Grayscale reports Zcash market cap rises to 1.5% of Bitcoin's in one year

A year ago, Zcash was a rounding error next to Bitcoin. Its market cap sat at roughly 0.1% of Bitcoin's, the kind of ratio that makes a coin easy to ignore. Fast forward to September 2026, and that number has jumped to 1.5%, according to new research from Grayscale.ZEC went from approximately $60 to around $1,500 in twelve months, a roughly 19-fold increase that pushed its market cap near $13.74 billion by late August. For context, Bitcoin's market cap hovered around $1.56 trillion at the time.Grayscale's report, published September 29, 2026, attributes the rally to growing demand for financial privacy. The thesis is straightforward: as blockchain transparency improves and on-chain surveillance tools proliferate, a segment of users and investors increasingly values the option to transact privately.Zcash's core feature, shielded transactions, lets users encrypt sender, receiver, and amount data while still settling on a public blockchain.By late September 2026, ZEC was trading around $1,400, with its market cap reported near $23-24 billion, suggesting continued momentum even after the initial price spike earlier in the summer.Grayscale frames the opportunity in relative terms. Bitcoin dominates what the firm calls the "currencies sector" of crypto, holding roughly 90-93% of that category's total market cap.On August 25, 2026, the firm launched its Zcash ETF under the ticker ZCSH on NYSE Arca. The product was a conversion of Grayscale's longstanding Zcash Trust, which dates back to 2017.Converting a trust into an ETF matters because it eliminates the persistent premium or discount to net asset value that plagued Grayscale's earlier trust products. Now, ZCSH offers direct exposure to ZEC with the arbitrage mechanism that keeps ETF prices tethered to the underlying asset.The ETF has reportedly attracted considerable inflows since launch.Grayscale's report includes hypothetical scenarios showing ZEC's price at various levels of Bitcoin market-cap capture. If Zcash hit 2% of Bitcoin's market cap, the implied ZEC price would land near $1,622. These are explicitly hypothetical, not forecasts.Zcash offers optional privacy that users can toggle on or off depending on the situation, using shielded transactions based on zero-knowledge proofs.But privacy coins carry specific risks that Grayscale itself acknowledges. ZEC is significantly more volatile than Bitcoin. Regulatory risk looms larger too — several exchanges have delisted privacy-focused tokens in recent years under pressure from regulators concerned about money laundering.Zcash also has a capped supply of 21 million coins, mirroring Bitcoin's scarcity model.