Privacy coins have climbed 213% since Bitcoin’s October 2025 peak even as BTC itself remains well below that high, according to a breakdown posted today by analyst Wise Crypto.

It is a narrow corner of the market, but one token in particular, Zcash (ZEC), has pulled the entire privacy sector into positive territory while most of crypto is still digging out of a year-long drawdown.

One Sector, but Mostly One Coin

Wise Crypto’s numbers show the privacy sector’s combined market cap growing from $7.1 billion a year ago to $33.6 billion now. Zcash accounts for roughly 62% of that total on its own, up 25x over the past year, with its market-cap ranking climbing from #82 to #7 at one point, though CoinGecko data currently places it at #9.

Glassnode data published last week also found something similar: that privacy was the only sector trading above its October peak, with every other category still underwater by double digits.

Grayscale’s Zcash ETF, ticker $ZCSH, crossed $500 million in assets within two weeks of launch, while Monero (XMR), the second-largest asset in the privacy category, has approximately doubled over the same stretch despite facing delistings from several exchanges.

Among the 25 biggest crypto assets, Wise Crypto noted that only four are still trading above their October levels: ZEC, HYPE, XMR, and WBT.

Investor Dan Tapiero told The Wolf of All Streets on September 11 that the moves in ZEC and HYPE this cycle show crypto isn’t just a Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana story anymore. “Zcash has been an enormous winner this year,” he said, pointing to broader activity building outside the three largest chains.

A day later, Egor Sidelska of Infinex argued that privacy is one of the only parts of crypto that hasn’t already been built out and cloned across other chains, calling ZEC “the last 100x in crypto that isn’t a random meme coin.”

Whether the Rally Is Justified Is Still Being Debated

There has been less bullish reading elsewhere, with analyst filbfilb recently pushing back on how far the Zcash rally can be trusted. He shared valuation models that compared ZEC’s transaction activity against Bitcoin’s at a similar stage of issuance, which landed on implied prices around $944, some way below where the coin is currently trading, although their convergence scenarios put fair value much higher if Zcash keeps closing the gap.

At the time of writing, the asset was changing hands at around $1,140, flat on the day but up 32% in the last two weeks and more than 2,100% over the past year, although it is still well off its 2016 all-time high near $3,190.

On the other hand, BTC was quite near $77,000, having lost just over 1% in 24 hours and about 34% in one year, putting it some 39% below its own ATH from October 2025.

Source: CryptoPotato