Zcash surged nearly 5% to a session high near $494 on Monday, pushing its market capitalization back above $8 billion and reinforcing its lead as the top privacy coin. The rally tracked Nym's adoption of Zcash's new Ironwood shielded pool and a shift toward coinholder-driven treasury governance, and it helped lift the combined value of privacy coins past $30 billion.
ZEC gained more than $20 in six hours on Monday, climbing from just over $470 at 4:10 a.m. EST to a session high just short of $494 by mid-morning. The move pushed ZEC's market cap back above $8 billion, consolidating its position as the most valuable privacy coin. The coin has risen nearly 8% since the start of August, making it one of the market's front-runners this month.
Nym integration sparks the rally
Nym's adoption of Zcash's Ironwood shielded pool enables direct, end-to-end shielded ZEC payments for its network services, a move Nym said delivers a landmark win for privacy-first decentralized finance. Industry commentator Will McEvoy, CIO at Cypherpunk, framed privacy as crypto's "last frontier," tracing the industry's shift from proof of concept to functional scalability.
According to McEvoy: "First we had to prove that cryptographic money could work—that was Bitcoin." He noted that Ethereum and Solana each answered a further demand — programmability, then scalability.
Governance shift adds momentum
Zcash also advanced its decentralized governance roadmap, launching a retroactive grants program that shifts treasury distribution from closed-door committees to direct coinholder voting. The mechanism mirrors Optimism's RetroPGF and is executed entirely within Zcash's shielded pool.
Privacy coins gain, but not uniformly
ZEC's rally helped lift the total market capitalization of privacy coins past $30 billion. Other notable gainers included NEAR, which climbed 2.4%, ZK, up 4.5%, and NOCK, up 5.3%.
However, ZANO fell 5.5% and ZBT dropped 6.5%, while COTI, last week's top performer, tumbled 10.2%. XMR, one of a handful of privacy coins with positive returns over the past seven days, edged down 0.3%.
Source: Bitcoin News
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