For the first time in nearly ten years, Zcash is trading in the highly exclusive four-figure club. The privacy-focused token is hovering around $1,124 after pulling off a blistering 120 percent surge over the past month alone.
But not everyone is celebrating this massive Zcash breakout. A trio of high-rolling traders placed massive, heavily leveraged bets against the asset, and they are currently watching their portfolios bleed out to the tune of $39 million in combined unrealized losses.
The most high-profile casualty is a trader known as Garrett Jin, operating from a wallet starting with 0x92ea. Blockchain analytics tracker Lookonchain noted his aggressive market pivot: “Garrett Jin just closed his entire 1,332 BTC ($105.4M) long for a $2.7M profit and is now fully focused on shorting ZEC,” they posted.
That singular focus has backfired spectacularly. Jin is short nearly 40,000 tokens from an average entry of $576.30, leaving his position underwater by $21.94 million. If the price touches $2,540.47, his entire setup faces total liquidation.
Two other anonymous wallets—0xdd53…2b13 and 0x362a…1d9f—are trapped in the exact same nightmare, staring down paper losses of $13.33 million and $4.12 million, respectively. Yet, stubbornly, no one has folded. Because positive funding rates force long positions to pay the shorts, Jin has actually pocketed over $554,000 simply for holding the line.
Why the Zcash Comeback Defies the Broader Market
These traders aren’t just fighting a single token; they are actively shorting the only corner of the digital asset space that is actually thriving right now. While Bitcoin languishes 36 percent below its October peak and the median top-200 asset is down 58 percent, the privacy coin sector is soaring.
Data from Glassnode reveals the privacy sector has exploded from a $7.1 billion valuation last year to a staggering $33.6 billion today. Zcash is single-handedly driving the bulk of this expansion, capturing 62 percent of the sector’s market cap while posting an astronomical 2,496 percent gain over a 12-month stretch. Even if you strip the token out of the equation, the remaining privacy basket is still up a healthy 85 percent.
Wall Street is eagerly feeding the frenzy. In late August, Grayscale launched the first US spot ETF for the token on NYSE Arca, swiftly scooping up $463 million in assets.
But this aggressive concentration of capital and attention cuts both ways. With over $2.56 billion in futures open interest, the identical leverage currently punishing the bears could violently turn on the longs if the privacy obsession suddenly cools.