Zcash (CRYPTO: ZEC) has surged roughly 3,000% over the past year, and the same early Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) investors who became billionaires the first time around are now racing to repeat that trade.
Why the Winklevoss Twins and Barry Silbert Are Betting Big on Zcash
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini, along with Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert, both discovered Bitcoin around 2012 and built fortunes by investing early and launching businesses around it, according to Bloomberg.
They’re now applying that same playbook to Zcash, building competing mining operations and investment funds around the privacy token.
“It’s deja vu all over again with Zcash,” Cameron Winklevoss said at the Token2049 conference in Singapore this month.
“If you had a time machine and you go back to 2013, how would you think differently? I think most people would say I would have bought more Bitcoin and I would have bought earlier. You now have that chance with Zcash,” he added.
Zcash launched roughly a decade ago but gained fresh relevance after a March 2025 U.S. court ruling reduced legal uncertainty around privacy coins.
That cleared the way for figures like Arthur Hayes to pitch Zcash as a Bitcoin hedge, and institutional capital followed.
Kaiko research analyst Thomas Probst said the privacy narrative turned into real money once well-known investors started treating Zcash as a “private Bitcoin.”
How the Mining Race Has Taken Shape
Cypherpunk Technologies, backed by the Winklevoss twins, and Fortitude Mining, backed by Silbert, have become two of the largest Zcash miners, each spending tens of millions of dollars on additional computing power.
Fortitude expects to control roughly 20% of total network mining capacity after its latest equipment installments, while Cypherpunk already holds about 20% of that same capacity.
Grayscale, part of Silbert’s DCG, launched the first U.S. Zcash ETF in August by converting a trust the firm had operated since 2013. The Winklevoss twins filed for a competing Zcash ETF earlier this month.
Why the Rally Still Carries Real Risk
Zcash’s concentration in just a handful of large miners and fund operators raises questions about how decentralized the network actually remains.
In May, a security researcher used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to uncover a critical vulnerability in Zcash that had existed undetected for years, one that could have let an attacker counterfeit unlimited tokens.
Chainalysis head of research Eric Jardine said privacy coins broadly carry regulatory risk tied to their lack of transaction transparency, since bad actors could exploit that opacity to avoid detection.
Two Prime CEO Alexander Blume also noted that many of today’s Zcash buyers aren’t ideological believers the way early Bitcoin holders were. “They are interested in making money and they are hopeful that there is still room to run the upside,” he said.
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