Zcash Snaps Five-Month Downtrend on 77% Volume Spike and Short Liquidations

The Breakout

ZEC at $293 is the cleanest technical breakout Zcash has printed in months. The token spent five months grinding lower inside a descending trendline, with each rally failing at progressively lower highs. That structure broke this week.

The trigger was a 77% surge in 24-hour trading volume across Binance and OKX, pulling ZEC through the $260 psychological resistance, then through the 100-day EMA at $273 and the 200-day EMA at $276. Derivatives added fuel: futures open interest jumped 10% to $514 million in 24 hours, and $1.1 million in short liquidations cascaded on the way up, creating a reflexive squeeze. The long-to-short ratio flipped to 1.075, confirming buy-side dominance.

Notably, this happened while Bitcoin and Ethereum traded flat to down. ZEC gained 6.7% on a day the broader market gave back ground — a clear sector-specific bid, not a rising-tide move.

The Foundry Catalyst

The structural backstory for this move is Foundry Digital's institutional-grade Zcash mining pool, announced March 11 and scheduled to go live this month. Foundry operates Foundry USA Pool, the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool. This is its first expansion to another proof-of-work chain.

The pool targets institutional and publicly traded miners with compliance-ready infrastructure, auditable payouts, and a dedicated reporting framework — the same stack that powers its Bitcoin operations. That matters because ZEC mining has historically been concentrated among a handful of pools. ViaBTC controls about 31.7% of Zcash hashrate, with F2Pool at 15.8%. Foundry's entry could meaningfully redistribute that concentration and, more importantly, give regulated miners a compliant way to earn ZEC for the first time.

This sits on top of the ZODL $25 million seed round from Paradigm and a16z crypto that closed in March, which resolved the development overhang from ECC's implosion. The two catalysts together — funded development and institutional mining infrastructure — represent the most significant month for Zcash fundamentals since the November 2024 halving.

The Privacy Premium

ZEC's outperformance isn't isolated. Privacy coins as a sector returned 288% in 2025 while the rest of crypto stayed flat, and the rotation has continued into 2026 with 14 of 18 privacy tokens above $100M market cap showing positive YTD returns.

The supply picture amplifies the move. Over 31% of circulating ZEC is now locked in shielded pools — coins held in privacy-preserving addresses that are effectively removed from the liquid float. When a 77% volume spike hits a compressed float, the price impact is outsized. Add in the post-halving issuance squeeze — annual inflation at roughly 4% since November 2024 — and you have a supply-demand dynamic that rewards momentum.

The next level to watch is the February 14 high at $333, which marked the last significant peak before the five-month decline. ZEC at $293 has cleared the major moving averages and reclaimed ground that would have been unthinkable two weeks ago at $248.

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