Key Highlights:
- Zcash (ZEC) surges above the $600 mark today, November 7, 2025.
- Shielded transaction adoption has grown.
- Arthur Hayes is fuelling the bullish sentiment.
Zcash (ZEC), one of the oldest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, has staged an explosive comeback, and soared above $600 from its October lows. The rally is driven by a massive derivatives short squeeze and renewed interest in privacy assets. ZEC is one of the most actively traded crypto currencies of the week and stands among the top 20 crypto currencies by market capitalization.
At press time, the price of the token stands at $641.34 with a surge of 23.16% in the last 24-hours as per CoinMarketCap.
According to the data that has been collected from Binance, Bybit, and Hyperliquid, ZEC’s perpetual futures funding rates turned sharply negative earlier this week, signalling an overcrowded short market. This setup fuelled over $50 million in short liquidations over the past 48 hours, squeezing bearish traders as ZEC’s price rose. The move comes at a time when Bitcoin remains steady at around the $101,000 mark, while many altcoins weaken. This suggest that capital is rotating more into privacy coins, AI tokens, and storage and infrastructure-linked assets.
Whale Leveraging and Liquidity Surge
On-chain data indicates that there has been significant whale activity that is supporting the move. A newly created wallet opened a $7.9 million leveraged long position on ZEC via HyperLiquid, while overall futures open interest jumped 27.6% to $734.7 million, its highest in over two years.
Binance leads ZEC futures with $340 million in open interest, followed closely by HyperLiquid at $332 million.The long-short ratio staying around 1.05-1.13 means buyers and sellers are almost evenly matched, showing the price move happening naturally and not because of heavy leverage.
Privacy Narrative Comes Back to Life
There has been a resurgence of the privacy coins that has boosted the market sentiment. The ZEC token has been up by 66% in the last 7 days and it has outpaced other privacy tokens such as Monero and Dash. On-chain data indicates that between 20-25% of circulating supply of ZEC is now held in shielded addresses, a major milestone for the network’s privacy adoption.
Part of this progress stems from Zashi wallet’s new CrossPay feature, which enables private cross-chain swaps, marking a step forward for interoperability. Meanwhile, Project Tachyon, which is currently being tested, aims to allow over 1,000 shielded transactions per second, potentially solving Zcash’s long-standing throughput limitations.
Arthur Hayes: Zcash Privacy Could Drive Next-Gen DEXs
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, has been pushing the Zcash’s price to a next level. After the token crossed the $600 mark today, he posted about it on X (formerly known as Twitter) and called the rally “ludicrous” and then boldly projected that the price of Zcash token could reach $10,000. His endorsements have sparked widespread attention and increased investor confidence in privacy-focused cryptocurrencies.
It’s just ludicrous.$ZEC to $10k pic.twitter.com/EfyiPB2Azl
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) November 7, 2025
With another post, Hayes is suggesting that the current decentralized exchanges are partially decentralized as all the trading activity can be easily viewed publicly on the blockchain. Everybody and anybody can see who traded, what was traded, and for how much. Zcash’s shielded transactions change that. Zcash hides the sender, receiver and transaction amount using zero-knowledge proofs, and brings full privacy to the table.
$ZEC shielded tx are going to power the next wave of true DEXs. What are your picks for the winners of a true privacy enabled DEX?
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) November 7, 2025
By saying “ZEC shielded tx are going to power the next wave of true DEXs,” Hayes means that the future version of DEX’s will not only be decentralized but also be completely private. In this way, Zcash provides the missing privacy layer that has the potential to drive the next evolution in decentralized finance.
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