Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have filed with the SEC for a spot Zcash ETF, proposed to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WINK. Winklevoss Asset Services is the sponsor, and custody goes to Gemini Trust — the brothers' own exchange. The annual fee is set at 0.25%, payable in ZEC itself.
Cypherpunk Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed company already holding roughly $29 million in ZEC and working on protocol development, signed on as the fund's ecosystem partner. The Winklevoss Capital Fund has also flagged nonbinding interest in buying up to $100 million of WINK shares once it launches — a signal of intent, not a done deal.
This makes WINK the third spot Zcash ETF bid in the US. Grayscale got there first in late August, listing on NYSE Arca and pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars within weeks. Bitwise filed next. Now Gemini — the exchange that was first in the US to offer ZEC trading and custody — is throwing its hat in too.
There's a neat bit of history here. The Winklevoss twins filed the world's first spot Bitcoin ETF application 13 years ago, only for the SEC to reject it in 2017 over manipulation concerns. Spot Bitcoin funds are routine now; the brothers are betting the same playbook works for a privacy coin.
The filing doesn't skip the uncomfortable part either. It discloses the Orchard bug found in Zcash's protocol in May 2026, which could theoretically have allowed counterfeit ZEC to be minted. It was patched in June with no evidence of exploitation — but the prospectus is blunt that there's no cryptographic way to prove nothing slipped through before the fix. Pricing methodology and the fund's administrator are also still unnamed, details the SEC will likely push for before this goes further.
