We Removed Zcash Six Weeks Ago. It's Up Roughly 4x Since

In August we suspended NEAR Intents after a BitcoinTalk user's swap stalled past its deadline without settling or refunding, and independent reports described the same pattern. NEAR Intents was our only route for Zcash. So Zcash came off the site entirely.

At the time we wrote that we would rather drop an asset than keep routing users somewhere funds get stuck. We meant it. It also turned out to be one of the more expensive sentences we have written.

ZEC traded around $400 at the end of June. It is around $1,609 today, having set an all-time high near $1,595 last Friday before pushing higher. It is up roughly 148% year to date, around 80% in the last month, and is now a top-ten asset by market capitalisation at roughly $26 billion. Through the entire run, our users could not buy it here.

Why we are writing this

Because the alternative is saying nothing and quietly re-adding it, and we would notice if a competitor did that.

There is a version of this post that frames the decision as vindicated principle. It isn't. A decision has a cost and this one's was real: anyone who came to TokensFund for Zcash in August or September found nothing and went elsewhere, during the single best stretch the asset has ever had. We do not get to keep the reputational benefit of the choice while pretending it was free.

What we would say is that the decision was correct on the information available, and that is the only standard any decision can be judged by. We had a user's funds unresolved, a support channel that had gone silent, corroborating reports of the same failure, and no second route for the asset. Routing people into that while the price ran would have been worse, not better — a customer whose ZEC purchase stalls in a $400-to-$1,600 market has lost far more than someone who simply had to buy elsewhere.

What actually drove the run

Three things, and only one of them is speculative.

Trust was repaired, mechanically. In July, Zcash sealed its Orchard pool and built a turnstile after discovering a proof-circuit flaw that could have allowed counterfeit ZEC with no on-chain trace. We called Ironwood the real test. It passed: the migration has been proceeding steadily, with roughly 427,000 ZEC — about 11.8% of the starting balance — still sitting in the sealed pool as of 10 September, and falling. For a privacy coin, where trust is the product, fixing a supply-integrity question is not a cosmetic upgrade.

Privacy demand kept building. 2026 has been a year of exchange wind-downs, delistings, and breaches that linked real identities to blockchain addresses. The case for assets that don't publish your financial history got made repeatedly, by events rather than by advocates.

And a squeeze did a lot of the work. This is the part to hold lightly. Reporting through the run described heavily short positioning, with a large majority of accounts on at least one major venue positioned short, and futures open interest more than doubling in a month. One trader reportedly closed a ZEC short this week at a $36 million loss after holding it for three months. A move amplified by forced buying is a real move — but its size is borrowed from people who were positioned wrong, and that borrowing gets repaid in both directions.

Zcash is back on TokensFund

As of today, BTC → ZEC is live again, routed through Changee. That is one route rather than a comparison, and we would rather tell you that plainly than dress up a single quote as a market survey.

THORChain has announced Zcash pools but they are not live yet — we checked, rather than taking the announcement at face value, because we said we would add it "the day those pools are live and quoting, not the day a press release says they are." When they activate, the comparison widens and we will say so.

One thing worth repeating at these prices: swap routes generally deliver to transparent Zcash addresses (t1...), which behave like Bitcoin addresses — visible amounts, visible history. Zcash's privacy lives in shielded addresses (zs... or u1...). If privacy is why you hold ZEC, moving the funds into your own shielded address after they arrive is the step that actually delivers it. Our walkthrough covers the mechanics.

The lesson we are actually taking

Not "never remove a provider." The removal was right, and we would make the same call tomorrow with the same facts.

The lesson is about route concentration. Zcash disappeared from our site for six weeks because it had exactly one route, and one route means one point of failure for an entire asset. That is the same structural argument we make about custody, applied to ourselves: a single dependency is a single decision away from an outage. XRP and GRAM currently sit in the same position, and that is a fragility worth fixing before it costs something rather than after.

If there is a general point here, it is that being right and being unlucky are not mutually exclusive, and that saying so out loud is cheaper than being caught pretending otherwise.

A note on risk

Nothing here is financial advice and nothing here is a price prediction. Figures reflect market data as of 22 September 2026 and move quickly; ZEC has risen sharply and assets that rise sharply can fall sharply. Short-squeeze dynamics amplify moves in both directions. Privacy assets face regulatory treatment that varies by jurisdiction — follow the rules where you live. Size positions so that being wrong is survivable.