Why Taiki Maeda Thinks Zcash Is the Trade of the Cycle
Taiki Maeda bought Zcash below $400, watched it rise to around $600, then sold below $300 after a vulnerability threatened confidence in its shielded supply. When the price recovered, he bought back at a higher price (a painful little round trip).
That story is the clearest part of his video, Zcash: The Trade of the Cycle. To Maeda, the recovery showed that the market was willing to trust Zcash again. Here is the rest of his bull case, minus 37 minutes of ranting.
Zcash does something Bitcoin cannot
Zcash has several Bitcoin-like properties: proof-of-work security, a 21 million supply cap and four-year halvings. The difference is optional privacy.
Bitcoin balances and transactions are public. Zcash supports both transparent and shielded transfers, using zero-knowledge proofs to verify a transaction without exposing all its details. That gives Zcash a distinct job instead of making it another slightly altered Bitcoin clone.
And people appear to be using it. CipherScan’s August 30 snapshot reported 4.85 million ZEC in shielded pools, or 28.7% of supply.
A higher price can make Zcash more useful
This is Maeda’s most interesting argument.
A small shielded pool offers limited privacy to someone moving a large amount because their transaction stands out. A larger pool, measured in both ZEC and dollars, lets more capital blend into a broader anonymity set.
That creates a reflexive loop: more shielding improves the product, a better privacy product attracts more users, and a higher ZEC price increases the dollar capacity of the shielded pool. Higher prices may strengthen the fundamentals instead of merely making the asset more expensive.
Pool size isn’t the whole privacy story. Fully shielded usage, transaction patterns and what happens after funds leave a shielded pool matter too. But the loop is plausible enough to take seriously.
The timing finally looks better
Zcash launched in 2016 and spent most of its life being mined, sold and ignored. After several halvings, its issuance is lower, its ownership is more widely distributed and it has survived long enough to earn some credibility.
Maeda sees ZEC as a possible second store-of-value asset beside Bitcoin. At the time of recording, he estimated ZEC at roughly 1% of Bitcoin’s market value and argued that 10% to 15% was possible if privacy becomes important enough. That is a narrative, not a valuation model, but it explains the asymmetry he sees.
Traditional investors also have a new route in. The former Grayscale Zcash Trust became The Zcash ETF in August 2026 and registered its shares for NYSE Arca.
The risk is the privacy itself
Shielded transactions make Zcash useful, but they also make its supply harder to audit continuously. That trade-off became real when researchers found a soundness vulnerability in Orchard, one of its shielded pools.
Zcash responded with the Ironwood NU6.3 upgrade in July 2026. It restricted the original Orchard pool, required exiting funds to pass through a turnstile and introduced a new pool designed to make circulating supply independently verifiable.
Surviving that incident supports Maeda’s resilience argument. It also proves the risk wasn’t theoretical.
I wouldn’t copy his concentration or leverage. If the privacy thesis weakens, shielded adoption reverses or trust breaks again, the same reflexive loop can run downwards.
The Zcash case is interesting because privacy, usage and price can reinforce each other. That makes it asymmetric, not safe.
