Over the past year, Zcash has been the best performing cryptocurrency among the top ten largest assets by market cap. At the time of writing, ZEC trades around $1,500, up roughly 193% year to date and more than 2,470% since this time last year. Just a little over a month ago, ZEC was trading around $500, meaning the token has tripled in value in a matter of a few weeks as the momentum to the upside has only accelerated.
Source: CoinGecko
The price is only one side of the story however. A look into Zcash’s onchain data shows that private transactions are climbing just as quickly as the price of the token. Data from Blockworks shows that Zcash processed 62,375 shielded transactions last week. This is the highest weekly count since 2022. In the same week, the network also settled $23.88 billion in transfer volume. Only one week in Zcash’s history has seen a bigger transfer volume week and that came during the 2021 bull market.
Source: Blockworks
Shielded Activity was Flat for Most of 2026
The shielded transactions chart shows that, for the first seven months of the year, private transactions on Zcash mostly did not move and remained flat. Weekly counts ranged between 8,000 to 12,000 from January to July, even as ZEC climbed off its spring lows near $250. August is where the chart flipped. Shielded transactions pushed past 15,000, reached close to 48,000 in early September and then jumped to last week’s high.
Shielded transactions are the core of what makes Zcash so unique. These transactions use zero-knowledge proofs to hide the sender, receiver and amount. Transparent ZEC transfers work just like Bitcoin where anyone can see the details within a particular transaction. A trader buying ZEC on an exchange to ride the rally has little reason to touch the shielded pool. Someone moving money privately does.
$23 billion settled in a single week
Transfer volume points in the same direction. Last week’s $23.88 billion is roughly double the previous week and more than twice the peak Zcash hit during its late-2025 rally, when weekly volume topped out a little above $10 billion.
Price inflates part of this figure. ZEC is worth about six times what it was in the spring, so the same number of coins changing hands now produces a much bigger dollar total. Trading activity is also running hot, with $1.97 billion in 24-hour volume. Transaction counts don’t scale with price the same way, which is why the shielded numbers carry more weight in reading actual usage.
The 2022 record came with an asterisk
The 2022 benchmark isn’t clean. In mid-2022, Zcash’s shielded pools were hit by a spam attack that flooded the network with junk transactions, bloating the chain and slowing wallet sync for months. Developers later overhauled the fee model to make that kind of attack expensive. Part of the old high was manufactured, so clearing it is a lower bar than the headline suggests.
One strong week is also a thin sample. Shielded activity dropped to about 28,000 transactions in the week of Sept. 7, nearly halving before it rebounded. ZEC is showing some strain too, slipping from an intraday high of $1,679 and losing 4.1% against Bitcoin over the past 24 hours.
If weekly shielded counts hold above 40,000 into October, the case that people are using Zcash for privacy rather than just trading it gets much harder to argue with. A slide back toward 15,000 would suggest last week was a spike driven by the same speculative wave lifting the price.