factors leading to a 45% daily rally.

ZEC climbed to $593.24, the highest level for the year to date, also breaking the 2026 trading record with $1.6B in daily volumes. As Cryptopolitan reported earlier, the recent rally follows a critical consensus patch by the ZCash team.

The coin has recovered from a local low below $200 in March, and is now close to its one-year peak. The recent rally also raised the possibility that ZEC may still outperform, similar to its 2025 run. 

What factors are boosting ZEC? 

For the past few months, ZEC has crashed with the narrative that influencers were the main factor behind its climb. The expectations were that ZEC would not recover quickly. 

During the current rally, ZEC showed it could quickly attract liquidity, given its listings on Binance and Coinbase. The coin is up by 136% in the past month, and may be moving beyond speculation or influencer hype. The coin has a very high mindshare of 0.4%, standing among crypto assets based on Messari data.

ZCash network fees are also up by over 47% according to Messari, with $500K to $1M in daily fee production.

ZEC open interest also rallied to over $813M, moving close to the levels of late 2024 and late 2025. The recent rally shows a similar pattern to the bull market in 2025. Multicoin Capital has also built a long position for ZEC since February. On Hyperliquid, the leading position is also long, with a notional value of $19M.

Currently, ZEC may be going through a short squeeze, as Hyperliquid revealed 66% of open positions were trying to short the coin.

Is ZEC undervalued?  

The long-running narrative for ZEC is that it is still undervalued and may expect robust growth in both adoption and price levels. The ZCash verifiable computation was later adopted by ZK-proofs in L2 chains, but ZEC lagged for years.

Now, the coin may be returning with additional confidentiality, as part of DeFi ecosystems. One of the major factors for the growth of ZEC is the ongoing shielding of coins.

Around 30% of ZEC is already locked in shielded pools and will probably not be sold through exchanges, but instead serve as DeFi liquidity. There have been no significant withdrawals from the shielded supply pools, creating a stable trend of ZEC scarcity.

ZEC also got a boost from its Robinhood listing in late April, expanding the mainstream adoption of the asset. For now, the coin has managed to escape the general decline on altcoin markets and break out on its own as a new platform for on-chain privacy.

Top privacy coins have also responded to the ZEC rally, expanding their market cap by 17% to over $17B. Monero (XMR) had a slower growth, adding 2% in the past day to over $414. The coin has been climbing in the past weeks, but lacked the sharp breakout of ZEC.

Both XMR and ZEC were added to ThorChain for an extra layer of confidentiality. The availability of confidential on-chain swaps is gaining traction as AI analysis and blockchain tracking are improving. On the downside, ZEC and XMR are seen as a way to launder hacked funds more efficiently.

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