Zcash (ZEC) jumped 17% to 20% on Thursday to trade between roughly $1,338 and $1,358, and the surge forced $345 million in crypto liquidations across 86,816 traders in 24 hours, figures from market data trackers show.
Shorts took most of the hit: $208 million of the closed positions were bets on the price falling, against $137 million on longs. The rally came the day after Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang said in a post on X that the venture firm is a ZEC token holder and an investor in the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL). The size of Paradigm’s ZEC position was not disclosed. ZEC has gained roughly 160% over the past month, against Bitcoin’s 18.2% over the same period.
ZEC itself produced $56 million of liquidations, a heavy figure for a token with a market capitalization of $23 billion. Ether led the day’s losses at nearly $89 million, with bitcoin at $85 million, and the largest single position wiped out was an $18 million bitcoin trade on Hyperliquid. A short squeeze likely fed the move: rising prices force short sellers to buy back, which pushes prices higher still, and borrowed positions have fuelled each leg of the run.
The rally landed in Asian morning hours, and the price snapshots behind the 17% and 20% figures differ, so the exact print is best treated as a range rather than a settled number.
Bitcoin was quieter, climbing about 1% to just above $76,400, while Solana and Hyperliquid added around 3% and ether roughly 2%. The broad strength came after the Federal Reserve raised its target range by a quarter point to 3.75%-4% on Sept. 16, its first hike of the cycle. Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said in an email that bitcoin had already “overreacted negatively” to the CLARITY Act failing in the Senate, leaving it less exposed to a stronger dollar.
