Asia Morning Briefing: ZEC's Rally Outpaces What Transparent Onchain Data Can Explain
Zcash (ZEC) is surging despite transparent on-chain data not reflecting broad user adoption, suggesting a supply squeeze in shielded pools drives the rally.Summary
Zcash (ZEC) has significantly outperformed majors like BTC and ETH during a recent market downturn, but transparent on-chain metrics do not support this rally, suggesting the move is not tied to broad user growth.
Zcash's privacy features obscure activity, as a growing share of transactions occur in shielded pools, making adoption hard to track via visible data. A temporary surge from Zerdinals inscriptions did not translate to sustained growth in transparent senders. Concurrently, Monero (XMR), a pure privacy asset, shows stable transaction counts, indicating ZEC's rise is not part of a sector-wide privacy coin shift.
The key factor appears to be Zcash's migration to the Orchard shielded pool, with shielded supply rising significantly. This shift, coupled with features like Unified Addresses and default-private UX, is causing a supply squeeze, as roughly 30% of ZEC supply is now in unobservable shielded addresses, forcing the price move faster than visible network activity can explain.
(Source：CoinDesk)