Zcash set a ten-year high this week, and Europe got its first Zcash exchange-traded product.
21Shares listed it on Euronext Paris and Euronext Amsterdam on Tuesday under the ticker ZCASH, physically backed by the token itself with BitGo as custodian, trading in euros in Paris and dollars in Amsterdam. A companion product tracking ether.fi’s ETHFI launched on the same terms.
It opened with about $100,000 in it.
A First, at 2.5% and $100,000
The launch figures were 5,000 securities outstanding at a net asset value of €20.04, which is roughly $100,000 of assets under management on day one. The annual management fee is 2.5%.
Set that against the American product. Grayscale converted its nine-year-old Zcash Trust into the ZCSH exchange-traded fund on NYSE Arca on 25 August, and it now holds close to $890 million, around 8,900 times the European launch. ZCSH completes a 3-for-1 share split on 30 September.
None of that makes the listing meaningless. A first-of-its-kind regulated product is how European access gets built, and every fund starts at seed size. But “Zcash reaches Wall Street and Europe” describes one fund with real money in it and one with a hundred thousand dollars, and a 2.5% annual fee is a meaningful drag for whoever arrives first.
The Week’s Numbers Do Not Agree
Zcash passed $1,600 on Wednesday to reach a ten-year high, having gained 88% over the past month and more than 28% in a week, outperforming Solana, XRP and Hyperliquid. The move came alongside Bitcoin rising above $87,000, its highest since January.
The intraday peak is reported anywhere between $1,600 and roughly $1,680 depending on the source and the venue, and ZEC was back near $1,522 by late Wednesday, which one account puts at a 6.6% decline across the session. So the same day reads as a record high and as a sharp reversal, depending on where the counting starts.
Zcash now sits around ninth by market capitalisation at roughly $27.5 billion, and is up more than 2,700% this year.
Why People Are Buying It
The case being made is about privacy becoming an institutional requirement rather than an ideological one.
“ZEC rose from outside the top 80 cryptocurrencies by market cap to the top 10 over the course of 2026,” said David Lawant, head of research at Anchorage Digital. “It’s one of the few major assets seen as retaining the original cypherpunk ethos that some investors feel has faded from crypto’s more prominent, institutionalized names.”
21Shares, which issues the new product and therefore has an interest in the argument, frames it commercially. Senior investment strategist Maximiliaan Michielsen said investors moving capital on-chain “need the same confidentiality they rely on in traditional markets, where off-exchange venues handle a huge portion of volume, rather than radical transparency that exposes positions to front-running, AI surveillance, or quantum threats.”
Named buyers exist. Multicoin Capital disclosed a significant ZEC position earlier this year, and Cypherpunk Technologies, backed by the Winklevoss twins, has accumulated the token and invested in Zcash mining.
One Date Holders Need
Zcash activates its NU7 upgrade on 5 November, cutting block times to 25 seconds and retiring the original Sprout shielded pool.
Funds left in Sprout after that become unspendable. Anyone still holding ZEC there has six weeks to move it, and no price rally changes that deadline.
