Zcash (ZEC) skyrocketed from around $40 in early September to a peak of $750, a seventeenfold increase, before correcting to approximately $610, down 6.5% over the past 24 hours. This dramatic rally was fueled by viral social media debates linking Zcash developer Daira-Emma Hopwood to Bitcoin's enigmatic creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
An old video of Hopwood, a cryptographer and longtime Zcash contributor, resurfaced on X, mistakenly identifying her as the project's founder and sparking transphobic comments. The controversy evolved into theories about her potential connection to Nakamoto, based on overlaps in their cryptographic research. Hopwood's work on privacy techniques like key blinding and group signatures appeared in early Bitcoin forum discussions, with one archived post directly citing her papers, and shared British origins added to the speculation.
Amid the rumors, some traders framed Zcash as a return to Bitcoin's original vision of privacy and decentralization, driving retail interest. However, the token faced a nearly 30% correction to $513 on November 8, coinciding with skepticism over its privacy claims and centralization risks, where a small group controls mining blocks.
The resurgence aligns with broader trends, including new European MiCA regulations and growing distrust of centralized stablecoins, renewing focus on privacy coins. CryptoQuant data highlighted speculative excess, but ZEC's performance remains strong relative to the market, signaling persistent optimism in crypto's ideological roots.
