Zcash Down Over 50% Since Winklevoss-Backed DAT’s Last Purchase

Zcash (ZEC) has fallen roughly 60% from its November 2025 high, extending a multi-month slide that has reversed much of the asset’s Q4 gains.

The privacy-focused coin, which was the top-performing large-cap crypto asset of 2025, began its downward trend in December, shortly after the Winklevoss-backed Zcash treasury company Cypherpunk Technologies last disclosed a ZEC purchase, its third since launching.

Cypherpunk, which launched in November as a Zcash-focused treasury company, last reported buying ZEC on Dec. 30, 2025, bringing its holdings to 290,062.67 ZEC. The spot price of Zcash has dropped over 50% since then.

The firm hasn’t announced any new purchases, and CoinGecko data shows total holdings have remained the same since.

Data shows the company paused accumulation after reaching about 1.76% of ZEC’s total supply. Cypherpunk has said it aims to build a position equal to 5% of the token’s supply.

With an average ZEC purchase price of about $334, Cypherpunk Technologies is sitting on an unrealized loss of $25.73 million, down 26.5%, with ZEC trading around $245 at press time.

ZEC kicked off a multi-month rally this fall, starting in late September, reaching as high as $700 in mid-November. While the privacy coin has retraced much of its 2025 gains, it’s still trading almost 400% higher than its pre-rally levels in September.

The Defiant reached out to Cypherpunk to clarify its plans for the DAT, but hasn’t received a response by press time.

Meanwhile, Cypherpunk’s shares have dropped about 40% over the past 30 days, though they remain over 100% higher than in November, before the company rebranded from a biotech firm, Leap Therapeutics, Inc, to a Zcash DAT, according to data from Google Finance.

Top DATs Keep Buying

Cypherpunk’s pace of ZEC purchases stands out against more aggressive digital asset treasury (DAT) strategies elsewhere in crypto. The original and largest DAT, Michael Saylor’s Strategy, has been making its BTC purchases on a weekly basis for over a year, with few exceptions.

While Strategy’s unrealized losses have ballooned to about $4.36 billion amid the market downturn, the firm has kept up its accumulation cadence, making five Bitcoin purchases so far in 2026, according to the company’s data.

Tom Lee’s BitMine, the largest Ethereum DAT, has kept pace so far this year with the same number of ETH purchases, per data from DefiLlama. BitMine’s unrealized losses reached $6 billion this week as the spot price of ETH slipped below $2,000.

Amid Cypherpunk’s dropping shares and rising paper losses, Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, announced this week that it’s restructuring its business.

The company said in a blog post on Thursday, Feb. 5, that it plans to cut roughly 25% of its remaining workforce and exit Europe, the UK, and Australia, as it doubles down on the U.S. market.