Zcash touched its highest price level since 2018, extending a four-day gain of more than 50%, as bets in the coin's perpetual futures market nearly doubled over five days.

The privacy coin, which trades as ZEC, briefly reached $888—its highest level since 2018—before pulling back to around $843, according to Decrypt's price data. Even at those levels, ZEC was up nearly 7% over 24 hours and roughly 48% since August 20.

The rally leaves Zcash well short of its all-time high of $3,191.93, set in October 2016 during the coin's earliest days of trading, when liquidity was thin. Two years ago, the coin traded as low as $16. Since then it has been on a remarkable run, appreciating by more than 1,800% in the last year alone.

Open interest in ZEC perpetual futures nearly doubled in five days, rising from $962.5 million on August 19 to $1.8 billion on Monday, while 24-hour volume reached $5.3 billion, according to crypto derivatives data platform Loris Tools. The average eight-hour funding rate was 0.0106%, meaning traders paid a premium to hold long positions.

ZEC futures let traders bet on Zcash's price without owning the coin, often with leverage. Open interest tracks outstanding contracts, while a positive funding rate signals stronger demand for long positions—raising the risk of a short squeeze if ZEC rises, or long liquidations if it falls. Crowded futures markets can intensify both short squeezes and selloffs.

Interest in Zcash has grown over the past year as investors searched for an alternative to Bitcoin with stronger privacy protections. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which are transparent by default, Zcash shields balances using zero-knowledge proof technology, making it difficult to track transactions on the network. That same privacy has been a liability elsewhere: some exchanges have delisted privacy coins in certain jurisdictions over anti-money-laundering concerns, a headwind that makes the current wave of interest in ZEC notable.

Interest in the coin grew further after Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash Trust into an ETF in November. A conversion would let investors gain ZEC exposure through ordinary brokerage accounts rather than holding the coin directly—the same route Grayscale's flagship Bitcoin trust took before becoming a spot ETF. The proposal is still under review.

Whatever bullishness the Grayscale news may have garnered was tested in June, when ZEC plunged from $635 to $309 after developers using Claude Opus 4.8 disclosed a flaw in the network's Orchard shielded pool that could have enabled undetectable counterfeiting.

Developers issued an emergency patch in June, then activated the Ironwood upgrade in July. Ironwood retired Orchard and introduced accounting safeguards designed to trap any counterfeit ZEC in the old pool. Developers could not determine whether the flaw had been exploited.

In August, Winklevoss-backed Cypherpunk Technologies launched a Zcash mining operation that it estimates represents 18% of the network's hashrate. The company holds about 323,394 ZEC—around $268 million—and aims to acquire 5% of the circulating supply, a treasury-style accumulation that echoes the corporate Bitcoin buying adopted by some firms in recent years.

With ZEC trading at its highest levels since 2018, the unresolved Grayscale review is the clearest known milestone ahead for the coin.