ZEC: The Privacy Hedge the Market Forgot to Price (And It's Not Even on Sale)

Cypherpunk Technologies' CIO Will McEvoy has officially entered his oracle era, proclaiming Zcash the crypto market's most mispriced asset. His logic? You can't slap a price tag on privacy itself, a concept the market seems to have missed while busy trading JPEGs and dog tokens. In a March 18, 2026 thread, he sounded the alarm that AI surveillance is turning every stablecoin swap and wallet snoop into a public data leak, yet ZEC still gets treated like a cypherpunk's niche hobby coin.

When McEvoy hit 'post,' ZEC was lounging at $244.77, comfortably below his baseline $263 valuation—a figure that pencils out to a $4.4 billion market cap. Not one for modest comparisons, he then proceeded to bench-press ZEC against the entire financial gym: Bitcoin's $1.45 trillion monolith, gold's $34.8 trillion boomer fortress, the $11.3 trillion swamp of offshore wealth, the $312 billion stablecoin parking lot, and even privacy rival Monero at $6.8 billion.

From this buffet of benchmarks, he cooked up a series of "rerating" scenarios that read like a degen's dream menu. Snagging a mere 0.5% of Bitcoin's market? That's a $446 ZEC. A full 1%? Enjoy your $891 bag. Getting greedy with 2% lands you at $1,782, and a truly heroic 5% moonshot would send it to $4,456. Compared to offshore wealth, 0.1% equals $680, 0.5% is $3,402, and 1% gets you a cool $6,804. The gold-linked fantasy peaks at $10,477, the stablecoin play at $4,692, and beating Monero at its own game could mean $2,047.

McEvoy's argument isn't about spotting triangles on a chart; it's about the tech arms race. As AI gets scarily good at connecting your blockchain dots, the demand for a financial cloaking device should logically explode, transforming Zcash from an optional extra to a necessary hedge against a transparent panopticon. The market, however, is still scrolling cat videos, leaving ZEC trading at a discount to every single one of these theoretical upside targets. The joke might be on everyone else.