Zcash Surges as Grayscale Files ZEC ETF and Cypherpunk Buys $33M Mining Fleet

Zcash spent years as crypto’s quiet privacy coin, rarely the center of attention. Two announcements four days apart just changed that.

Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot ZEC ETF under the ticker ZCH, with NYSE Arca listing, BNY Mellon as transfer agent, and Coinbase as custodian. DCG International Investments, a subsidiary of Grayscale’s parent Digital Currency Group, is separately in non-binding talks to contribute roughly 200,000 ZEC to the trust, worth close to $111 million at recent prices. Days earlier, Cypherpunk Technologies acquired a 4.2 GSol/s Zcash mining fleet for $33.33 million from Winklevoss-affiliated sellers, a purchase that hands Cypherpunk roughly 18% of Zcash’s entire network hashrate and an expected 7,800 ZEC in monthly production.

Cypherpunk now holds about 323,394 ZEC, close to 1.92% of circulating supply, and has stated a target of building toward a 5% treasury position. Between the ETF filing and the mining consolidation, ZEC jumped as much as 22 to 30% depending on the measurement window, alongside a broader market rally that makes isolating the exact contribution of each catalyst difficult.

An ETF filing and a hashrate-concentrating mining acquisition are pulling in different directions structurally, one is about broader regulated access, the other is about a single company controlling a meaningfully larger share of network security. Both are real, both are new, and both are worth tracking independently rather than folding into one “Zcash is pumping” headline.

Curious what actually makes Zcash’s privacy technology different from Bitcoin’s public ledger? Learn more in the Bitcoin Academy.