ZEC jumped 20% in a day after one of crypto venture's biggest names admitted he's betting on privacy. Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang said on Wednesday that his firm holds Zcash tokens and has also backed the nonprofit now steering the coin's development, the Zcash Open Development Lab.
That's a bigger deal than it sounds. ZODL closed a seed round north of $25 million back in March, with Paradigm, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures and Winklevoss Capital all chipping in — but nobody mentioned then that Paradigm was also holding ZEC itself. A quiet cap-table entry is one thing; a public admission from Huang reads as something else entirely, and traders took it as a signal that a top-tier fund isn't just funding privacy infrastructure — it's betting on the asset.
Over the past month ZEC is up roughly 160%, dwarfing bitcoin's 18.2% gain over the same stretch, and it briefly touched an all-time high of $1,385. The rally landed right alongside the Fed's September 16 rate hike, a move that usually spooks risk assets. This time crypto shrugged it off.
Zcash's community also just voted on the NU7 upgrade: 99.9% backed cutting block times from 75 seconds to 25, while 98.9% chose to leave issuance and the halving schedule untouched. Developers are targeting a November mainnet launch.
Three months ago the story around Zcash was the opposite kind of dramatic — an AI-discovered bug in the shielded Orchard pool knocked nearly 30% off the price. How fast that reputation flipped says a lot about what a venture heavyweight's endorsement can do. It doesn't erase the bigger problem privacy coins face, though: regulators keep tightening exchange listings for them, and one post on X won't change that.
