Zcash Just Crossed $1,000 for the First Time in a Decade. One Short Seller Lost $18.5 Million.

Zcash surged roughly 20% Friday, tagging $1,023 after opening near $828, its first trip above $1,000 in almost ten years.

The privacy token is up about 94% in a month and more than 2,300% in a year, a run from a $150 low last November that has carried its market cap toward $17 billion and knocked Dogecoin out of the top ten.

The trade that made it violent was everyone betting against it.

About $36.6 million in leveraged ZEC positions were liquidated in 24 hours, and $34.5 million of that came from shorts. Nearly all the pain landed on one side of the book.

Anatomy of a Squeeze, With a Famous Casualty

A short liquidation forces the exchange to buy the token back, which pushes price higher, which liquidates the next short.

Rinse, repeat, moonshot.

The poster child this round is Garrett Jin, the former BitForex executive, whose wallet, flagged by Lookonchain, shows a 32,760 ZEC short entered near $444. He kept adding as it ran against him and has now realized more than $18.5 million in losses.

Here's the wild part: the shorts haven't quit. Open interest hit a record $2.33 billion even as the squeeze ripped, and long/short ratios on Binance and OKX sit at 0.60 and 0.37, meaning bearish accounts still outnumber bulls.

That's not a warning sign for the rally. That's unspent fuel.

The Institutional Machine Underneath It

This isn't running on memes. Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into ZCSH on NYSE Arca in late August, the first US spot ETF for a privacy coin, made possible only after the SEC closed its Zcash Foundation probe in January.

The fund has already gathered roughly $414 million, with Coinbase as custodian and BNY Mellon administering. Digital Currency Group, Grayscale's owner, was separately in talks to buy 200,000 ZEC.

ZEC could reach roughly $8,100 if it captures just 10% of Bitcoin's market share, from 0.1% today. - Zach Pandl, head of research, Grayscale

The tech is cooperating too. Tools released by the team behind the Zakura node cut the time to build a private transaction from over three seconds to under 200 milliseconds on mobile, pushing shielded payments toward everyday usability.

Shielded-address holdings are climbing after eight flat years, though the trader promoting that stat, Taiki Maeda, disclosed a large leveraged long in the same breath.

Bitcoin Bent on the Jobs Report. Zcash Didn't.

The macro backdrop whipsawed everything. Thursday, Fed Governor Christopher Waller said he'd be "inclined to support" holding rates, dropping September hike odds from 63% to 50% and torching $415 million in crypto shorts.

Then Friday's jobs report landed at 162,000 against a 56,000 forecast, reviving hike bets and shoving Bitcoin back under $80,000, where it sits near $79,000 today.

Zcash held its gains anyway. When an asset shrugs off the macro punch that floors the market leader, traders notice.

The honest caveats: RSI near 77 is overbought, and September is historically ZEC's second-worst month, with a median return of nearly minus 10%.

The map says $935.50 is the line that has held every pullback, with $1,080 next above and a Fibonacci zone at $1,115 to $1,292 if momentum continues. Lose $1,000 and $900 comes fast, with $780 below.

So the question worth arguing: is this the moment privacy finally gets repriced as hard money, or the most crowded squeeze of 2026 running out of shorts to burn?