Zcash Rockets 12% to $672: Privacy Powerhouse Defies $1.5 Trillion Crypto Crash on November 21, 2025

The emergence of Zcash has caused a bloodbath, with the cryptocurrency jumping up 12% to $672 on November 21, 2025, as the crypto-sphere loses 1.5 trillion in a ruthless decline. As Bitcoin tanks below the 86,000 mark and Ethereum plunges beneath the 2,800 mark, ZEC can boast of being a privacy lighthouse, having increased 150 per cent in a month and 1,600 per cent in the year to date.

The frenzied trading of the institutions and pre-halving euphoria had increased the volume by 78% to 456 million, and on-chain data revealed the presence of a 22% spike in shielded transactions, which now constituted 35% of network activity.

This is breaking out past the $650 marker, verified by a textbook cup-and-handle arrangement, and it has wiped out nearly 28 million dollars in shorts on Binance and Bybit, placing Zcash squarely into the limelight as the final contrarian bet during global financial nervousness and monitoring worries. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index is at 9, and the RSI of ZEC is 72, indicating the overbought momentum, but no indication of withdrawal by the whales.

The boom is based on a story of rediscovered utility zk-SNARKs to permit optional privacy without obligatory anonymity, a definite flexibility that avoids regulatory traps of the Monero project and attracts capital that follows regulatory rules.

The current move can be compared to the 500% follow-up of the 2020 halving, only on a greater scale, since by 2025, the macro storm of U.S.-China tariffs will have driven the price of privacy up, as traceable goods such as USDT are at risk of being frozen.

In the middle of the holders, which had built up to a low of 289 in September, only sold 8,500 ZEC on the day before, a paltry amount compared to 45,000 coins swept by large addresses. It is said in a world of glass blockchains, Zcash provides frosted windows, secure but not suspicious.

18M ZEC Haul by Cypherpunk is the Ignition of an Institutional Fire: Winklevoss Bet Signal Whales Awakening

The rebranded brainchild of Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss, Cypherpunk Technologies, struck a bombshell by acquiring more than 18 million ZEC on November 19, doubling its treasury to more than 30,000 coins and launching the token above 700 intraday.

The idea expressed through this institutional flex, where OTC desks buy and sell ETFs during outflows, is that privacy is becoming a hedge against Big Brother, and the selective protection of Zcash is avoiding AML delistings that bedevil strict anonymity peers.

Grayscale in its ZCSH trust then invested, with 137 million YTD, and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes placed ZEC as the BTC runner-up in his family office, as in a moonshot, 20% of the market cap of Bitcoin, which would see ZEC at 18200.

No move is solo; on-chain forensics show that since the codification of the privacy tech into the Clarity and Genius Acts in July, there were $256 million in new deposits, which were shielded by DeFi without indictments of Tornado Cash-scale. Bitcoin staff ZEC Kraken and Coinbase added ZEC pairs after MiCA tweaks freed up 89 million dollars of idle liquidity.

However, the sceptics raise the red flag on overbought risks: The MACD divergence provides evidence of a break, with a support of ironclad support of 600 dollars. FUD is not being sold to institutions, but freedom is, an executive of Cypherpunk boasts, as open interest doubles to 41% to $1.2 billion, foaming at the mouth, to take a futures run at the volatility spike.

Halving Hype Peaks: November 24 NU6.1 Fork Slashes Rewards, Supercharges Scarcity Narrative

As the block award is reduced by half to 3146400 height on November 24, Zcash enters the deflationary stage with the Network Upgrade 6.1, which cuts emissions by half and repurposes 20 per cent of rewards, 8 per cent to community grants through ZCG and 12 per cent to shielded voter-directed funds.

This governance mayarche ousts the ancient developer kitty, which limits inflation to 4% and gives holders real power in a really decentralised steer. Also, after the forks, the amount supplied on an annual basis is half that of Bitcoin at 1.5 million ZEC, with the moat of privacy turning the supply curve into a booster shot, and is expected to initiate a 92% Q4 spurt akin to the 2024 event frenzy.

Testnets crushed it: privatised on November 14, Starknet L2 rollup, which swears Zcash securities, has live custom smart contracts on its rails, reducing fees by 85%, with over $45 million TVL in DeFi wrappers so far. It has been billed by developers as the privacy layer of Ethereum, but without the gas, and the hype has been justified by 150% on-chain activity every quarter.

However, glitches with execution would startle the emotion; a snag in the September devnet would add an extra 72 hours of testing to the stress-test. With block times narrowed down to 75 seconds, miners, whose hashrate increased 29% to 12.4 MS/s, prepare to adapt to Equihash changes, so that the ASICs can resist the migration of GPUs out of the Ethereum ghosts.

Ztarknet L2 Unleashed: $100M TVL Projections Private DeFi Dawn attracts Glow of Regulatory Rafting

The L2 revolution of Zcash hit warp speed with the mainnet beta of Ztarknet on November 14, and combined the idea of zk-rollups to verify confidential dApps with no disclosure, as the network called position snoppers, which also includes a yield farm.

The first users, such as Electric Coin Co., invested 23 million in test pools and had projected TVL of 100 million by the end of the year when bridges to Solana and Polygon are released. This scalability salve takes care of the 7 TPS bottleneck of Zcash, which is swelling to 2,500 with SNARK verifiability as a godsend to tokenised RWAs in need of discretion.

Regulatory winds blow: MiCA exemptions of optional-privacy protocols at the EU allowed ZEC to enter Binance with the axe of delisting, and the U.S. Clarity Act Zcash landed on IRS-compliant wallets. Chainalysis recorded global remittances of ZEC corridors reaching 220 million a month as unbanked persons evade maciation with fiat currency.

Quantum-resistant upgrades pre-forked with 12 million dollars in community grants aim to achieve this in Q2 2026. The community grants look after elliptic curve FUD. Nonetheless, adoption is sluggish: Having secured at 35% is lagging behind Monero at 98% which Ztarknet will fill with user-friendly wallets such as the YWallet 2.0.

Prognosis Fracture: Moonshot or Dip $800 and 580 respectively? Hayes Bullish Call Fuels $10K Call

The oracles have been split by Zcash price tea leaves. The bulls, who have been following Cypherpunk with their coattails, target November closing at $720-740, and December at 800-820 on halving halos and liquidity on L2.

The 5.84% upside to $720 in November 2020, smashed by EMA convergence and 7.2% historical November pops, is predicted by Changelly, which projects that its algorithm will take it all the way to $1,049 in 2026.

The ambitious target of Arthur Hayes, who set ZEC at the quarter of the market value of Bitcoin, which is worth only 10,000 dollars, is the start of the dream of a $500 billion market value, which is supported by the 1,172% YTD scorch.

Bears are growling with fatigue: RSI of CoinCodex 66.27 shows it is in a neutral-to-overbought state, and the pullback targets of 580-600 in case the death cross does its thing in alts. Another Elliott Wave mumbles an ameliorative ABC to $550, then impulse is resumed, and leverage is 22x on OKX.

CoinDCX cools off to $700 end-of-month, on condition of $600 hold-on; default opens the gates to $500 hell. However, as 30% supply is insured and whale stocks are inflated by 18%, the skew is tilted up to the right, the price of privacy in a panopticon world.

Ecosystem Edges Forward: DeFi Blossoms, Delisting Demons Lurk

Zcash swarms with potential and threats. Ztarknet DeFi TVL increased three times to $67 million, and protocols such as ZcashSwap earned 9.2% APY on shielded liquidity pairs, making it better than the open competitors.

The volume of dark pools, which were a default feature of ZEC, increased 17% during economic opaqueness, and NFT markets such as Zcash Arts did the tokenisation of 12,000 drops with privacy themes. Rivals are jealous: The optional model of Zcash has 22% institutional allocation compared to 5% in Monero, according to Messari.

Shadows remain. FSA in Japan is debating a complete ban, and 15% of transactions to the EU are seized due to lax KYC of privacy flows. Neither scalability nor quantum whispers can use a stuttering L2 without L2 maturity, and quantum whispers require FCMP forks. It is a vibrant community: ZIP proposals of 925,000 finance education, defeating FUD by facts.

By the end of November 21, Zcash had stayed at $672, a privacy phoenix among charred remains. To the dreamer, this is nothing but volatility; it is vindication. ZEC is not in the shadow of the transparency trap of crypto; it enables the shadowed.