Zcash Flashes Green: Privacy Coin Pumps 62% in a Week, Traders Now Sleepy-Eyed on $420 Target

Zcash (ZEC) is living its best life right now. The privacy token is changing hands around $379.89 on Friday—up 15% in the last 24 hours, a hefty 62% in the last week, and more than 77% in the last month. That kind of move gets attention. Even your degens who haven't checked their portfolio since the last airdrop scam are sliding into DMs asking what happened.

The bullish vibes have prediction market players rethinking their life choices. Odds on Myriad (operated by Decrypt's parent company Dastan) of ZEC hitting $420 in April—a modest 10% further climb—have swung to 60% in favor. Just Thursday, predictors were sitting pretty at 80% against that outcome. How the turn tables. Nothing like a 20% swing in 24 hours to make you question whether your contrarian play was actually just copium.

As for what's fueling the fire? Hard to pin down one specific catalyst. Crypto's big hitters are all green following the US-Iran conditional ceasefire agreement. The broader privacy sector is up 21% on the week, though that rally is pretty much a two-horse race between ZEC (explosive) and DASH (up around 48%). Monero and ZKsync? Barely blinking at 6.1% up and 4.4% down respectively. Meanwhile, XMR holders are probably wondering if privacy is still cool or if they missed the memo.

Now for the fun part: a security researcher uncovered a critical vulnerability in Zcash nodes that could've let malicious miners drain over 25,000 ZEC from the deprecated Sprout shielded pool—roughly $6.5 million at writing. Alex "Scalar" Sol dropped the disclosure on March 23. The bug? zcashd nodes were skipping proof verification for Sprout transactions. Good news: it was never exploited, and everything was patched by end of March. Nothing like a six-figure bug discovery to really seal the deal on a pump week.

Zcash has been outperforming the majors lately. Bitcoin's sitting around $72,531 (up 9% weekly), Ethereum's chilling at $2,226 (up 8.5%). But let's keep it real—ZEC is still down roughly 46% from its November high of $698, and light years from its ATH of $3,191 back in October 2016. So yeah, it's pumping, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is more "finally waking up from a coma" than "winning the lottery."

Elsewhere in the space: Bitget launched IPO Prime with preSPAX—a token giving retail exposure to SpaceX's future public market performance. BitTensor's TAO token took an 18.5% hit in 24 hours as drama between founder Jacob Steevesand subnet operator Covenant AI boiled over. TD Cowen initiated coverage on Sharplink with a buy rating, slapping a $16 price target on shares trading around $6.42. Because nothing says "trust me bro" like betting on a stock that's currently playing hard to get at $6.42.