In the past two months, I’ve seen quite a few market movements. While the entire crypto market’s total capitalization evaporated by over $1 trillion, one coin has been defying the trend—Zcash (ZEC) has surged from $35 to a peak of $750, a 13-fold increase. Honestly, this performance even outshines Bitcoin and Ethereum.

At first, I thought it was unbelievable, so I took a deeper look at on-chain data, and I found that there’s indeed something behind it. The shielded pool (which can be understood as the TVL concept on other public chains) for ZEC increased from 2.66 million coins in March to 4.98 million coins in November, doubling in size, which is quite an impressive growth. Even more interesting, the proportion of ZEC in the shielded pool jumped from 18% in October to 29.38%, meaning nearly one-third of ZEC is now used for privacy protection.

Looking at the trading data, the numbers are even more astonishing. The contract holdings of ZEC were $18.75 million at the end of September, and by November, they skyrocketed to $1.377 billion—this kind of growth clearly exceeds what can be explained by demand alone. The price followed suit, soaring from $58 to $750, reflecting a market re-pricing of privacy’s value.

Unlike other privacy coins, ZEC has always been balancing privacy protection and compliance. This pragmatic attitude has become an advantage in the context of increasingly strict crypto market regulation. While everyone is discussing FIT (Functionality, Usability, Transactionability), the genuine demand for privacy is being re-recognized by the market. This rally might not just be capital rotation; it’s more like a signal that the privacy track is regaining its pricing power in the digital age.