Zcash is up roughly 32% on the week, hit a multi-year high of about $1,595 on Sept. 19 — its highest since its 2016 launch — and ranks No. 9 by market value. The obvious explanation is that privacy is back in style. Mert Mumtaz thinks the obvious explanation is wrong.
“I wouldn’t say for Zcash it’s the privacy aspect specifically,” Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of the Solana infrastructure firm Helius, said on the Sept. 21 episode of Unchained. Privacy, he said, is “just one of sort of the colors” in a bigger picture.
The store-of-value case
Mumtaz’s argument starts from what a store of value has to be. “You can’t actually have the best version of a store of value without that asset having the ability for privacy,” he said on the show, arguing that a store of value should carry little surprise, whether regulatory or about fungibility. Privacy, in that framing, is one requirement among several, alongside scale and resistance to future threats.
He put the whole package this way: “It’s sort of the entire story of privacy, quantum proofing, store of value, scale.” Zcash is working toward faster block times and full quantum-resistance in its next upgrade; today the network is quantum-recoverable rather than quantum-proof.
The tell, in Mumtaz’s view, is the comparison with Monero. If the rally were about privacy alone, he said, “you would have Monero as well doing the exact same price performance or something like this.” Monero, another privacy coin, is also up on the week, but by less than Zcash.
The competing read
There is a more concrete catalyst than any thesis. Grayscale listed a spot Zcash exchange-traded fund, ticker ZCSH, on Aug. 25, and it has pulled a $233 million inflow surge — a wrapper that lets institutions buy exposure without touching a shielded address. Privacy coins broadly have rotated higher, with Monero and Dash also climbing, which points to a sector bid rather than anything specific to Zcash.
Mumtaz has repeatedly promoted Zcash, and says his firm helped bring the coin to Solana users through NEAR. He was candid about his temperament: “when things go well, I’m not that enthused about them,” he said on the podcast.
Why the distinction matters
The framing shapes what happens if privacy stops being scarce. Mumtaz expects it won’t stay a differentiator: “sooner or later, more and more chains will start adding privacy,” he said. If Zcash’s run rested only on being the private option, that edge erodes as competitors copy it. If it rests on the fuller store-of-value case he describes, it does not. Either way, the pitch he says sells it is short: “if you just say it’s encrypted Bitcoin, that’s pretty much all you need.”
Related Listen: Zcash, Ethereum, Aztec, Canton and More: Which Chain Will Win the Privacy Race?
The post Zcash Is Rallying on More Than Privacy, Mert Mumtaz Argues appeared first on Unchained.
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