Zcash has been the best-performing cryptocurrency among the top ten assets by market capitalization over the past year. At the time of writing, ZEC trades around $1,500, up roughly 193% year to date and more than 2,470% since this time last year, according to CoinGecko data. Just over a month ago, the token changed hands near $500, meaning it has tripled in value within a matter of weeks as upward momentum has only accelerated.

The price, however, is only one side of the story. On-chain data shows that private transactions are climbing nearly as quickly as the token itself. Blockworks data indicates that Zcash processed 62,375 shielded transactions last week, the highest weekly count since 2022. In the same week, the network settled $23.88 billion in transfer volume — only one week in Zcash's history has recorded a larger figure, and that came during the 2021 bull market.

Shielded Activity Was Flat for Most of 2026

For the first seven months of the year, private transactions on Zcash largely stood still. Weekly counts ranged between 8,000 and 12,000 from January through July, even as ZEC climbed off its spring lows near $250. August is where the chart flipped: shielded transactions pushed past 15,000, approached 48,000 in early September, and then jumped to last week's high.

Shielded transactions are the core of what makes Zcash unique. They use zero-knowledge proofs to hide the sender, the receiver, and the amount. Transparent ZEC transfers, by contrast, work like Bitcoin, where anyone can view the details of a given transaction. A trader buying ZEC on an exchange to ride the rally has little reason to touch the shielded pool; someone moving money privately does. Zcash launched in 2016 as one of the first blockchains built around zero-knowledge cryptography, a technology that has since spread through the wider industry, where it now underpins several Ethereum scaling networks.

$23 Billion Settled in a Single Week

Transfer volume points in the same direction. Last week's $23.88 billion is roughly double the previous week's total and more than twice the peak Zcash reached during its late-2025 rally, when weekly volume topped out a little above $10 billion.

Price appreciation inflates part of the figure. ZEC is worth about six times its spring value, so the same number of coins changing hands now produces a much larger dollar total. Trading activity is also running hot, with $1.97 billion in 24-hour volume. Transaction counts, however, do not scale with price in the same way — which is why the shielded numbers carry more weight in reading actual usage.

The 2022 Record Came With an Asterisk

The 2022 benchmark is not a clean one. In mid-2022, Zcash's shielded pools were hit by a spam attack that flooded the network with junk transactions, bloating the chain and slowing wallet synchronization for months. Developers later overhauled the fee model to make that kind of attack expensive. Because part of the old high was manufactured, clearing it sets a lower bar than the headline suggests.

One strong week is also a thin sample. Shielded activity dropped to about 28,000 transactions in the week of Sept. 7, nearly halving before it rebounded. ZEC is showing some strain as well, slipping from an intraday high of $1,679 and losing 4.1% against Bitcoin over the past 24 hours.

If weekly shielded counts hold above 40,000 into October, the case that people are using Zcash for privacy rather than simply trading it becomes much harder to argue against. A slide back toward 15,000 would suggest that last week was a spike driven by the same speculative wave lifting the price.

Source: Cryptopolitan