The Zcash price jumped 23% in 24 hours on Thursday to the highest level on record, after Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang confirmed the firm holds ZEC. The token added another 10% on Friday to trade near $1,488. The rally lands in the same week that holders voted overwhelmingly for faster blocks and for keeping Bitcoin-style halvings.
Key Takeaways
- ZEC hit $1,388 intraday on Thursday and traded near $1,488 on Friday.
- Paradigm confirmed it holds ZEC and backed Zcash’s inflation-funded developer fund.
- Holders voted 99.9% for 25-second blocks and 98.9% to keep the halving schedule.
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ChatGPTZcash Price Breaks Out on a 23% Day
Thursday’s move took the Zcash price up 23% over 24 hours to around $1,369, its highest level ever. The intraday high came in at $1,388. The jump arrived the day after the Federal Reserve’s first rate hike since 2023, a decision the crypto market largely shrugged off: Bitcoin edged up less than 1% to about $76,258 and Solana gained close to 3%.
The run did not stop there. ZEC rose another 10% on Friday to roughly $1,488, once again the strongest performer among the large caps. Its market value stands at $22.9 billion, which makes it the ninth-largest crypto asset.
That ranking is barely a week old. On Monday, Zcash first climbed into the top 10 after its Grayscale fund pulled in more than $500M in three weeks. Four days later, ZEC has climbed from the edge of the top 10 to ninth place.
The longer view explains why traders keep watching it. The Zcash price is up about 168% over 30 days, against 18.2% for Bitcoin over the same stretch. Over twelve months the gain tops 2,500%.
Fund flows are keeping pace. Zcash’s only US fund, the Grayscale product listed since August 25, added nearly $47 million on Thursday. Earlier this month, the token jumped 16.5% in a single session on the back of that same fund.
Why Paradigm’s ZEC Disclosure Moved the Zcash Price
The catalyst was a single post. In his Wednesday post on X, Matt Huang confirmed that Paradigm owns ZEC on top of its stake in Zcash Open Development Lab. He described Zcash as “a private complement to Bitcoin.”
Paradigm’s involvement in the ecosystem was already public. Zcash Open Development Lab raised more than $25 million in March from a group that included Paradigm, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures and Winklevoss Capital. What changed this week is the direct token exposure, now stated openly by the firm’s co-founder.
Huang went further than a position disclosure. He argued that Zcash’s developer fund, which is financed through network inflation, deserves continued backing as AI-driven cyber capabilities and quantum computing advance. He also pushed for combining coin holder votes with other ways of making network decisions.
That second point matters because Zcash’s funding model is a live debate. Every block carries issuance that pays for development, and this week’s vote set how part of that system will work for years ahead. A large investor defending the dev fund in public lands in the same week holders voted on the network’s future.
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25-Second Blocks and Halvings: What NU7 Changes
The vote itself drew record participation. Nearly 2.4 million ZEC took part out of roughly 3.6 million eligible, a 66% turnout, well above the 1 million ZEC threshold set for the result to count as representative. The full breakdown is in the NU7 poll results posted on the Zcash community forum.
The margins were lopsided. 99.9% backed cutting block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, which shortens the wait for a payment’s first confirmation. 98.9% voted to keep the Bitcoin-style halving schedule instead of a smoother issuance curve, and 99.3% asked for NU7 to ship as soon as possible, dropping anything not ready by September 30.
Two narrower decisions came with it. Holders backed, by 96.6%, delaying the reissuance of fees collected through the Network Sustainability Mechanism until February 2031, and they supported disabling transactions tied to the obsolete Sprout privacy system. Daily issuance does not change, because the ZEC paid per block falls in line with the faster block time.
The timeline is already set. NU7 is scheduled to activate on testnet on October 6, with a final go or no-go decision on October 20 and a mainnet target of November 5. In the short term, the Zcash price trades with no prior high above it and an ETF still absorbing inflows. Over the next three to six months, execution matters more: in June, a four-year-old flaw in the Orchard pool sent ZEC down 40%, and a protocol change of this size will face the same scrutiny.
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