Bitcoin and Zcash Discussion Intensifies
Engagement in the Bitcoin and Zcash communities ramped up recently as Zcash saw its price hit a low of $598 on Saturday, only to bounce back to over $700 by Sunday.
“The ‘Bitcoin, everything else is a scam’ crowd is going to get really twisted trying to figure out what to say about Zcash,” remarked Hunter Horsley, the CEO of the investment firm Bitwise, on a post, which drew a flurry of reactions.
In response, user Bit Pain stated, “No, I have no qualms calling this clearly orchestrated pumping and dumping of VC coins a scam,” alluding to Zcash’s remarkable 1,500% surge since October.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of the RPC node provider Helius and a Zcash advocate, sided with Horsley, describing the Bitcoin community’s disapproval of privacy coins as a conspiracy theory.
Zcash reached a new eight-year high in October, overtaking Monero and establishing itself as the leading privacy coin by market capitalization, which now exceeds $11.2 billion. This growth has reignited discussions about privacy within the cryptocurrency landscape.
Zcash currently sits as the 12th largest cryptocurrency per CoinMarketCap, just shy of entering the top 10, trailing behind Cardano’s ADA, which boasts a market cap of over $17 billion.
In November, Arthur Hayes, founder of crypto exchange BitMEX, mentioned that Zcash has become the second-largest liquid investment for his family office, Maelstrom, with BTC being the largest.
Additionally, a biotech firm, Leap Therapeutics, announced a rebranding to Cipherpunk Technologies, a venture focused on Zcash and supported by Winklevoss Capital, resulting in a stock price surge of over 170%.
This rapid increase in Zcash’s value has also prompted renewed dialogue around incorporating privacy features into the Bitcoin protocol, including the reactivation of the Bitcoin opcode OP_CAT, which could enable native privacy and advanced functionalities.
