Zcash (ZEC) has emerged as one of the crypto market’s most striking stories in 2026, with Bankless co-founder David Hoffman drawing a direct parallel between its current rally and Ethereum’s explosive 2021 run.
Hoffman argues that a large pool of Bitcoin-derived capital is rotating into ZEC, pushing its market capitalization from roughly $200 million to $26 billion. He likens the move to Ethereum’s 2021 surge, when ETH climbed from a low of about $12 billion to a peak of $554 billion, and says “ZEC of 2026 is ETH of 2021.”
The on-chain data supports the narrative. Zcash processed 62,375 shielded transactions last week, the highest weekly total since 2022, and settled $23.88 billion in transfer volume — its second-largest weekly volume ever, surpassed only during the 2021 bull market. ZEC trades around $1,500, up roughly 193% year to date and more than 2,470% from a year ago, after trading near $500 just over a month ago.
The surge in shielded activity is notable because these privacy-preserving transactions use zero-knowledge proofs to hide sender, recipient, and amount. For most of 2026, weekly shielded transactions were flat at 8,000–12,000; they began climbing in August, reached nearly 48,000 in early September, and hit last week’s high. Transfer volume was also roughly double the previous week and more than twice Zcash’s late-2025 peak of around $10 billion.
Some caution is warranted. The 2022 shielded transaction record was inflated by a spam attack, and weekly activity dipped to about 28,000 in the week of September 7 before rebounding. ZEC also slipped from an intraday high of $1,679, losing 4.1% against Bitcoin over 24 hours. Hoffman himself says similar capital flows into NEAR Protocol are weaker and more dispersed, though NEAR is becoming a focal point among smart contract platforms.
He also warns of a “curse of big cryptocurrencies,” arguing that Bitcoin and Ethereum may struggle to deliver past returns, and that unless total crypto market capitalization climbs from about $3 trillion to $30 trillion, traditional firms like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Apollo could capture much of the sector’s new economic value.
