Zcash (ZEC) traded above $800 on Saturday for the first time since 2018, CoinDesk reported. The jump was roughly 48%. Futures volume ran into the billions of dollars. And the timing was not accidental: Grayscale had advanced its plan to convert the Grayscale Zcash Trust into a spot ETF just one day earlier.
That advance came in the form of a fifth amended S-3 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The document details the proposed conversion of the trust into a fund renamed “The Zcash ETF.” If approved, it would be the first spot ETF tracking a privacy coin in the United States.
The amendment specifies the structure. The fund would list on NYSE Arca under ticker ZCH, with a sponsor fee of 2.5% annually. Bank of New York Mellon would serve as transfer agent and Coinbase Custody Trust Company would hold the assets, according to The Block. In practice, that means the same custody and listing rails as Grayscale’s bitcoin and ether ETFs, this time applied to a token whose shielded transactions have long drawn regulatory scrutiny.
The Zcash Trust has operated since 2017 and held over $260 million in assets under management as of Friday. In a prior amendment earlier in the week, Grayscale disclosed that a Digital Currency Group subsidiary was in discussions to contribute roughly 200,000 ZEC, worth about $110 million, to the fund. That contribution has not closed.
The price action outran the filing itself. ZEC jumped roughly 48% on the day, per CoinDesk, though BeInCrypto reported a 34% gain to the same eight-year high. Futures volume hit billions of dollars as the token cleared its January 2018 peak, CoinDesk said, the first time ZEC has traded above $800 since that year.
That run revived “next bitcoin” chatter around the privacy-focused token, which ranks as the 12th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, per The Block’s data. Zcash launched in 2016 and is built around shielded transactions designed to obscure sender, recipient, and amount on the base layer.
James Seyffart, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote on X on Friday that the filing indicates Grayscale is “getting closer and closer to converting this thing into an ETF.”
Grayscale has launched more than a dozen crypto ETFs, including funds tracking bitcoin, ether, dogecoin, and XRP. The Zcash product would extend that roster into the privacy-coin category. U.S. regulators have approached that category with caution, and the SEC has not publicly signaled a decision timeline for the conversion.
What the filing does not address: whether regulators have engaged substantively on the structure, or whether the proposed DCG contribution of 200,000 ZEC will close. An amendment is not approval. The futures volume spike, meanwhile, points to derivatives buyers front-running a decision that could still be months away.
